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This chapter asks why the Thebans, and especially their royal family, are made to suffer so terribly by Dionysus in Euripides' Bacchae. Pentheus' tyrannical behaviour and his evidence-proof hatred and contempt for Dionysus lead him to ruin; was there an alternative that could have avoided it? The approaches of Cadmus and Teiresias do not seem to provide one. The chorus, however, and the common people of Thebes, embrace Dionysus simply and unquestioningly as a bringer of pleasure; the elite might have done likewise. They still suffer more than they, or anyone, deserves; nor has Dionysus' wanton savagery done anyone any good.

This chapter reviews Murray's involvement with the theatre. It situates his translations in the performance traditions of early 20th-century England and also in a wider context, including that of the Salvation Army and the influence of Nietzsche. The chapter ends by exploring the influence of Murray's translations on the reworking of Greek tragic plots by the Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka.

This chapter examines a play about the unsettling introduction into Greece from the East of the Bacchae (the followers of Dionysus), which is included in his final dramatic trilogy, produced posthumously for him in Athens. It observes that the Dionysian cult had become, in Athens, so tame that it could be trusted to preside over the most productive theater of which we know. It further observes that the cult's vitality, as well as that of a remarkably sophisticated Athens, may have developed on deep-rooted passions that had long been harnessed, not eliminated. It notes that such harnessing could even take the form of representing a “death” which somehow had the capacity of a “resurrection.”

This chapter discusses Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, It explores, first of all, how Soyinka draws on Yoruba mythology and cosmology to emphasise the revolutionary potential of ritual sacrifice. Then, the focus shifts to the politics that the adaptation performs through its ambiguous relation with the Euripedean pre‐text, a relation that is characterised by a dual emphasis on correspondence and difference. In the final part, the cultural politics at play in Soyinka's refiguration of Dionysus and in his theory of ‘Yoruba tragedy’ is considered in relation to Martin Bernal's Black Athena project. The primary intention is to demonstrate how Soyinka does with ‘tragedy’ what Bernal does with ‘Greece’: challenging its conventional definition and destabilising the Eurocentrism that has traditionally inhibited it.

This chapter examines the epiphanic nature of the narrative of the seventh Homeric Hymn to Dionysus in relation to the other Hymns in the collection, taking into account distinctions of length, and Dionysus' presentation elsewhere in Greek literature (including Euripides' Bacchae) and art. It is argued that the focalization of the seventh Hymn on the epiphany of Dionysus upon the ship of the Tyrsenian pirates is not simply the narration of a divine epiphany; rather one finds in the Hymn the epiphanic structuring of the narrative.

This interlude illustrates the problems of ambiguity by comparing the figures of Pentheus in The Bacchae and Job in the Bible. Both characters try to clarify categories—those of order for Pentheus and those of justice for Job. Both are resolved only after meeting with different types of furies. Both stories probe the chasm between human attempts to order the worlds of knowledge and the unknowability of the divine order. Both call the boundaries of human experience into question.

This chapter traces close parallels between Act 1 of Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara and Euripides's Bacchae as a way of revealing previously unexplored allusions and meanings in the modern play and illuminating how classical themes were taken up and modernized by Shaw.

This chapter traces close parallels between Act 2 of Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara and Euripides's Bacchae as a way of revealing previously unexplored allusions and meanings in the modern play and illuminating how classical themes were taken up and modernized by Shaw.

This essay traces close parallels between Act 3 of Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara and Euripides's Bacchae as a way of revealing previously unexplored allusions and meanings in the modern play and illuminating how classical themes were taken up and modernized by Shaw.

This chapter traces large-scale parallels between Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara and Euripides's Bacchae as a way of revealing unexplored meanings in the modern play and demonstrating classical Greek influences on Shaw's philosophical outlook.

This chapter examines Euripides's commentary on political theory and practice by focusing on his three plays: Suppliant Women, Erechtheus, and Bacchae. It traces the inspiration Euripides takes from enlightened philosophy and considers his commentary's implicit criticism of the politics enacted by Greek cities, especially Athens. While the political role of women in tragedy is generally adversarial to the city, the chapter shows that some mothers and some girls in Euripides's drama cooperate enthusiastically with the city's political aims. It suggests that the voluntary decision of young women to offer their neck to the knife of sacrificers in order to save the city or the genos is a phenomenon that has tried the hermeneutics of the critics.

This chapter examines the annihilation of the polis's political power and authority, announced in the plots of Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis. In both Euripides plays, the polis lost its ability to organize and harmonize the collective life of Athens—at least initially—in dealing with women's issues. In Bacchae, the entire female population abandons the city, and the king is unable to recall them and punish them as he wants to do. In Iphigenia in Aulis, the sacrifice of Iphigenia triggers an institutional crisis that is resolved only when she consents to be sacrificed, and then turns into a sort of savior “hero.” This chapter shows how political failure and impotence manifest themselves in contact with that part of the population that state politics has never consented to make a partner in its power and actions.

This chapter examines Bacchae's textual complexity to address the issue of which parts of the Dionysiac “gospel” and myth in the play are mythical or even invented, and which correspond to historical cult in the various Greek cities. It considers which religious features of Dionysism as presented in Bacchae's parodos would be accepted and integrated in the polis according to Teiresias's enlightened interpretation of Dionysus. It shows how the Chorus makes the charge of madness and folly regarding the intellectual arrogance of Pentheus and simultaneously presents the principles of their own “gospel.” It suggests that the sophia upheld by the Chorus is suitable to Teiresias's city, but is contradicted by the Bacchants at the end of the play.

This chapter examines Teiresias's attempt to convince Pentheus to accept Dionysism. In the first part of his appeal to Pentheus, before the king orders his men to destroy Teiresias's religious seat, Teiresias says: “Come on, Pentheus, believe me, do not be too confident that sovereignty rules men.” Teiresias could not be more explicit about the weakness of political power in relation to other powers, especially in satisfying the human need to forget everyday sufferings. However, Pentheus rejects Teiresias's and Cadmus's political advice and replaces their arguments with his own perverse obsessions. This chapter discusses Bacchae's presentation of a city-state in which sexual seduction satisfies the leaders' lechery and/or helps their political success. It also considers Teiresias's response to Pentheus's misrepresentation of the Bacchants' sexuality.

This chapter focuses on Dionysus's revenge in the fist round of his attack on Thebes, during which he plays the role of man, perfectly simulating man's weakness and in fact counterfeiting his weakness only in order to publicly mock the impotence and ineptness of the king. Bacchae makes Dionysus play a contriving game with Pentheus, not in order to persuade him but to exhibit the god's unlimited and spectacular power to the external audience and to readers. This chapter considers how Dionysus's simulation in which he splits his character into a fake victim and a real mocker makes him unconquerable, but also complacent and petty. It suggests that Pentheus is defeated in the game that he plays by the superior intelligence and power of his enemy and highlights the impotence of politics before the mythical power of the gods.

This chapter examines Euripides's polemical representation of the anthropomorphic divine characters and the distressing vision of the failure of the state in Bacchae. More specifically, it shows that a brutal Dionysus would not have had access to the city. Like Euripides's other wretched stories of revenge, the story of Dionysus's revenge exhibits various symmetries. Pentheus and Dionysus gain satisfaction in the same way: Pentheus by insanely attacking the source of prophecies, Dionysus by inflicting on Cadmus the future sack of the seat of Apollo's oracular voice. This chapter considers Cadmus's imputation that Dionysus has behaved like a mortal and how Dionysus justifies his actions. It suggests that the anthropomorphism of Greek gods is absurd because as universal forces they need nothing personally or emotionally. It also explains how Bacchae renews the presentation of the tragic ambivalence of revenge.

This chapter considers a series of plays all first produced in Britain between 1969 and 1988: Maureen Duffy's Rites (1969); Caryl Churchill and David Lan's A Mouthful of Birds (1986); and Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale (1988). These three re-visions in different ways exploit tensions between daily experience and the mythical/fantastical, suggesting a permeable skin between them: here, ordinary lives are infiltrated by spirits, or alternatively a predominantly mythic frame cracks under the insistent pressure of a contemporary world. The plays are linked by their engagement with Euripides' The Bacchae, a text itself preoccupied with the fragility of boundaries. It is useful to view Rites in the context of emergent second-wave feminism: it is a one-act black farce that vividly satirises antagonism between the sexes, and articulates mounting resentment on the part of women rooted in an awareness, variously more and less conscious, of their unequal social treatment.

William Wordsworth’s The Prelude provides a glimpse of the experience of the stranger. It talks of his trip to France in 1790 where the hospitality he received made him feel very much at home. By late 1792, however, things turned sour when Wordsworth travelled back to England by way of Paris. It was the “September Massacres” that soiled and, to him, brutalized France itself. These feelings of belonging and rejection constitute the stranger. This chapter explores the stranger political and the stranger rhetorical, focusing on France’s political trifles and how it affected the reception towards the stranger—both foreign and local. It recalls the classic-pagan and the Judeo-Christian as cultures where the stranger emerged long before 1789. Works such as Euripedes’s The Bacchae and Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus play in part a vindication of prudent behaviour by hosts towards guests.

This chapter examines Dionysus in '69 (1970), De Palma's filmic record of a Greek tragedy, which bears thematic relations to the two comedies, Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970), that he shot before and after it. It asserts that the theme of voyeurism and a self-reflexive awareness of the camera provide strong links among the three films. The composition of Dionysus in '69 itself lies in two performances shot in June and July 1968, which were then melded into one film, of an avant-garde play based on Euripides's The Bacchae, staged by Richard Schechner's Performance Group in New York City. An experiment in “environmental theater,” the play involved breaking down barriers between intellect and instinct, as well as breaking through the fourth wall separating the audience from the actors.