Staging Women’s Pain in greek and Shakespearian Romance Plays

Staging Women’s Pain

Lecturer Jan Parker reflects on some of the powerful questions we will explore in our new course
on Shakespeare and Euripides: Romance Plays

‘Romance – true dramatic romance – is the most important and challenging form for today’s audiences’.

- Director of the 2026 Cambridge Triennial Greek Play, The Ion.

In our new course on Romance Plays we will explore this challenge through Greek and Shakespearian ‘romances’: the Ion, The Winter’s Tale, Alcestis, Pericles and The Tempest, asking in what, if any sense is ‘All’s Well that Ends Well? And in one session, we will hear from and feed back to the director of the Ion our sense of the proper pain as well as proper delight of this play.

For romances contain compelling motifs that have to end well, have to end in reunion and restoration: the baby exposed at birth with tokens (Ion, Perdita) has to be reunited with birth parents … but at what cost to the mother? The folk motifs of the healing potion that can restore the King, shipwrecks and the restoration from a seemingly destructive storm to a new order, the families separated by anger or jealousy, Alcestis restored from death, the sense of some mysterious power shaping events are also played out in All’s Well, Pericles and The Tempest.

But as in medieval epic stories - romans - there are many twists and turns before a happy ending that ends in reunion, and forgiveness but not forgetting, of the sometimes terrible pain enacted on stage and lived through by the audience.

At the end, Helena in All’s Well does succeed in satisfying her new husband’s stipulation that he will only acknowledge her as wife

‘When thou canst get the ring upon my finger which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to.’

And Leontes in The Winter’s Tale is restored ‘when that which is lost is found’.

And Admetus does get his wife Alcestis back from the Underworld.

But at what cost and to whom? Such motifs can carry with them darkness. We will explore the plays that use such romance motifs to discuss: what do we need to happen? what is it that gets restored? who is reunited and to what effect?

And how to stage such darkness, such pain, today?

The Ion, like The Winter’s Tale starts in the pain of a mother forced to give up the child at birth to be exposed. Creusa the royal princess in the Ion has been raped by Apollo and both rape and labour and birth in secret are graphically if lyrically described.

Rosalind Parker, the Cambridge Triennial Greek Play director, has provisionally chosen to start the play with a mime rather than a Messenger speech telling of the rape. Is this more or less shocking than a conventional Prologue? Similar decisions have to be made about the graphic verse ‘aria’ when Creusa tells of her pain, of the baby desperately trying to latch on before being put in a cradle with cloths embroidered with royal symbols, and left at Delphi.

This pain is being brought into the present as, 16 years later, she encounters Ion on the steps of Apollo’s Temple. A motherless child meets a mother who all believe to be childless, come to Delphi because an oracle says there her husband and she will find a child. But such secrets can’t come out easily: only at the end does the Priestess appear with the cradle and the recognition is complete. But … as in Winter’s Tale, what about the causers of the pain: Apollo’s rape, Leontes’ violent brutality? How should Rosalind ‘play’ the last scene, the ending?

For we need to ask: is all really well that ends well? In the hands of these two great playwrights, do these final scenes leave behind the grief, the loss, the bitter division? In these ‘strange sea changes’ when ‘that which is lost is found’, is all forgotten, is all even forgiven? Or in our delight at the pattern coming out, at the unification of those we have come to care for, are we made to really confront to the violence and pain we have witnessed?

Join us to study Ion alongside other great plays by Euripides and Shakespeare, with lectures and seminars by Jan Parker and Fred Parker. A rare chance to study these works with leading scholars.

Live online, Tuesdays, 20 January to 24 February 2026, 6.00-8.00 pm UK time

Further information on our website.