The Bacchae

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The Bacchae

Pentheus being torn apart by Agave and Ino, Attic red-figure vase.
Written by Euripides
Chorus Bacchae, female followers of Dionysus
Characters Dionysus
Teiresias
Cadmus
Pentheus
Servant
Messenger
Second Messenger
Agave
Date premiered 405 BCE
Setting Thebes
This box: view • talk • 

The Bacchae (Greek: Βάκχαι / Bakchai; also known as The Bacchantes) is an ancient Greek tragedy by the Athenian playwright Euripides. It premiered posthumously at the Theatre of Dionysus in 405 BCE as part of a tetralogy that also included Iphigeneia at Aulis, and which Euripides' son or nephew probably directed.1 It won first prize in the City Dionysia festival competition.

The tragedy is based on the mythological story of King Pentheus of Thebes and his mother Agavë, and their punishment by the god Dionysus (who is Pentheus' cousin) for refusing to worship him.

Contents

Background

The Dionysus in Euripides' tale is a young god, angry that his mortal family, the royal house of Cadmus, has denied him a place of honor as a deity. His mother, Semele, was a mistress of Zeus, and while pregnant, she was killed because she looked upon Zeus in his divine form,the lightning bolt. Most of Semele's family, however, including her sister Agave, refuse to believe that Dionysus is the son of Zeus, and the young god is spurned in his home. He has traveled throughout Asia and other foreign lands, gathering a cult of female worshippers (Bacchantes), and at the start of the play has returned to take revenge on the house of Cadmus, disguised as a blond stranger. He has driven the women of Thebes, including his aunts, into an ecstatic frenzy, sending them dancing and hunting on Mount Cithaeron, much to the horror of their families. Complicating matters, his cousin, the young king Pentheus, has declared a ban on the worship of Dionysus throughout Thebes.

Plot

Dionysus first comes on stage to tell the audience who he is and why he decided to come to Thebes. He explains the story of his birth, how his mother Semele had enamoured the god Zeus, who had come down from Mount Olympus to lie with her. She becomes pregnant with a divine son; however none of her family believe her, thinking the illicit pregnancy of the more usual sort. Hera, angry at her husband Zeus' betrayal, convinces Semele to ask Zeus to appear to her in his true form. Zeus appears to Semele as a lightning bolt and kills her instantly. At the moment of her death however, Hermes swoops down and saves the unborn Dionysus. To hide the baby from Hera, Zeus has the fetus sewn up in his thigh until the baby is grown. However, Semele's family—her sisters Agave, Autonoe, and Ino, and her father, Cadmus—still believe that Semele blasphemously lied about the identity of the baby's father and that she died as a result. Dionysus comes to Thebes to vindicate his mother Semele.

The old men Cadmus and Tiresias, though not under the same spell as the Theban women (who include Cadmus' daughters Ino, Autonoe and Agave, Pentheus' mother), have become enamored of the Bacchic rituals and are about to go out celebrating when Pentheus returns to the city and finds them dressed in festive garb. He scolds them harshly and orders his soldiers to arrest anyone else engaging in Dionysian worship.

The guards return with Dionysus himself, disguised as his priest and the leader of the Asian maenads. Pentheus questions him, still not believing that Dionysus is a god. However, his questions reveal that he is deeply interested in the Dionysiac rites, which the stranger refuses to reveal fully to him. This greatly angers Pentheus, who has Dionysus locked up. However, being a god, he is quickly able to break free and creates more havoc, razing the palace of Pentheus to the ground in a giant earthquake and fire. Word arrives via a herdsman that the Bacchae on Cithaeron are behaving especially strangely and performing incredible feats, putting snakes in their hair in reverie of their god, suckling wild wolves and gazelle, and making wine, milk, honey and water spring up from the ground. He tells that when they tried to capture the women, the women descended on a herd of cows, ripping them to shreds with their bare hands (Sparagmos). Those guards who attacked the women were unable to harm them with their weapons, while the women could defeat them with only sticks. Dionysus wishes to punish Pentheus for not worshipping him or paying him libations. He uses Pentheus' clear desire to see the ecstatic women to convince the king to dress as a female Maenad to avoid detection and go to the rites, as is shown in the dialogue:

Stranger: Ah! Would you like to see them in their gatherings upon the mountain?
Pentheus: Very much. Ay, and pay uncounted gold for the pleasure.
Stranger: Why have you conceived so strong a desire?
Pentheus: Though it would pain me to see them drunk with wine-
Stranger: Yet you would like to see them, pain and all.2

Dionysus dresses Pentheus as a woman and gives him a thyrsus and fawn skins, then leads him out of the house. Pentheus begins to see double, perceiving two Thebes and two bulls (Dionysus often took the form of a bull) leading him.

The god's vengeance soon turns from mere humiliation to murder. A messenger arrives at the palace to report that once they reached Cithaeron, Pentheus wanted to climb up an evergreen tree to get a better view of the Bacchants. The blonde stranger used his divine power to bend the tall tree and place the king at its highest branches. However, once he was safely at the top, Dionysus called out to his followers and showed the man sitting atop the tree. This, of course, drove the Bacchants wild, and they tore the trapped Pentheus down and ripped his body apart piece by piece.

After the messenger has relayed this news, Pentheus' mother, Agave, arrives carrying the head of her son which she herself had pulled off. In her possessed state she believed it was the head of a mountain lion; she proudly displays it to her father, eager to show off her successful hunt, and how brave she had been. She is confused when Cadmus does not delight in her trophy, his face contorting in horror. By that time, however, Dionysus' possession is beginning to wear off, and as Cadmus reels from the horror of his grandson's death, Agave slowly realizes what she has done. The family is destroyed, with Agave and her sisters sent into exile. Dionysus, in a final act of revenge, returns briefly to excoriate his family one more time for their impiety. Cadmus and his wife Harmonia are turned into snakes. Tiresias, the old, blind Theban prophet, is the only one not to suffer.

Modern interpretations

Binary divisions of the Self and the Other: In the Bacchae, Dionysus is the protagonist; furthermore, he embodies aspects of both, the Self( for example, part Greek god and Male) and the Other (of Asian descent and effeminate characteristics). When Petheus unknowingly talks of Dionysus, he describes him as ‘some Asian foreigner, masquerading as a priest…too womanish to be a proper man’. So he insults his ethnicity, appearance, manliness and even his higher godly status.

The Bacchae can be said to enact a clash between two opposing ethnic groups; Greek and Asian. Cadmus tries to dissuade Pentheus from his quest into the unknown, urging him to stray within the safe sanctuary that is home: ‘Dwell within the temple of our beliefs, not in the wilderness that lies beyond’. Pentheus is adamant on hunting the imposter, who is actually Dionysis in disguise, declaring: ‘He’ll soon regret the day he brought his filthy foreign practices to our city in the West’. He later interrogates Dionysus: ‘Where are you from?’; ‘Why then bring your practises to my home?’ These foreign practises are especially threatening as they stand to corrupt all the women folk, sending them into frenzied worship practises; Pentheus: ‘…this foreigner who dares infect our women’s minds and bodies and our beds’. Bacchae is an occasion when some women revolted against male authority and broke the bonds trying them to their clearly (narrowly) defined domestic sphere within a patriarchal society.

The Theatre as the Other: To be gazed upon by the mask of Dionysus is to cross the threshold between sanity and madness, between the real and unreal. When an actor put on his mask at the festival of Dionysus he marked an eruption into the heart of public life of a real of being totally alien to the everyday world of the city. In Bacchai, an actor must assume the mask of Dionysus himself; as the god himself is the protagonist. Both actors and audiences must put their fate with Dionysus and allow themselves to be taken into the imaginative world of ‘the other’ in theatrical illusion. When Dionysus goes against such accepted polarisations, he is questioning human perceptions of reality and what we see in the world; namely, a fundamentally empirical method is a weak tool, when compared to the unlimited illusion of the theatre. He subverts these binaries and turns hierarchy on its head –he allows women to question the supremacy of men, but then punishes them by sending them mad-he contradicts himself, as he himself is contradictory in his nature (he is symbolised by giant phalluses but his masculinity is compromised by his long hair, delicate beauty and decorative clothing; he is worshiped in the wild hillside but is central to an important and organised cult in the heart of the city; he blurs the division between comedy and tragedy).

Dramatic versions

Joe Orton's play The Erpingham Camp (television broadcast 27th June 1966; opened at the Royal Court Theatre on 6th June 1967) relocates The Bacchae to a British Butlin's-style holiday camp. An author's note at the beginning of the text of the play states that: "[n]o attempt must be made to reproduce the various locales in a naturalistic manner. A small, permanent set of Erpingham's office is set on a high level. The rest of the stage is an unlocalised area. Changes of scene are suggested by lighting and banners after the manner of the Royal Shakespeare Company's productions of Shakespeare's histories."3

In 1970 Brian de Palma filmed Richard Schechner's dramatic re-envisioning of the work, Dionysus in '69, in a converted garage.4

Wole Soyinka adapted the play as The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite with the British National Theatre in London in 1972, incorporating a second chorus of slaves to mirror the civil unrest in his native Nigeria.

Caryl Churchill and David Lan used the play as the basis of their 1986 dance-theatre hybrid A Mouthful of Birds.

Brad Mays directed his own adaptation of the play at the Complex in Los Angeles in 1997, where it broke all box office records and was nominated for three LA Weekly Theatre Awards5 : for Best Direction, Best Musical Score and Best Production Design. Because the production featured several scenes with levels of violence and nudity rare for even the most experimental of theatre pieces, it was widely discussed in print6, and even videotaped for the Lincoln Center's Billy Rose Collection in NYC7. The production was eventually fashioned into an independent feature film 8 which, interestingly, featured Will Shepherd9 of Richard Schechner's Dionysus in '69 in the role of Cadmus.

The Bacchae 2.1, a theatrical adaptation set in modern times, was written by Charles Mee and first performed in 1993.10

In 2007 David Greig wrote an adaptation of The Bacchae for the National Theatre of Scotland starring Alan Cumming as Dionysus, with ten soul-singing followers in place of the traditional greek chorus. A critically-praised run at New York's Lincoln Center Rose Theater followed the show's premiere in Scotland.11

Operatic versions

Harry Partch composed an opera based on The Bacchae titled Revelation in the Courthouse Park. It was first performed in 1960, and a recording was released in 1987.

Another opera based on The Bacchae, called The Bassarids, was composed in 1965 by Hans Werner Henze. The libretto was by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman.

Musical versions

Peter Mills created the musical "The Rockae" using the "The Bacchae" as its foundation. Dionysus, a glamorous rock star in every sense of the word, seeks revenge on those who denied him as a babe. The performance is complete with a swarm of groupie dancers dancing wildly to the electric guitar numbers.

Significant quotations

Dionysus: "It's a wise man's part to practise a smooth-tempered self-control."
Dionysus: "Your [Pentheus'] name points to calamity. It fits you well." (The name "Pentheus" derives from πένθος, pénthos, grief)
Messenger: "Dionysus' powers are manifold; he gave to men the vine to cure their sorrows."
Dionysus: "Can you, a mortal, measure your strength against a god?"

Dramatic Structure

In a play that follows a climatic plot construction, Dionysus the Protagonist, instigates the unfolding action by simultaneously emulating the plays author, costume designer, choreographer and artistic director. 12 Helen P. Foley wrote of the links between the importance of Dionysus as the central character and his affect on the plays structure, she writes: "the poet uses the ritual crisis to explore simultaneously god, man, society, and his own tragic art. In this protodrama Dionysus, the god of the theatre, stage-directs the play."13 At the start of the play, Dionysus gives us the exposition and from which we can highlight the plays central conflict; the invasion of Greece by an Asian religion.14

Critical Review

Up until the late nineteenth century The Bacchae's themes were considered far too gruesome to be studied and appreciated. It was Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy" in 1872 that reposed the question of Dionysus's relation with the theatre that elevated interest in The Bacchae. In the twentieth century performances of The Bacchae had become quite fashionable, particularly so in the opera due to the dramatic choruses found throughout The Bacchae's story.15 R.P Winnington-Ingrams review in 1948 praises the work of Euripides, he writes: "On its poetical and dramatic beauties he writes with charm and insight; on more complex themes he shows equal mastery."16

Translations

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Rehm (1992, 23).
  2. ^ Euripides. Ten Plays by Euripides. Trans. Moses Hadas and John Mclean. New York: Bantam Books, 1981, p.299
  3. ^ Orton, Joe. 1976. The Complete Plays. London: Methuen. p.278. ISBN 0413346102.
  4. ^ Dionysus in '69 at the Internet Movie Database
  5. ^ http://www.laweekly.com/
  6. ^ http://www.laweekly.com/2001-05-17/stage/grin-and-bare-it/
  7. ^ http://www.nypl.org/research/lpa/the/the.html
  8. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0154187/
  9. ^ http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0791892/
  10. ^ The Bacchae 2.1 on the web.
  11. ^ "A Greek God and His Groupies are Dressed to Kill", New York Times theatre review by Charles Isherwood, July 5, 2008
  12. ^ Teevan (2001, 4)
  13. ^ Scully (1987, 321)
  14. ^ Johnston (2001)
  15. ^ Morwood (2008, x-xi))
  16. ^ Norwood (1949, 317)

References

Plays by Euripides

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