This study examines the reception and appropriation of Euripides in the English
Renaissance, concentrating upon the domestic tragedies produced and published in
the period between 1590 and 1610-namely, Arden of Faversham, A Woman
Killed with Kindness, and The Yorkshire Tragedy. It challenges received critical
orthodoxy about the afterlife of Euripides in Renaissance England and suggests
that Euripidean influence on English Renaissance drama was not always mediated
by Seneca, but was received in a more direct manner through Latin, Italian and
French translations of Euripides published in the first half of the sixteenth century;
that it is to be found not exclusively in Senecan court tragedies but also in
domestic tragedies. This study suggests that Euripides provided the vocabulary and
structure of argument for domestic tragedy as much as for Senecan court tragedy;
that both sub-genres explore such characteristically Euripidean questions as those
about traditional ideas of sex and gender, sex roles, and the relationship between
family and state.
Having emerged at the end of the sixteenth century, domestic tragedy articulates
the paradigmatic change in the ideas and ideals of sex, marriage, family and state
in post-Reformation England. With the emergence of the early modem state, the
distinction between private and public became reconceptualized, and sex roles
reformulated. The household came to be identified as private, and to be relegated
to a position lesser than that of the state, which was identified as public. Women
came to be enclosed within the household, excluded from the public sphere. The
conceptual framework of sex roles and the relationship between family and state
reformulated in post-Reformation England bears a startling similarity to that
produced in the Athenian society Euripides questions in plays such as Alcestis and
Medea. This similarity best explains why Renaissance England found Euripides so
useful for discussions of its own problems and preoccupations. It explains why
figures like Alcestis and Medea and Euripidean themes and concerns were
mobilized and appropriated in the domestic tragedies of the period between 1590
and 1610 as idioms and structures of argument in discussing the conflicts and
tensions in family and marriage in early modem England