Plautus: Menaechmi — Twins, Trickery, and the Search for Something Truer

Somewhere on the Illyrian coast, in a city whose very name warns visitors of financial ruin, two identical brothers are about to turn a normal day into an unraveling comedy of mistaken identity. Plautus’ Menaechmi, staged sometime around 205–184 BC, is one of the oldest surviving farces in Western literature—and one of the most quietly revealing windows we have into the world the early church was born into.

A Roman Comedy in Greek Clothes

Menaechmi belongs to a genre the Romans called fabula palliata (pronounced FAH-boo-lah pahl-lee-AH-tah)—”comedy in a Greek cloak.” The setting is nominally Epidamnus, a Greek trading city on the Adriatic, and the characters wear Greek dress and bear Greek names. But underneath the costume, the play is thoroughly Roman. Plautus wrote in the decades following the Second Punic War, when Rome’s armies and merchants were pushing deep into the Greek Mediterranean, and his audience knew the world of piracy, slave markets, and courtroom politics firsthand.

The plot itself is simple on its face: two twin brothers, separated as boys, are unknowingly reunited in the same city on the same day, and everyone who meets one mistakes him for the other. A stolen cloak, a hungry parasite, a suspicious wife, and a courtesan named Erotium all get swept into the chaos before the truth is finally, joyfully uncovered.

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The Engine of the Farce

What makes Menaechmi work as comedy is dramatic irony—the audience knows the truth about the twins from the opening prologue, and every character’s confusion becomes a source of delight rather than confusion for the audience itself. Plautus reinforces this with constant winks at the crowd, at one point noting that while other playwrights always set their comedies in Athens to seem properly Greek, he will set his “nowhere”—wherever the actors happen to be standing. It is theater that never quite forgets it is theater.

Beneath the slapstick, though, Plautus lets real Roman anxieties surface. In one striking monologue, Menaechmus of Epidamnus steps outside the fiction entirely to complain about the burdens of Roman patronage—how a man of means is obligated to spend his days in the forum defending clients, worthy or not, simply because that is what the system demands. It is a moment where the Greek mask slips and Rome itself looks out at the audience.

A World Without Providence

Read simply as farce, Menaechmi is clever and disposable entertainment. Read alongside Scripture, it becomes something more interesting: a portrait of a world operating entirely without the light of revelation.

The play’s plot—a boy stolen from his family, years of separation, an eventual recognition scene in a foreign city—bears a striking structural resemblance to the Joseph narrative in Genesis, and to Jacob and Esau’s tangled identities in Genesis 25 and 27. But the resemblance only sharpens the contrast. Where Joseph tells his brothers that what they intended for evil, God intended for good, in order to preserve life (Genesis 50:20), Plautus’ twins credit nothing but blind luck (Fortuna) and their own cleverness for their reunion. There is no hashgachah—no providence—governing the plot of Menaechmi, only coincidence dressed up as fate.

The same emptiness shows up in how the play treats people. Messenio, the loyal slave, obeys his master purely out of fear of the whip, the millhouse, and the iron chain. Human beings are, in the language of Roman law, instrumentum vocale—”speaking property.” Compare that to Paul’s letter to Philemon, written two centuries later, in which the runaway slave Onesimus is to be received “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” (Philemon 16). Or to Ephesians 6:9, where Christian masters are told to give up their threats altogether, since master and slave alike answer to the same Lord in heaven. The gospel did not immediately dismantle Roman slavery as an institution, but it detonated the assumptions underneath it—and Menaechmi shows us exactly what those assumptions looked like before the detonation.

Marriage fares no better in Plautus’ world. Menaechmus’ wife holds leverage over her husband only because of her dowry, and the whole arrangement is treated as a transaction to be managed rather than a covenant to be kept. The play’s resolution is telling: Menaechmus liquidates his estate and puts everything up for public auction—including, as a punchline, his own wife. Ephesians 5 answers this directly, calling husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). Where Plautus ends in an auction block, Paul ends in a cross.

Aristophanes: Lysistrata and the Wool of Redemption

Picture a city with an empty treasury and a locked bedroom door, and ask yourself honestly whether either one has ever produced lasting peace. This is the image at the heart of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, performed in Athens in 411 BCE, and it is closer to your own experience than the two and a half thousand years between you and ancient Greece might suggest. The central claim of everything that follows can be stated plainly: every human being longs for a peace that human ingenuity has never been able to manufacture, and God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, has provided it at a cost no human strategy could ever have paid. The Sicilian Expedition of 413 BCE had destroyed thousands of Athenian soldiers and most of the fleet. Sparta had fortified Decelea and was strangling the city’s food supply. The state treasury in the Parthenon was nearly empty, and within months the democratic government would collapse in the Oligarchic Coup of the 400. The audience watching Aristophanes’ new comedy was a city that had tried everything and was still losing, and they knew it in their bones. Into that exhaustion Aristophanes offered his famous happy idea: the women of Greece, led by a woman named Lysistrata, would seize the Acropolis, control the treasury, and refuse their husbands any physical intimacy until Athens and Sparta made peace. Before dismissing this as comedy, which it certainly is, note that it is also the most serious proposal the most brilliant satirist in the ancient world could devise. He had looked at a civilization destroying itself and done his absolute best. And his best was a locked door and a seized treasury. That gap between his best and what the situation actually needed is the Gospel’s opening.

 

What Aristophanes Got Right, and Why That Matters

Before marking where Aristophanes falls short, it is essential to honor what he gets right. He correctly identifies that prolonged war destroys families and that broken families produce broken cities. He correctly sees that male leadership, when it becomes self-serving and detached from the human cost it imposes, invites catastrophe. He correctly senses that the longing for peace is not a political preference but a need written into the human person so deeply that even the most exhausted people cannot finally suppress it. James 4:1 confirms his diagnosis with apostolic authority: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” This is precisely what Aristophanes saw. Theologians call what he was doing common grace, the capacity given by God to all human beings to perceive genuine truths about reality even without the light of special revelation. Lysistrata belongs to the genre of Old Comedy, the archaia, defined by its fantastical happy idea and its willingness to mock the powerful at the precise moment when mockery is the only available form of honesty. Its central theatrical device is Lysistrata’s extended metaphor for governing Athens: she compares it to cleaning and carding wool, washing the city of its corrupt officials, drawing the remaining threads into a common basket, and weaving them into a unified fabric. It is a beautiful image of social restoration, and it reaches as far as the best human wisdom has ever reached. The question is whether it reaches far enough.

 

Darkness Reaches for Light: Deborah, Isaiah, and the God Who Comes Down

The Old Testament does not merely stand in contrast to Lysistrata. It illuminates the play by showing what divine initiative looks like placed alongside human ingenuity, and the difference between them is the difference between darkness groping for a candle it made itself and the Light of the world arriving unasked and unearned. Deborah in Judges 4 and 5 occupies precisely the same structural position as Lysistrata. Male leadership has catastrophically failed. Israel has groaned under Canaanite oppression for twenty years, and the general Barak will not move without a woman beside him. Both are effective. Both change the course of a war. But the nature of their authority is categorically different. Lysistrata seizes her position through subversive strike, leveraging biological necessity against the men she is trying to move. Deborah holds court as a prophetess under direct divine commission, and the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 leaves no ambiguity about where the credit belongs: God himself marched from Edom while the stars in their courses fought for his people. The peace that follows is described in Hebrew as shaqat, a resting granted to the land as a gift from above, not a ceasefire negotiated from below. Shalom, the biblical word for this peace, means wholeness, flourishing, right relationship with God and neighbor in every dimension of existence. It flows from a source that no human administrator, however gifted, can access from below. Isaiah picks up the wool thread in chapter 1 verse 18 and transforms it entirely. Yahweh addresses a corrupt and hypocritical Judah in the language of a courtroom: “Come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” Aristophanes imagines skilled human hands cleaning a broken city. Isaiah announces that the scarlet of moral guilt becomes the whiteness of wool when God himself performs the cleansing. Sit with that image before moving past it. The stain that no human washing could touch becomes white as wool not because better administrators were found, but because the Judge of all the earth offered to absorb the guilt himself. This is the direction in which the whole biblical story is moving, and it is a direction that Aristophanes, at his most brilliant and most compassionate, never had the resources to imagine.

 

The Law, the Gospel, and the Body That Was Not Withheld

Here is what you already know about yourself, stated plainly because the Gospel can only be received by people who have heard the Law first. You have tried to manufacture peace through control. You have held something back to gain leverage, withheld warmth to apply pressure, managed access to yourself as a negotiating strategy. You have practiced Lysistrata’s method, not because you read Aristophanes but because it comes naturally to every human heart that has not been reached by grace. And you know how it ends. The relief is temporary when it comes at all, and beneath the surface the fracture deepens. Paul in Romans 5:1 names the foundational reality on which everything else rests: “Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is peace with God, the settled legal and relational reality that results from justification, and it is the only ground on which the peace of God described in Philippians 4:7 can stand. You cannot build the experience of interior peace on any foundation except reconciliation with God through Christ, and you cannot earn that reconciliation. It is a gift, purchased at the cost of a body that was not withheld. Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:3 to 5 addresses Lysistrata’s specific mechanism directly, without having read the play, because the impulse to weaponize intimacy for control does not require a Greek comedy to invent it. He instructs married couples not to deprive one another except by mutual agreement for a limited season of prayer, because prolonged deprivation creates precisely the fracture and temptation that Aristophanes depicts with such comic accuracy. The body is not a bargaining chip. It is, as 1 Corinthians 6:19 declares, a temple of the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 5 describes a marriage in which the husband loves his wife as Christ loved the church, a love that does not withhold but pours out, that does not leverage but sacrifices. Jesus Christ did not lock the door. He opened it, walked through it, went to a cross, and gave his body entirely for people who had nothing to offer in return. He did not negotiate a ceasefire. He purchased a peace that reaches all the way down to where the problem actually lives, to the human heart in its enmity with God, at the only price that could ever settle the debt.

 

The Fathers, the Seeds of Truth, and the Practice of Discernment

The Early Church Fathers read pagan literature through eyes trained by Scripture, and their practice offers guidance for the modern Christian approaching Lysistrata. Clement of Alexandria argued that Greek literature contained seeds of truth, genuine perceptions of reality that, while incomplete, could serve as preparation for the fuller light of the Gospel. Tertullian was more cautious, concerned that theatrical culture would erode Christian moral formation. Both instincts are worth holding together. Lysistrata is not spiritually neutral material. Its sexual content is explicit and extensive, and a reader who engages it carelessly will be formed by it in ways they did not choose. Engaged with the full resources of biblical theology at hand, however, it functions as Clement suggested, as a preparation for the Gospel rather than a substitute for it. John Chrysostom observed that Christian women achieve a courage that transcends their social standing not through civic rebellion but through submission to God, which describes the difference between every female martyr the Fathers celebrated and the brilliant but finally powerless Lysistrata. Augustine insisted in De Bono Coniugali that the conjugal bond is a matter of justice and mutual care, not leverage, which names exactly what the play’s central strategy violates. For the reader not yet convinced they need the Gospel’s answer, consider this honestly: Aristophanes was the cleverest man in Athens, writing for the most educated audience in the ancient world, in the middle of a crisis they desperately needed to solve. His best idea required women to deny themselves and their husbands, seize a temple, and wait for the men to grow uncomfortable enough to negotiate. Two and a half thousand years later, the strategies that replace the Gospel look different but work the same way. They reach as far as the skin and no further.

 

God Himself Is the Peace You Are Looking For

The reason the Gospel’s peace surpasses every alternative is not primarily that it is more effective, though it is, nor that it is more ethical, though it is. The reason is that it gives the human soul what the human soul was actually made for, which is not a ceasefire but God himself. Augustine said it first and no one has improved on it: you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. The exhausted citizens of Athens in 411 BCE were not ultimately longing for the end of the Peloponnesian War. They were longing, without knowing it, for the God who made them, and every human attempt at peace is a fractured echo of that longing. In your marriage, the path of Ephesians 5 is not a technique for improved domestic harmony. It is a participation in the self-giving love of Christ, who is himself the peace between you and your spouse and between both of you and God. In your peacemaking, Matthew 5:9 does not merely commend a social strategy. It names peacemakers as children of God because they image the character of the God who made peace through the blood of his cross. In your witness, every person around you who has run out of happy ideas is closer to the Gospel than they know, because the Gospel begins at the end of human resources and not a moment before. Go and tell them. Tell them that the treasury of grace does not run empty. Tell them that the door has been opened from the inside by the one who made it. The wool of Aristophanes needed human hands to clean it. The scarlet of Isaiah’s courtroom became white as wool by divine act. The Lamb of God is both the one who does the cleansing and the one in whom the cleansed find their rest. Tell them his name is Jesus, that he gave everything he had so that everyone who comes to him empty-handed leaves with more than Lysistrata ever dreamed of offering, and that the peace they are looking for has already been purchased at a price they could never have paid themselves.

 

Euripides and the Abyss of Passion: Medea in the Light of Scripture

Euripides’ Medea, first performed in Athens in 431 BC, stands as one of antiquity’s most psychologically unsettling tragedies — and its power lies precisely in this: it sees the human condition with devastating clarity and offers no remedy for what it sees. Where Aeschylus traffics in cosmic justice and Sophocles in the collision between individual will and divine order, Euripides descends into the interior life of a woman destroyed by betrayal and consumed by passion. Medea, the foreign sorceress from Colchis who helped Jason win the Golden Fleece, is abandoned by her husband for a politically advantageous Greek marriage. Her response is total and terrifying: she murders Jason’s new bride, the Corinthian king Creon, and finally her own children, escaping unpunished in a chariot drawn by dragons. This is not a story about a monster. It is a story about a mother who loves her children and kills them anyway, and that intolerable combination is precisely what the playwright intends. The famous monologue of lines 1019 to 1080, in which Medea rehearses the murder in her imagination before committing it, is worth pausing over: she does not want to do this, and she does it anyway. Her maternal tenderness and her murderous resolve occupy the same sentences, the same breath, the same heart. That is the abyss Euripides opens. The essay that follows argues that Euripides diagnosed a problem only the gospel can address — and that reading him carefully, in the light of Scripture, illuminates both the depth of human fallenness and the magnitude of what redemption means.

Relations to Homer, Herodotus, and Greek Literature

Medea belongs to the broader mythological tradition of the Argonautic cycle, appearing in fragments attributed to Hesiod and in later developed form in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica. Within that tradition, Medea’s role is analogous to Circe’s in the Odyssey — a magical foreign woman who assists a Greek hero through supernatural power, instrumentalized by male ambition and then discarded. Euripides radically subverts this convention by making Medea the protagonist rather than the auxiliary figure, and her triumph over Greek hubris inverts every expectation the Argonautic tradition had established. The revenge cycle of the play echoes Aeschylus’ Oresteia, where blood calls for blood across generations, and Medea’s passion-driven destruction parallels the madness of Ajax in Sophocles or Deianeira’s fatal love in the Women of Trachis. Herodotus is relevant as well, though indirectly: his Histories are saturated with the tension between Greek and barbarian, and he consistently demonstrates that the gods punish hubris regardless of ethnic identity. Medea embodies that principle as a barbarian woman who exposes Greek oath-breaking and suffers for it, yet whose response becomes its own form of monstrous excess. Euripides shares Herodotus’ skepticism about Greek moral superiority while surpassing him in psychological depth. The play’s social critique — its exposure of women’s powerlessness in Greek marriage, its unsparing portrayal of xenophobia toward the Colchian outsider — reflects the anxieties of Athens during the early Peloponnesian War. Euripides’ broader body of work, including the Bacchae and Hippolytus, consistently probes the destructive potential of passion when divine or social order fails to contain it, making Medea not an aberration in his career but its defining statement.

Relations to Ancient Near Eastern Literature and the Old Testament

Direct literary borrowing between Euripides and Ancient Near Eastern texts is difficult to establish, and the parallels that exist are better understood as reflections of shared Mediterranean archetypes than as evidence of textual dependence. Medea’s sorcery and her dragon-drawn chariot evoke the powerful foreign enchantresses of Mesopotamian tradition, and the figure of the chaos monster — serpentine, destructive, associated with primordial disorder — appears in texts ranging from the Babylonian Enuma Elish to Ugaritic mythology. The revenge motif itself has deep ANE roots: the Epic of Gilgamesh turns on divine retribution for human arrogance, and Hittite and Hurrian mythologies include figures of spurned divine consorts whose anger brings catastrophe. What distinguishes Euripides from these ANE counterparts, however, is his location of the driving force entirely within the human psyche. ANE revenge narratives typically frame destruction as cosmically mandated, tied to the restoration of divine or royal order. Euripides offers no such comfort. These ANE parallels prepare the way for the Old Testament’s engagement with the same themes, because Scripture does not enter a cultural vacuum when it addresses passion, covenant, and betrayal — it enters a world already saturated with these questions and answers them from an entirely different foundation. The Old Testament engages the themes of Medea at every major point, not through direct contact but through the deeper logic of covenant and its violation. Jason’s abandonment of Medea — the woman who had sacrificed her homeland, her family, and her honor to serve him — mirrors the covenant treachery that the prophets repeatedly condemn. Malachi addresses the men of Judah in terms that could be applied directly to Jason: “the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless” (Malachi 2:14). Medea’s foreignness and sorcery recall the Old Testament’s consistent warnings against pagan practices, though Euripides frames what the Torah condemns as tragedy rather than apostasy. The infanticide at the play’s center inverts the Exodus narrative: where Pharaoh murders Hebrew children to preserve his power, Medea murders her own to destroy Jason’s legacy. Isaiah 46 offers the sharpest counter-image: Yahweh presents himself as the divine mother who carries Israel, who bore the nation from the womb and will not abandon it even through judgment. Where Medea’s love becomes the instrument of destruction, Yahweh’s maternal faithfulness is the very ground of Israel’s hope.

Relations to the New Testament

The New Testament’s engagement with Medea’s world moves from diagnosis to remedy, and its diagnosis is more searching than anything Euripides achieved. Paul’s account in Romans 1:24-25 of a humanity “given over” by God to the desires of their own hearts — passion as both the consequence and the expression of idolatry — illuminates Medea’s trajectory with precision: her passion is not a flaw in an otherwise noble character but the fruit of a world structured around human desire rather than divine order. Romans 6:23 finds in Medea its most literal dramatic illustration, as sin’s logic moves from broken covenant to murdered children with terrible consistency — the wages are always death, and Euripides shows us exactly how they are paid. The play’s unresolved ending, in which Medea escapes without judgment, anticipates the New Testament’s insistence on final eschatological justice while exposing the inadequacy of any merely human framework for accounting for evil. Romans 12:19 quotes Deuteronomy directly: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” Medea’s entire career is a usurpation of that divine prerogative — vengeance claimed by human hands always exceeds and corrupts what it intended to balance. Jesus’ command in the Sermon on the Mount to love enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44) stands as the sharpest possible contrast to her self-vindicating logic: not vengeance answered by greater vengeance, but the cycle broken by a love that costs everything and destroys nothing. John’s Gospel deepens the diagnosis from ethic to ontology: “everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed” (John 3:20). Medea operates entirely within darkness. The play offers no light, no principle of forgiveness, no force capable of interrupting the revenge cycle — and that absence is not a literary weakness but a theological witness, testifying by its very emptiness to what the world without the gospel looks like from the inside.

Biblical Critique and the Superior Solution of the Gospel

Euripides sees clearly. He sees that passion without covenant destroys everything it touches, that oath-breaking cascades into catastrophe, that a world structured around human desire rather than divine order ends in infanticide and dragon chariots and escape without redemption. What he cannot see — because no pagan framework can — is that the problem is not passion’s excess but the absence of the love that casts out fear, the covenant that holds when feeling fails, the cross where justice and mercy meet without either being consumed by the other. The Bible does not contradict Euripides’ diagnosis. It fulfills it. Where Medea finds only vengeance, Scripture offers forgiveness. Where she finds only escape, the gospel offers resurrection. Where she destroys what she loves, the Spirit produces the love that lays down its life. The biblical framework for marriage in Ephesians 5 grounds the husband’s love not in romantic feeling or social contract but in the self-sacrificial love of Christ for the church, a covenantal commitment that persists beyond feeling and beyond convenience — the precise opposite of what Jason practiced and what destroyed them both. First Corinthians 13 describes the love that Medea and Jason never had and that neither Greek culture nor pagan religion could produce. Colossians 3:13 commands forgiveness as the definitive alternative to the revenge cycle: “as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” The dragon chariot takes Medea away from consequences. The resurrection takes us through them. That is the difference between a tragedy and a gospel, and it is the only difference that finally matters.

Implications for Christian Belief and Practice

Medea has always been uncomfortable reading, and its discomfort is theologically productive. The play refuses to let its audience sentimentalize passion or romanticize revenge, and its unflinching portrait of what human beings do to each other when covenantal faithfulness collapses should generate in Christian readers not superiority but grief — and the sober recognition that the same forces that destroyed Medea and Jason are present wherever human beings live together without the grace that makes forgiveness possible. The church’s calling to take marriage with radical seriousness, not as a social convenience or an emotional arrangement but as a covenantal bond reflecting the relationship between Christ and his people, is thrown into sharp relief by Euripides’ dramatization of what happens when that bond is treated as expendable. The biblical counseling tradition, drawing on the resources of Scripture to address broken marriages, addictive passion, and cycles of relational destruction, is engaged in precisely the ministry that Medea’s world lacked and desperately needed. But the essay’s final word is not obligation — it is invitation. If you recognize something of Medea’s world in your own experience, if you have known what it is to be abandoned, or to be consumed by a passion that is destroying you, or to be caught in a cycle of retaliation that has taken more than it has given — the gospel is not a theological proposition addressed to your intellect. It is a living word addressed to you, announcing that the forgiveness, the covenant faithfulness, and the resurrection power that Euripides could not imagine are available now, not as the reward of sufficient virtue, but as the free gift of the One who broke the only cycle that finally matters. Euripides wrote a play about people with no gospel. You are not those people, unless you choose to be.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Commitment

Dennis Okholm, reviewing Kathleen Noris' book, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, writes,

In a society where acedia results in relationships that are recycled more often than aluminum cans, Norris insists that what is most likely to maintain a marriage is not giddy romance but discipline, martyrdom, and obedience (which, at its etymological root, refers to hearing): "The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. You may say the 'I do' of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, but it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married." Good advice in a culture where that "five-o'clock somewhere" mirage always beckons.


Books & Culture, September/October 2008, Vol. 14, No. 5, Page 10.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor, a romantic comedy written by William Shakespeare, was first performed in 1600. The play centers on the attempts of Falstaff to seduce the wives of Ford and Page in order to gain control of their money. Mrs. Page is infuriated by Falstaff’s letter asking for an liaison and she seeks the help of Mrs. Ford, who has received an identical letter from Falstaff, to find a way to ruin Falstaff without destroying her honor and reputation. Both husbands are told of Falstaff’s intentions and Mr. Page is not worried, since he doesn’t think his wife will fall for Falstaff, while Mr. Ford becomes jealously irate and seeks to capture Falstaff.

Mrs. Ford invites Falstaff over for a liaison, and while they are talking, Mrs. Page rushes in, forcing Falstaff to hide. She announces that Mrs. Ford’s husband is about to return and Falstaff panics. Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford hide him in a laundry basket and the servants sneak him out under Mr. Ford’s nose. However, he nearly suffocates in the dirty laundry, gets all dirty, and then is thrown into the river.

Even though he has been humiliated, Falstaff returns again to Mrs. Ford and seeks to seduce her. This time Mrs. Page enters and again acts angry to discover Falstaff there. She warns them that Mr. Ford is almost home, so they disguise Falstaff as a fat old woman who has come as a fortuneteller. Mr. Ford hates witches and kicks Falstaff out of his house, unaware that he is the woman in disguise.

Even though humiliated a second time, Falstaff agrees to meet Mrs. Ford in the haunted forest at night. While he tries to seduce her, the children and slaves dressed up like fairies and elves attack Falstaff, pinching and burning him until he is completely terrified. As the children leave, Mr. Ford and Mr. Page arrive and Falstaff realizes he has been fooled. Falstaff is urged to give up his lustful pursuits and Mr. Ford is admonished to trust his wife. In the end, the merry wives of Windsor have won.

Shakespeare has effectively dealt with the issue of immorality and jealousy, playfully showing the foolishness of men. The wisdom of the two wives turned a potentially destructive situation into a learning occasion for the men. Shakespeare’s main objective was to show that wives can be merry, that is have a full, exciting, and meaningful lives, while remaining true to their husbands. This is a much more constructive and wholesome philosophy than what is being taught through our popular culture today.

The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew, a romantic comedy, is one of William Shakespeare’s earlier plays, first performed in 1593-94. It is a play within a play, with the first act setting the stage for the second play. The first play is a comedy where a wealthy lord plays a joke on a drunken peasant, Christopher Sly, by taking him to his home while he is passed out and instructing everyone to treat him like a lord when he comes to. Sly refuses to believe he is a lord even though all the servants and attendants tell him that he has suffered amnesia and has mistakenly claimed to be a poor peasant for the last several years. He finally believes them when he meets his “wife” who is a young page dressed up as a woman. When he wants to go to bed with his wife, the staff force him to watch a play instead. The play we watches becomes the main focus for the rest of the play.

Lucentio, a rich young man, and his two servants arrive in Padua in order to attend the university. However, when Lucentio sees a beautiful young woman, Bianca, he decides to pursue her instead. There are several barriers that threaten to make his desires impossible. First, Bianca’s father refuses to let anyone marry Bianca until her older sister Katherine is married. Unfortunately, Katherine is an ill-tempered woman with a bitter tongue and no one wants her. The second problem is that there are two other young men already seeking to win Bianca’s love.

Lucentio poses as a Latin tutor and is allowed to teach Bianca Latin. He quickly uses the Latin lessons to declare his love for Bianca and she begins to fall in love with him. However, another young man poses as a music teacher and also wins the right to teach Bianca music. In the end, Lucentio wins her heart but still must wait for Katherine to be married first.

This problem is solved when Petruccio, a rich man from Verona, arrives to find a rich woman to marry. Upon hearing about Katherine, he immediately sets out to marry her in spite of her bad reputation. Since he doesn’t care what kind of character his wife has, as long as she has a large dowry, Petruccio sets out to tame the shrew right from the start. When he meets her father, he declares his intentions to marry Katherine, and her father thinks he is crazy. Nevertheless, he meets with Katherine and they have a bitter exchange of words, but Petruccio is ready and follows his plan to break her will. He tells Katherine’s father that she loves him and wants to marry him on Sunday.

On the wedding day Petruccio is late and arrives poorly dressed riding a worn out old horse. After the wedding, he refuses to stay for the banquet and commands Katherine to come away immediately to his house. At home Petruccio refuses to let Katherine eat or sleep for several days, pretending he loves her too much to let her eat his poor food or sleep in his poor bed.

On the way back to Padua, Petruccio forces Katherine to agree that the sun is the moon and that an old man is a young maiden. Through his cunning plan, Petruccio has broken Katherine’s willfulness and has brought her under his control. At a banquet Petruccio bets the other two men that they cannot get their wives to come them before he can get Katherine to come. Since they know how strong-willed Katherine is, they agree to the bet. The first man’s wife refuses to come because she “is busy” and the second man’s wife demands that he “come to her.” When Petruccio sends word to Katherine, she comes immediately and asks what he wants. The other men are shocked, and Petruccio commands Katherine to make the other two women to come as well. When she returns with them, Petruccio tells Katherine to remove her hat because it makes her look silly. She quickly complies to the astonishment of all. He then commands her to rebuke the other two women for not obeying their husbands, which she aptly does. Everyone then fully realizes that Petruccio has truly tamed the shrew.

Madama Butterfly

I went to see Madama Butterfly performed by the Elgin Opera. The singing was excellent but the low budget left the stage sparse. The Elgin Opera has been in operation for five years and did a commendable job, especially the orchestra composed of two violins, a viola, a cello and a piano.

The story is about a U.S. Navy officer, Pinkerton, who marries a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl while his ship is anchored in Nagasaki. Pinkerton is warned by Sharpless, the U.S. Consul that such a marriage will only end in disaster, since the young girl will be devastated when he leaves. Pinkerton shrugs off the warning and declares that he has intentions of marrying a “real wife” when he gets back to the states. As the marriage proceeds, the villagers and family members denounce Cio-Cio-San, whom Pinkerton calls Madama Butterfly because of her innocent beauty, because she has rejected the local gods for Pinkerton’s God. Even though she is hurt by the denunciations, she is happy to be married to Pinkerton.

Three years later Cio-Cio-San is still waiting for Pinkerton to return as he has promised her. Everyone says she is foolish since they know Pinkerton has no intention of returning. Undaunted by their unbelief, she is so steadfast in her faith that he will return she turns down marriage proposals from wealthy suitors. Every day she searches the port for any sign of Pinkerton’s ship.

Finally, after three long years, she sees his ship coming into port. She is so elated that she stays up all night waiting for him to come home, yet he doesn’t appear. Finally, the next morning Pinkerton arrives with his American wife to break the news to Cio-Cio-San, but she is asleep. When he realizes that she has been faithfully waiting for him to return, he is stricken with grief over the pain he has caused her. He cowardly runs away, unable to tell her the news himself, leaving his wife to be found by Cio-Cio-San when she wakes up. Cio-Cio-San is devastated and realizes the Pinkerton has come not for her but for their three-year-old son. She tells her son to look closely at her face so he will remember her and then tells him to go and play. As he leaves to play, she kills herself with the same dagger that her father used to commit suicide. As she is dying, Pinkerton comes to retrieve his son, finding her too late. As he bends over her dead body, the curtain closes.


This is a powerful tragedy that illustrates the pain and suffering caused by military personnel stationed overseas who get involved with local women. The U.S. military has had a dark history in this matter, but it is not alone. Every major nation that has troops stationed on foreign soil is guilty of the same crime. While the U.S. military discourages such marriages, it does not prohibit them. Commanders and chaplains should be better trained to deal with this issue.

But the morale is limited to international marriages of convenience. Many men play fast and loose with women, leaving a trail of broken hearts behind them. It is hard not to find a woman who has not been mistreated by shallow professions of love only to find themselves used and abandoned when the relationship is no longer convenient. Modern pop culture tends to support this behavior through movies, TV shows, and music while at the same time lamenting the pain of such broken relationships. Parents, teachers and other leaders need to educate young women and guard them from predatory males intent on using women and then throwing them away.

Andromache

In Andromache, Euripides dramatizes how the bitter jealousy of Hermione spurs her to seek the death of her rival, Andromache. Hermione is the wife of Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, killed by Paris at Troy, and Andromache is the widow of Hector, brother of Paris, killed by Achilles at Troy. Andromache was given to Neoptolemus as the prize of war won by his father. The presence of Andromache infuriates Hermione, and becomes utterly unbearable when Andromache has a son by Neoptolemus while she remains barren. Her jealousy causes her to plot the death of Andromache and her son.

In order to carry out her plot, she summons her father, Menelaus, king of Sparta. He comes and is about to carry out the murders when he is confronted by Peleus, Achilles’ father, Neoptolemus’ grandfather. Peleus shames Menelaus for attempting to commit such a heinous crime, and he returns to Sparta, leaving Hermione alone. Hermione repents of her attempted murders and seeks to commit suicide before her husband returns and sends her away.

While Hermione is in a suicidal rage, Orestes, son of Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus, comes and stops her. He agrees to murder Neoptolemus and marry Hermione, so they run off together to Delphi to carry out the deed. Orestes lies, telling the residents of Delphi that Neoptolemus is going to rob the temple of Apollo. Arousing their anger, he gets them to kill Neoptolemus.

Peleus is distraught, having seen both the death of his son and his grandson. However, his wife, Thetis, the sea goddess who bore Achilles, predicts that Andromache’s son will move to Molosia, where his descendants will become an unbroken line of mighty kings.

Jealousy, untimely death, murder, and misfortune all tend to disrupt the plans of men, yet the gods also open up unexpected opportunities through these tragedies. The play ends with the chorus singing: “Many are the shapes of Heaven's denizens, and many a thing they bring to pass contrary to our expectation; that which we thought would be is not accomplished, while for the unexpected God finds out a way. E'en such hath been the issue of this matter.”


Here are several quotes from the play that I found interesting:

Adromache laments the cruelty of women when jealousy embitters them: “How strange it is, that though some god hath devised cures for mortals against the venom of reptiles, no man ever yet hath discovered aught to cure a woman's venom, which is far worse than viper's sting or scorching flame; so terrible a curse are we to mankind.”

The Chorus sings the bitterness that arises from jealousy when two women are married to the same man: “Never, oh! never will I commend rival wives or sons of different mothers, a cause of strife, of bitterness, and grief in every house. would have a husband content with one wife whose rights he shareth with no other. Not even in states is dual monarchy better to bear than undivided rule; it only doubles burdens and causes faction amongst the citizens. Often too will the Muse sow strife 'twixt rivals in the art of minstrelsy. Again, when strong winds are drifting mariners, the divided counsel of the wise does not best avail for steering, and their collective wisdom has less weight than the inferior mind of the single man who has sole authority; for this is the essence of power alike in house and state, whene'er men care to find the proper moment. This Spartan, the daughter of the great chief Menelaus, proves this; for she hath kindled hot fury against a rival, and is bent on slaying the hapless Trojan maid and her child to further her bitter quarrel. 'Tis a murder gods and laws and kindness all forbid. Ah! lady, retribution for this deed will yet visit thee.”

PELEUS: Surely after this every prudent man will seek to marry a wife of noble stock and give his daughter to a husband good and true, never setting his heart on a worthless woman, not even though she bring a sumptuous dowry to his house. So would men ne'er suffer ill at heaven's hand.

Helen

Most people are familiar with the story of Helen and how her running off with Paris to Troy started the Trojan War depicted in Homer’s Iliad. However, I was surprised to discover that there is an alternate tradition that exonerates Helen by placing her in Egypt while the war was supposed to have taken place. Even Herodotus writes in his history that Egyptian priests reported a tradition that Helen stayed in Egypt. Euripides picks up on this tradition in his play Helen, which was most likely influenced by a sixth century BC poet Stesichorus.

According to Euripides’ play, Helen was not guilty of running off with Paris because she had been whisked away to Egypt while a wraith was put in her place to mislead Paris and start the war. The play opens with Helen in Egypt living in a temple. The king, Theoclymenus is determined to marry Helen, but she repeatedly refuses because she believes her husband, Menelaus, will come rescue her. After the ten year long war ends in the fall of Troy, Menelaus is tossed about at sea for seven years until his ship is wrecked and he is washed ashore at Egypt.

Theoclymenus hears of the Greek shipwreck and searches for survivors in order to kill them. Menelaus escapes capture and discovers Helen, who has to work hard to convince him she is the real Helen. When word comes that the wraith Helen has vanished, Menelaus believes the real Helen and they plan their escape. Menelaus is no longer angry at Helen, since he now knows that it wasn’t her at all who left him for Paris.

Helen deceives Theoclymenus by telling him that her husband was killed in the shipwreck and she agrees to marry him after a proper Greek ceremony is performed at sea. Theoclymenus thinks that Menelaus is merely a lowly sailor from the shipwreck, so he agrees to let Helen and the stranger carry out the ceremony. Helen, Menelaus and a small band of Greek sailors who survived the wreck board the ship supplied by Theoclymenus. As they get far enough from shore the Greeks overpower the Egyptian sailors, capture the ship, and sail for Greece.

It shows the love that Helen has for her husband and how she has remained chaste for seventeen years while waiting for him to rescue her. This is in stark contrast to the view of Helen in the Iliad, who is complicit in seducing Paris and leaving her husband for him. About the only other interesting thing about this play is the vivid description of the Greek’s battle to capture the ship from the Egyptians.

Valentine's Day Skit

Here is a skit I wrote for our youth group to be made into a video and shown at our Valentine's Banquet. It is still in the editing stage, so let me know what you think so I can make some last minute changes.

I Can Show You the World
AGYG Valentine’s Skit 2007

Cast:
Alan (Aladdin): Grant
Jessica (Jasmine): Christina
Andy (Abu): Paul
Jeff (Jafar): Charles
Gene (Genie): Josh
Jessica’s Mom: Eunice
Jessica’s Friend: Liz


Alan is a non-Christian who smokes, drinks, steals, and is mean
Jessica is a Christian girl who wants to be a missionary and serve God
Andy is Alan’s friend who often eggs him on to do bad things
Jeff is Jessica’s uncle who wants to get Alan arrested to keep him away from Jessica
Gene is Alan’s friend who teaches him how to trick Jessica into thinking he is a Christian
Jessica’s mom orders Jessica not to date Alan
Jessica’s friend uncovers the truth about Alan and convinces Jessica to break up with him


Scene One (Alan and Andy talking about the things they have just stolen)
Alan: That was close. We almost got caught by the store owner.
Andy: Yeah, but look at what we got! (Dumps iPod, camera, cds, etc. onto table).
Alan: Not bad. I bet we can get $100 for this iPod. $75 for the camera. $20 for these cds.
Andy: All in a day’s work. Hey, you wanna go get a beer? Cruise for some chicks?
Alan: I know just the place. There’s this cute girl that rocks.
Andy: Let’s go.

Scene Two (Jessica and Liz are talking about their future work for God)
Jessica: I just got back from this amazing retreat. God really spoke to me.
Liz: What happened?
Jessica: I dedicated my life to God and promised that I would become a missionary and go anywhere in the world to serve Him.
Liz: That’s pretty extreme, isn’t it?
Jessica: Yeah, but it is what I want to do with my life. I mean, I want to do something eternally significant.
Liz: I can see why you’re so excited about it. Who knows, I just might join you.
Jessica: That would be awesome.
Liz: I’ll pray about it. And for you, too.
Jessica: Thanks. You’re my best friend. I don’t know if I could make it without you.

Scene Three (Jeff and Jessica’s mom are talking about Jessica’s decision to be a missionary)
Jeff: I heard that Jessica is going to become a missionary.
Mom: I wish she would come to her senses and choose a more reasonable career.
Jeff: What a waste. She’s so talented, intelligent…and beautiful.
Mom: You don’t think you could talk some sense into her, do you?
Jeff: For you, my dear sister, I would do anything. Consider it done.
Mom: Thanks. You can’t imagine how troubling this is for me.
Jeff: Don’t worry. She’ll come to her senses, get a good job, find a nice guy….

Scene Four (Alan, Andy and Gene talking about how to get Alan hooked up with Jessica)
Alan: What did I tell you! She is one fine looking girl!
Andy: You weren’t kidding. She is hot!
Gene: Are you guys talking about Jessica?
Alan: That’s the beauty!
Gene: I feel sorry for you.
Alan: Why?
Gene: She’s a Christian.
Alan: So, what difference does that make? I don’t care what her religion is.
Andy: Yeah. What’s the big deal?
Gene: You don’t get it. She wouldn’t give a guy like you a second thought. She would never date a non-Christian.
Andy: What, is she some kind of bigot?
Gene: No. It’s just that she believes that dating someone who doesn’t believe in Jesus is wrong.
Alan: Wow. Is she a loony toon or something? I don’t want to get mixed up with some religious fanatic.
Gene: Don’t worry. She’s perfectly normal. Once she falls in love with you, Jesus will be out the window.
Andy: Yeah, Romeo here can charm any girl. Jesus doesn’t stand a chance against him.
Alan: Tell me your plan, gen-i-us. I’m all ears.

Scene Five (Jessica and Liz are talking about Alan)
Liz: I heard you went out with Alan last night. How did it go?
Jessica: It was like a dream! He’s so handsome… charming… romantic!
Liz: What did you guys do?
Jessica: Dinner at Maggiano’s. A movie. Talking late into the night.
Liz: What did you guys talk about?
Jessica: He told me he wants to go on the mission field and teach others about Jesus. I was so excited—he wants to do exactly what I want to do! Can you believe it; I’m so blessed.
Liz: Sounds like a dream come true. Maybe it’s too good to be true.
Jessica: It can’t be. I just feels so right.

Scene Six (Jeff and Jessica’s mom discussing Jessica’s new boyfriend)
Jeff: I heard Jessica has a new boyfriend.
Mom: Yes, and he wants to be a missionary, too. I just can’t win.
Jeff: All is not lost. I can get rid of this religious Romeo, no problem.
Mom: Are you sure?
Jeff: Leave it to me, sister. This guy is going down!

Scene Seven (Alan, Andy and Gene are discussing Jessica)
Alan: Gene, you’re a gen-I-us!
Andy: Stop the puns, Romeo. You’re making me sick.
Gene: I told you it would work.
Alan: She is eating out of my hands. She fell for every line I fed her. Now, if I can just take this to the next level. What should I do?
Andy: Slow down, Al, you’re going a little too fast, don’t you think?
Alan: No way. I’m going to reel this fish in as fast as I can. I don’t want her to get away.
Gene: Well, let me tell you what to do.
Alan: I’m all ears, gen-I-us.
Andy: (Andy rolls his eyes and groans)

Scene Eight (Jeff and Liz are talking about Jessica and Alan)
Jeff: I’m concerned about Jessica. What do you think of this new boyfriend of hers?
Liz: He seems ok. I mean, he is all that she wants in a guy.
Jeff: Really? That’s not what I found out.
Liz: What do you mean?
Jeff: I’ve been asking around, and it seems that Jessica’s boyfriend has quite a record of misdeeds.
Liz: Like what?
Jeff: Well, he’s been arrested twice for shoplifting in the past few years. He’s well known at all the bars and dance clubs. In fact, word on the street says he is even dealing crack, but I can’t verify that.
Liz: Are you sure?
Jeff: Checked it out with my cop friend. It all is true.
Liz: Wow. I need to tell Jessica.
Jeff: Yes. Please do. I am really concerned for her. So is her mother.

Scene Nine (Jessica and Alan fighting over the revelation of his true nature)
Jessica: How could you do this to me! You’re such a liar! A phony! We’re history!
Alan: But Jessica, I did it because I love you.
Jessica: Puh-lease! You don’t know what love is.
Alan: I can change. I’ll stop doing all the bad stuff.
Jessica: It’s more than that. I need someone who has the same passion for God that I have. You don’t even come close. I’m sorry, but I’m through with you!
Alan: But… I can show you the world.
Jessica: Don’t call me, I’ll call you…. Not!!!!

Scene Ten (Jeff and Jessica’s mother glorying in their victory)
Mom: I didn’t think you could pull it off.
Jeff: I’m surprised that you doubted me, sis.
Mom: And you even got him arrested for drug possession. How did you do that?
Jeff: You just have to know the right people. All it took was a phone call and a quick stash of crack in his car, and the rest is history.
Mom: You are sooooo evil. I love it. Now we just have to finish the work of changing Jessica’s mind.
Jeff: Leave it to me.
Mom: I will.

Scene Eleven (Two years later Alan runs into Jessica and tells her of his conversion in prison)
Alan: Hey, Jessica. Is that you?
Jessica: Alan? You look totally different. What’s up?
Alan: I just got out of prison. It changed my life.
Jessica: Really (sarcasticly)?
Alan: No, I’m serious. I hit bottom and all I could do was look up and ask Jesus to help me. And he did.
Jessica: I find it hard to believe.
Alan: I know. I don’t expect you to believe me. But give me a chance and I will show you that it’s real.
Jessica: I will pray for you. That’s all I can promise right now.
Alan: Thanks. That’s enough.

Scene Twelve (Two years later Jeff and Jessica’s mom are fighting about Jessica marrying Alan and going to Africa as missionaries)
Mom: I don’t believe it. You let them get married!
Jeff: I didn’t think she would ever talk to him again after what happened.
Mom: Well, you thought wrong. Now I have two religious psychos in my family. And Africa. Why Africa? Of all the places in the world to go, why did they go to that God-forsaken place?
Jeff: I’m sorry, but everything I tried didn’t work.
Mom: And now I have to live with the mess. You couldn’t have failed more miserably. Sometimes I wonder why mom ever let you live.

Scene Thirteen (Alan and Jessica in Africa)
Alan: This is the most incredible experience I have ever had. I couldn’t have imagined life could be so fulfilling and meaningful. And the best part is that I get to spend it with you.
Jessica: You’re so wonderful. You’re all that I want in a man, and more. And to think we can serve God together for our whole lives. It’s truly amazing.
Alan: We are so blessed. I finally understand what love is all about. I’m going to cherish you for the rest of my life.
Jessica: It is truly a miracle how God brought us together. It couldn’t be more perfect.
Alan: I agree. Loving Jesus, loving you, and loving these Africans is the most important thing I could do with my life. I have found true love in every aspect of my life. Thank you for being patient with me.
Jessica: I’m truly glad that I gave you a second chance. I guess God still works miracles and changes lives. I have never been so happy in all my life, and you are an important part of that. I love you.

Cymbeline

This is another of Shakespeare’s romantic plays written near the end of his life. Cymbeline, King of Britain, who lost his two sons while they were very young, marries a new wife with an arrogant son, Cloten. Cymbeline’s daughter, Imogen, is expected to marry Cloten, but she disobeys and marries the brave, but poor, Posthumus Leonatus. Cymbeline banishes Posthumus, and the couple exchange gifts to seal their love since they are unable to consummate their marriage. Imogen gives Posthumus a ring and he gives her a bracelet.

Posthumus flees to Rome where he defends his wife’s honor after the villain Iachimo questions her chastity. Iachimo brags that he can seduce Posthumus’ wife easily, so the two make a bet. Iachimo schemes to enter Imogen’s bedroom in a trunk, steals her bracelet and discovers a mole under her breast. He convinces Posthumus that he has slept with her with this knowledge and the bracelet. Posthumus gives his ring to Iachimo and then writes a letter to his servant to kill his unfaithful wife.

Meanwhile, Imogen again spurns Cloten and tells him he isn’t worthy to wear even Posthumus’ shabbiest clothes. The Queen is furious and tries to poison Imogen, but the physician realizing her scheme, makes a potion that merely numbs the senses but doesn’t kill. Imogen dresses like a young boy and goes with the servant to meet Posthumus. Along the way she meets Belarius, a nobleman, who had kidnapped the Cymbeline’s two infant sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, and raised them as his own. Calling herself Fidele, the two men are unaware that she is a girl, let alone their sister.

Cloten realizes that Imogen has fled, so he dresses in Posthumus’ clothes and chases after her. Cloten argues with Guiderius and is killed by him and his brother Arviragus. Imogen has taken the Queen’s poison, thinking it is medicine, and she passes out. The two men hide the decapitated Cloten in the forest and do the same to Imogen when they find her, thinking she is also dead. When Imogen recovers from the poison, she sees the decapitated body and thinks it is her husband, Posthumus.

The Queen goes mad at the disappearance of her son, Cloten, and dies. King Cymbeline then encounters Belarius with the two young men Guiderius and Arviragus, and orders them killed for killing the king’s stepson Cloten. Belarius then reveals the true identity of the boys and they are reunited with their true father, King Cymbeline. Iachimo also confesses to the King Cymbeline how he came upon the ring that belonged to Posthumus. After his confession, Imogen reveals her true identity and Iachimo is horrified. King Cymbeline is overjoyed to be reunited with his daughter as well as his two long-lost sons. At last, Posthumus is discovered and the whole family rejoices together.

Imogen’s chastity and loyalty to her husband, even though he had lost faith in her, is touching. In a world where such loyalty and virtue are rare, it is important to have such positive role models. Chastity and loyalty are essential to a healthy marriage and society. It would do everyone good to meditate on the attitude and actions of Imogen and seek to imitate her virtue.