Bacchae E-Book

Euripides

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 74

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. Bacchae was first performed in Athens in 405 BC. At the whim of Dionysos, a son is torn to pieces by his own mother during the famous women-only Bacchanalian ritual. The story of revenge by the half-man half-god on Pentheus, King of Thebes, and all his people.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

BACCHAE

byEuripides

translated and with an introduction byFrederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Further Reading

Key Dates

Characters

Bacchae

Glossary and Pronunciation Guide

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Euripides

Euripides was born either in 485 BC or 480 BC, and died in 406 BC. He was a wealthy man: his family owned property on the island of Salamis (where, legend has it, he used to work in a remote cave fitted out as a writing-room). His first play was produced when he was about 30, and he went on to write 92 plays altogether, of which nineteen survive. The size of the corpus that has come down to us, a dozen more than from either Aeschylus or Sophocles, is a tribute to Euripides’ popularity not so much in his own time as later, when the manuscripts were copied. For over 2000 years he was the best known, most admired and most influential of all Greek dramatists.

If Euripides’ surviving plays are good evidence, he was less interested in ‘verbal music’ than were either Aeschylus or Sophocles. His language is seldom ‘sublime’; lines justify themselves by their place in the dramatic logic, by what they contribute to the flow of ideas and confrontations. He proceeds not with the mellifluous majesty of an Aeschylus or the solemn moral grandeur of a Sophocles, but by a torrent of dialectic, by abrupt turns and clashes of character, by visual and conceptual coups de théâtre. He is outstanding at showing characters in states of emotional and psychological stress, and he manipulates each situation, each myth, to do so.

Euripides’ combination of intensity and philosophical insight can be disconcerting: his revisionist approach to the ancient myths and his sceptical attitudes both to the Olympian gods and to the political orthodoxies of Periclean Athens reflect the ‘advanced’ thinking of his time as well as, no doubt, personal insight. His high reputation came very largely after his death. In his lifetime his plays seldom won first prizes, at the height of his career he was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for impiety, and in his seventies, controversial and unregenerate to the last, he was forced to flee from ‘democratic’ Athens to monarchical Macedonia.

Bacchae: What Happens in the Play

Before the royal palace of Thebes, the god Dionysos appears. He explains how he was born miraculously in the city, but was rejected by the people. He has now returned, and intends to make all Thebes accept him, beginning with the women, whom he has filled with ecstasy and driven into the mountains. He disappears to join them there, on Mount Kithairon, and the Chorus enters, singing and dancing in his honour, telling key parts of his myth, and describing how his ecstatic worshippers, the Bacchae (‘bacchants’) or Maenads (‘ecstatic ones’), dance like foals frisking in his honour.

Two old men, the prophet Teiresias and Kadmos, former king of Thebes, enter dressed as Maenads. They are planning to go and join the dance, but are interrupted by King Pentheus. He is furious that the women have been hoodwinked by a ‘pretty boy’, a charlatan. He has arrested and imprisoned them, and is proposing to do the same to Dionysos. Teiresias tries to convince him that the ‘charlatan’ is God, and advises acceptance. But Pentheus sends his guards to find Dionysos. The Chorus sings of its devotion to the god and its outrage at the way Pentheus is treating him. Then Dionysos is brought in, bound. The guard-commander tells how the women have miraculously escaped from prison, and how Dionysos willingly accepted arrest, smiling and holding out his hands as if to welcome the binding-ropes. Left alone, Pentheus questions Dionysos, refuses to accept his assurance that he is (or knows) God, and sends him to prison.

The Chorus begins another dance of indignation and bewilderment. It is interrupted by Dionysos’ voice, calling from the prison, and by a bolt of lightning which sets the palace ablaze. Dionysos appears to his followers – and Pentheus runs out angrily after him. Before they can quarrel, a cowherd hurries in from Mount Kithairon. He tells of the women, high in the hills: peaceful, placid, then raging with God’s ecstasy till they hunt down and kill any animal in their path, and finally at peace again. Pentheus vows to punish them, and Dionysos suddenly changes character. Playing on the king’s desire to spy on the women at their secret ritual, he persuades him to disguise himself as a woman and hide in the trees where he can see but not be seen. Pentheus goes in to change clothes, and the Chorus sings of what ‘wisdom’ is, and of the punishment suffered by mortals who mistake its nature. Pentheus appears, dressed as a Bacchant, and Dionysos leads him, as if in a daze, away to Mount Kithairon. After a choral dance of anger against the ‘unbeliever’, an attendant stumbles in, shaking with terror. He tells how the God and the King came to the mountain, how Dionysos bent a fir-tree to the ground, put Pentheus in the high branches, then revealed him to the Bacchae as a climbing beast, a spy. They uprooted the tree, tore Pentheus to pieces and played catch with his limbs. Now they are coming in procession back to Thebes, led by Agave, Pentheus’ aged mother, with his head impaled on her thyrsos (sacred staff). The last part of the play (originally, mainly musical) begins with a chorus of joy at Pentheus’ punishment. Agave and the Bacchae enter, rejoicing at the ‘lion they danced to death’. But then Kadmos comes in, with servants bringing the remains of Pentheus’ body. He shocks Agave out of her trance, and shows her what she has in her hands, and what she has done. Dionysos appears on high, and announces that Thebes’ punishment is complete for rejecting him. Broken-hearted and bewildered (how could God do this?’), Agave and Kadmos stumble out to exile, and the play ends with the bleak choral reflection that God is not to be understood or challenged, that mortal hopes are vain and that all we can do, when the super natural enters our lives, is ‘expect the unexpected’.

Bacchae

Bacchae was first performed in 405 BC, a few months after Euripides’ death in exile at the Macedonian court. In the following year, 404 BC, the 27-year Peloponnesian War came at last to an end, Athens accepted humiliating peace-terms; in the reign of austerity and censorship imposed by the victorious Spartans, theatre productions dwindled almost to nothing. The great age of Athenian tragedy was over.

At first sight, Bacchae seems unlike any other of Euripides’ surviving plays. It avoids direct political, moral and ethical comment, of the kind common in, say, Women of Troy (savage about the effects of war), Medea (outspoken about the relationship between men and women) or Orestes (with its reflections on family duty and social obligation). It contains none of the awkward questions Euripides asked in other plays about religious belief, for example ‘If all we see around us is disaster and suffering, why should we think God cares for us?’ (Hecuba), or ‘What do we do if we think that the God we believe in is a tyrant and a criminal?’ (Ion). In fact it seems free of questions and comments altogether: the self-contained presentation of a simple dramatic situation, without diversions or irrelevances. God comes, reveals himself and punishes those who refuse to accept him.

As always with Euripides, however, simplicity of style and surface mask far greater complexity. The questions and comments in Bacchae are no less sharp for being latent. The cult which overwhelms the Thebans in the play may be religious, but Euripides’ picture of communal panic and bewilderment must also have had political resonance in the last, flailing months of the Peloponnesian War. The play’s tight focus on a single dilemma, a single tragedy, leaves a question unspoken but noisy in the air: ‘If this horror is the present, what will the future be and however will we cope with it?’ The play ends not with resolution of the conflict between Dionysos and Pentheus, but with Agave’s and Kadmos’ agonised realisation that despite everything they have believed and suffered until now, tomorrow is unpredictable, imminent and inevitable.

In a way quite different from Aeschylus or Sophocles (who pose ethical and philosophical questions in ways which imply clear answers), Euripides leaves the issues hanging, for each member of the audience to resolve in his or her own way. And in Bacchae