The Wykehamist
Othello and Desdemona, and Anthony and Cleopatra are undeniable, possibly partly due to the fact that both lovers die, one unable to live without the other. Yet the romanticism of Juliet’ s suicide is arguable, as she is clearly a woman, or even a girl“ who is culturally deprived of the right to give voice to her passion, on pain of being considered a whore”( Bate, 2001) leaving her control over little except her life, by which she might express her emotions. Juliet, and by extension, many of these other women, is trapped by a woman’ s traditional passivity in love, finding a solution to her anguish which clearly stems from the suicides of Thisbe and Dido. Yet of the three original Ovidian lovers mentioned— Thisbe, Dido and Medea— two of these women’ s husbands( Aeneas and Jason) go on to marry younger, more beautiful women, having abandoned Dido and Medea respectively, both of whom write tragically furious letters in Ovid’ s Heroides. In particular, Medea’ s promise of wrath at the very end of her epistle is ended in a self-destructive spiral of anger and uncertainty:
‘ Now I hate myself because I was concerned For the good of a faithless husband. Let that be in the care of the god who prods me; I do not know for certain what is in my soul.’( Medea to Jason)
‘ Your husband? Be careful, Medea. Are you using respectable words To cover your evil designs? No, no! Face up to the terrible Wrong you’ re about to commit and recoil from the guilt while you may!’( VII. 69-71)
Medea’ s fractured style of speech when torn between her warring desire and duty is emulated by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice, in Portia’ s desperate attempt to rationalise her emotions in order not to tell Bassanio which casket to choose in order to win her heart. Her erratic logic,
‘ One half of me is yours, the other half yours, Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours, And so all yours.’( III. ii. 16-18)
is similar in tone, if not in stake, to Medea’ s attempt to justify providing aid to Jason from the fire-breathing bulls, seed-sprung warriors and the dragon, all of whom guard the precious golden fleece. However, the similarities between Shakespeare’ s Portia and which is heart-breaking in its similarity to her internal conflict at the very beginning of her love for Jason, as written in Ovid’ s Metamorphoses, highlighting her huge range of emotion and pain, which Ovid is able to comprehend in a woman and convey in his poetry, driving to understand the pain she must have been in in order to feel pushed to murder her own children.
The confusion Medea experiences at the outset of her new love feels powerfully realistic in her division between her passion for Jason, and her loyalty to her father Aeëtes. Unaware of being manipulated by her lover, she draws herself in both directions in her soliloquy in Book VII of Ovid’ s Metamorphoses, her speech fragmented, veering between exclamations and questions with alarming regularity before finally interrupting herself saying,
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