The Bacchae by Euripides - O gods, I see the greatest grief there is.

Reading Euripides chronologically, it would be fair to think that however ingenious and inventive Euripides was, he did not write a play quite at the level of Agamemnon or Oedipus the King, at least until his brief exile in Macedon, where he wrote The Bacchae just before his death.  It’s a deep one, and approaches the unbearable in a way few plays do.  It is the King Lear of Euripides.

I find it curious that given the plays were written for the Dionysian Festival, The Bacchae is the only play about Dionysus to survive.  We know there were others – Aeschylus wrote a trilogy about young king Pentheus, torn to pieces by his god-crazed mother – but I take Euripides as writing, in a farewell gesture, about the source of things.  The source of religion; the source of drama.

Dionysus, god of wine and madness, after a tour of Asia has returned to his birthplace of Thebes (the first words of Robert Bagg’s amusing translation are “I’m back!”), to the very spot where his mother was incinerated by Hera’s lightning while pregnant with Dionysus.  The play is in effect a duel between the teenage god and his teenage cousin Pentheus, King of Thebes, both plausibly psychologically teenage.  One kind of unreason against another.  The more powerful wins, and Pentheus is torn to pieces by his mother and aunts in their religious frenzy.  The old men of the city, who humiliate themselves before Dionysus on purely rational, Pascal’s wager-like grounds, escape with their heads.

The extraordinary recognition scene, where Agave gradually realizes not just that she has savagely murdered her own son but is holding his head, is what I was thinking of when I mentioned King Lear.

AGAVE: What is it?  What am I holding in my hands?

CADMUS: Look more closely still.  Study it carefully.

AGAVE: No! O gods, I see the greatest grief there is.

CADMUS:  Does it look like a lion now?  (212, tr. Arrowsmith, as are all other quotations)

I beg you, someone, rewrite that ending so Cordelia does not die!

The Bacchae is set in the deep past, among the origin myths, and contains a complex presentation of the human religious drive, both our attraction to religious explanations of the world around us and our resistance to them.  But I also wonder if the play is a commentary on drama itself.  As Aristotle would ask decades later – please join me in reading Aristotle’s Poetics, with a post at the end of October – why do we sit through these horrible plays?  What, exactly, are we celebrating, Euripides is perhaps asking, at a Dionysian Festival?  What do these tragedies do?

It is the costumes that caught my attention, the ones within the play.  To worship Dionysus, you have to dress like a worshipper:

TIRESIAS:            He will know what errand

brings me, that agreement, age with age, we made

to deck our wands, to dress in skins of fawn

and crown our heads with ivy.  (p. 161)

Tiresias believes in Dionysus because he believes in everything, while Cadmus believes in nothing, but both old men join in the performance of worship.  Meanwhile the chorus of Asian Bacchantes are the mature worshippers, there beautiful songs and dances (I’m guessing about the dances) more integral to the play than ever before.  Why does the chorus sing and dance, after all – because they – we, the audience – are worshipping Dionysus or per Nietzsche allowing our Dionysian side to at least peak out for a few hours.

The culmination is the cross-dressing scene, when Pentheus disguises himself as a woman in order to spy on their frenzied orgies – such a teenager – and what begins as a costume becomes a performance:

DIONYSUS:                             But look:

one of your curls has come loose from under the snood

where I tucked it.

PENTHEUS:       It must have worked loose

when I was dancing for joy and shaking my head.

DIONYSUS:  Then let me be your maid and tuck it back.

Hold still.  (196)

Pentheus and Dionysus; The Bacchae has the strangest pair of protagonists.  But almost everything in the play is strange and disturbing, an exemplar of the sublime in literature.

I picked a marble relief of a Bacchante in part so I could get a good look at her fennel stalk, the thyrsus, that is so important to the play.  The relief is a Roman copy of a Greek original contemporary with The Bacchae.  It is on display at the Met.

Next week is our last Euripides play, although not our farewell to Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, performed in the same set as The Bacchae.  It effectively wraps up an ongoing Euripidean project.