Discover Lady Jane Lumley’s play “Iphigenia At Aulis”

The origins of an alternative tradition of female play writing, long before Aphra Behn and the Restoration Theatre, are also part of the extended Sidney family story. Since the very first extant script by a British woman was Iphigenia at Aulis, the first English translation of Euripides tragedy, which was translated by Lady Jane Lumley in 1557. Jane Lumley was related to Mary Dudley Sidney, the countess of Pembroke’s mother and Lady Mary Wroth’s grandmother. And although it is extremely unlikely that they read Lumley’s translation of Euripides play, the story of female self-sacrifice, which had been embodied by Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days Queen, may have influenced their own dramas.

Jane Lumley’s translation sets an agenda of female outspokenness, which the countess of Pembroke and Lady Mary Wroth certainly followed. In this extract, Queen Clytemnestra, who’s just discovered that her husband, Agamemnon, has brought his daughter Iphigenia to Aulis to sacrifice her to the Goddess Diana so that the becalmed Greek army can sail to Troy to recover Helen, the abducted wife of Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, In Lumley’s version of this tragic prelude to the Trojan War, women’s voices, including a chorus of women, speak out powerfully about the costs of war.