Merope (Messenia)
Merope (
Euripides' Cresphontes
Euripides based his lost tragedy Cresphontes (Κρεσφόντης, Kresphóntēs) on this myth.
According to
Plutarch quotes a line spoken by Merope in this scene in his essay On Meat-Eating (Moralia 998e) and adds, "what a stir she rouses in the theatre as she brings them to their feet in terror lest she wound the youth before the old man [who had served as secret messenger between mother and son] can stop her!"
Aristotle cites this as an intended action that would have been performed involuntarily due to Merope's ignorance of the particular circumstances of the action: "one might think one's son was an enemy, as Merope did" (Nicomachean Ethics III.1, 1111a11-12, trans. Ross). Hyginus continues: "When Merope realised her enemy had given her the opportunity of avenging herself, she made things up with Polyphontes. As the joyful king was performing a religious ceremony his guest, falsely pretending to have killed the victim, killed him and regained his paternal kingdom."
Maffei's Merope
It is a strong proof of the power of Maffei's mind that without [a love intrigue], he should have succeeded in winning the public favour at a period when a romance of some kind was considered indispensable to any drama. Maffei wrote his Merope with the intention of proving that it was possible to excite the sympathy and sustain the interest of the audience by a plot depending entirely on the strong affection existing between mother and son, when brought out and placed in a vivid light by situations of extreme peril.[3]
By agreement with Maffei, Voltaire went on to adapt the play, which was eventually staged in 1743 as Mérope. Further adaptations were subsequently produced by Aaron Hill in 1749 in England and by Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter in Germany in 1774. There were also two independent English treatments of the story, one by George Jeffreys in 1731, and Matthew Arnold's of 1858. In his introduction to the latter, Arnold surveyed the European development of the story and explained that he had reworked into his own dramatic poem[4] the fifty lines still recorded of the lost Greek original.[5]
Notes
- ^ Trans. Cropp, p. 121
- ISBN 1590176197), p. 354.
- ^ Catherine Mary Phillimore, "The Italian Drama," in Studies in Italian Literature, Classical and Modern (S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1891), p. 183.
- ^ Text at Bartleby
- ^ Preface to Merope
Sources
- M.J. Cropp, "Cresphontes," in Collard, Cropp, and Lee (eds.), Euripides: Selected Fragmentary Plays I (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1995), pp. 121–147