Cultural depictions of Medea

The dramatic episodes in which Greek mythology character Medea plays a role have ensured that she remains vividly represented in popular culture. Titles are ordered chronologically.

Literature

• In Cicero's court case Pro Caelio (56 BC), the name Medea is mentioned several times, as a way to make fun of Clodia, sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher, the man who exiled Cicero.
• Medea (Ovid's lost tragedy; two lines are extant)
• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women (1386)
• In La Tavola Ritonda (c. 15th century), Medea lives on as the marvelously beautiful mistress of the island Perfida's Cruel Castle (Castello Crudele) in which she imprisons the hero Tristano (Tristan), as "every year she wanted to bent a [different] knight to her pleasure" for she was "the most lecherous woman in the world". Tristano, faithful to his true love Isolda, manages to escape from Medea's magic castle.
• William Morris Life and Death of Jason (epic poem, 1867)
• Robert Graves, Hercules, My Shipmate (1945)
• Dorothy M. Johnson, Witch Princess (1967)
• John Gardner, Jason and Medeia (1973)
• Otar Chiladze, A Man Was Going Down the Road (1973)
• H. M. Hoover, The Dawn Palace: The Story of Medea (1988)
• Percival Everett, For Her Dark Skin (1990)
• Kerry Greenwood, Medea: Book I in the Delphic Women Series (1997).
• Christa Wolf, Medea (published in German 1996, translated to English 1998)
• Medea plays a major role as an antagonist in Stuart Hill's The Icemark Chronicles trilogy.
• In Rick Riordan's The Lost Hero (2010), Medea, having been resurrected by vengeful goddess Gaea (Mother Earth), runs a department store in Chicago. She appears again in The Burning Maze and is shown to work under Caligula.
• David Vann, Bright Air Black (2017) retells Medea's story in prose poetry from a third person perspective.
• Madeline Miller, Circe (2018) narrates Medea's visit to her aunt Circe to be cleansed for the killing of her brother.
• Ben Morgan, Medea in Corinth (2018) is a sequence of poems and dramatic interludes which focus on Medea's religious encounter with Hecate. It includes a sonnet sequence composed of letters to Creusa, her love rival, illuminating their relationship.
• Rosie Hewlett's Medea (2024) retells Medea's story in a captivating first-person perspective.
• In 2024, Dark Horse Comics released the English version of Medea, a Belgian graphic novel retelling written by Blandine Le Callet and illustrated by Nancy Peña.

Theatre

• Pierre Corneille, Médée (1635)
• Georg Anton Benda's melodrama, Medea (1775), based on a text by Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter.
• Franz Grillparzer, Das goldene Vließ (<span lang="en" dir="ltr">en:</span> The Golden Fleece) (1821)
• Ernest Legouvé, Médée (1856)
• Hans Henny Jahnn, Medea (1926)
• Peter Kien's Medea: An der Bose (<span lang="en" dir="ltr">en</span>: On the Border), a play written while Kien was interned at the Theresienstadt Ghetto and never performed, having been hidden in Auschwitz until after his death in 1944.
• American composer Samuel Barber wrote his Medea ballet (later renamed The Cave of the Heart) in 1947 for Martha Graham and derived from that Medea's Meditation & Dance of Vengeance Op. 23a in 1955. The musical Blast! uses an arrangement of Barber's Medea as their end to Act I.
• Jean Anouilh's Médée (1946), which centers around Medea, Jason, Creon, and Medea's nurse, and was premiered at Théâtre de l'Atelier in Paris on March 25, 1953.
• Robinson Jeffers' retelling, first performed in 1947.
• A. R. Gurney<nowiki/>s The Golden Fleece.
• Chico Buarque and Paulo Pontes' Gota d'Água (1975)
• Heiner Müller, Medeamaterial (1974) and the supplementary Medeaplay text (1983).
• Chrysanthos Mentis Bostantzoglou (Bost)'s 1993 parody.
• Cherríe Moraga<nowiki/>'s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1995) combines classical Greek myth Medea with the Mexicana/o legend of La Llorona and the Aztec myth of lunar deity Coyolxauhqui.
• Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats (1998) is loosely inspired by the Medea myth.
• Dea Loher's Manhattan Medea, which premiered in 1999 in Graz, is set in modern-day Manhattan; Medea and Jason are living as illegal immigrants, until Jason marries the daughter of a rich businessman, abandoning Medea and their child; the play takes place on their wedding night.
• Michael John LaChiusa scored Marie Christine, a Broadway musical with heavy opera influence based on the story of Medea. The production premiered at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in December 1999 for a limited run under Lincoln Center Theater. LaChuisa's score and book were nominated for a Tony Award in 2000, as was a tour-de-force performance by six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald.
• Laurent Gaudé, Médée Kali (2003), first performed at the Théâtre du Rond-Point.
• In 2012, Australian playwrights Kate Mulvany and Anne-Louise Sarks retold the myth of Medea from her and Jason's doomed children's points of view.
• Helen McCrory played Medea in the Royal National Theatre's acclaimed production in 2014.
• Hannah Shepherd-Hulford played Medea in the Lost Dog dance-theatre production of Ruination at the Royal Opera House in 2022.