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‘A Conjugal Lesson’: Robert Brough's Medea and the Discourses of Mid-Victorian Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Edmund Richardson
Edmund Richardson*
Affiliation:
Robinson College, Cambridge
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Extract

The Athenian Captive (1838) was to constitute the last significant use of Greek tragedy on the professional stage in Britain for a radical political purpose until Gilbert Murray's stagings of Euripides in the Edwardian era.

Edith Hall

I believe in the Revolution.

Robert Brough, 1855

The fiercest political debates in 1850s Britain were inextricably bound up with the Classical past. Traditionalists and eulogists, priests and pamphleteers, doctors and revolutionaries all set their arguments and their ideals within a Classical framework. Amongst those who sought to use the ancient for decidedly contemporary purposes, Robert Brough was one of the most passionate. He was a revolutionary, a playwright, and a Classicist—though up until the performance of his burlesque Medea (on July 14th 1856), he had never been all three at once. This article will explore how, at the time, the myth of Medea was the perfect vehicle for radical politics—and how Brough exploited its potential to the full. It will frame his play within some of the most controversial debates of the period. It will explore Brough's (on the face of it, startling) claim that his burlesque would give the audience more to think about than any play they had seen before, that it would be ‘a conjugal lesson, surpassing in intensity anything ever before presented’. Brough wrote his Medea believing in ‘the Revolution’. And, as I hope to show, he wanted his audiences to leave the theatre believing in it too.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , 2003 , pp. 57 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 2003

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83. Throughout the volume, Brough is vitriolic. A typical passage: ‘So, torn by the roots from each bed and tree,/And into the bonfire cast/To blaze on the dunghill, perchance may be/The strawberry’s [symbol of the peerage] fate at last.’—Brough (n.2 above), 107.

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143. Lemon (n.129 above), 1. The ‘artist’ in question is the Medea, Adelaide Ristori.

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145. All this seems to call into question Hall’s argument that Classical burlesque, as a genre, consistently cut ‘a previously elite art form down to popular size’ (Hall [n.124 above], 48). Many of these earlier burlesques seem to offer a cut-rate, rather than a cut-down-to-size version of the Classical world. Here, it is not the Classical that has been humbled, merely its ‘unworthy’ imitators.

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164. Cf. Hall (n.124 above), 285.

165. Cf. Whitty (n.75 above), Zincke (n.70 above), Zincke (n.71 above), et al.

166. Illustrated London News, July 19th 1856, p.65.