Bacchae

A new translation by Colin Teevan.

In his play Bacchae, Euripides chooses as his central figure the god who crosses the boundaries among god, man, and beast, between reality and imagination, and between art and madness. In so doing, he explores what in tragedy is able to reach beyond the social, ritual, and historical context from which tragedy itself rises. Charles Segal's reading of Euripides' Bacchae builds gradually from concrete details of cult, setting, and imagery to the work's implications for the nature of myth, language, and theater. This volume presents the argument that the Dionysiac poetics of the play characterize a world view and an art form that can admit logical contradictions and hold them in suspension.

Euripides' Bacchae, the last of the surviving Greek tragedies, was first performed in 405 BC in the annual competition for tragic drama, where it won first prize. It has remained one of the most frequently performed Greek tragedies ever since and one of t

The Bacchae is the last and greatest of Euripides' plays. Its theme of the cost of resisting the gods who reside in human nature itself is still of immediate interest to audiences and readers and has inspired modern interpretations. Professor Kirk has made a translation which is both accurate and readable. This he supports with an analytic commentary and a substantial introductory essay which provide the Greek-less reader with essential background information and offer interpretation of a kind usually found only in Greek editions. This is a translation for students of Greek tragedy, particularly in courses on classics in translations or classical civilisation. It will also be useful for students of drama and of English and other literatures.

The purpose of this book is to investigate what it was Euripides intended to convey to the theatre-going public of his day when he wrote his most exciting and most gruesome play, the Bacchae. The meanings which are to be attached to the action of a play are woven by an audience, both during and after the performance, into a single dramatic experience, labelled in this book as 'audience response'. After some introductory chapters dealing with the history of the interpretation of the Bacchae and with the theory of audience response, the main part of the book is devoted to a detailed analysis of the action of the play (chapters 4 and 5), and to a study of Dionysus in his various apects in Athenian life and in his appearances in earlier literature and on the tragic stage. The discussion of the choruses concentrates on the choruses' repeated utterances about cleverness and wisdom, which form the core of the Dionysian propaganda of the play. The most immediate results of this new interpretation of the Bacchae are that the widely-accepted view of Pentheus as a dark puritan, a man possessed by the Dionysian qualities of his divine opponent, proves to be untenable, and that that which in the past has been rightly called the overriding theme of the play - the god's epiphany - also contains the poet's most serious and ironical discussion of divinity and of man's treatment of it. The problems of the Greek text are given full discussion, mainly in the nots and appendices. In many cases new solutions are proposed; some new problems are however added.

This new translation of The Bacchae—that strange blend of Aeschylean grandeur and Euripidean finesse—is an attempt to reproduce for the American stage the play as it most probably was when new and unmutilated in 406 B.C. The achievement of this aim involves a restoration of the "great lacuna" at the climax and the discovery of several primary stage effects very likely intended by Euripides. These effects and controversial questions of the composition and stylistics are discussed in the notes and the accompanying essay.

Collected here for the first time in the series are three major plays by Euripides: Bacchae, translated by Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal, a powerful examination of the horror and beauty of Dionysiac ecstasy; Herakles, translated by Tom Sleigh and Christian Wolff, a violent dramatization of the madness and exile of one of the most celebrated mythical figures; and The Phoenician Women, translated by Peter Burian and Brian Swamm, a disturbing interpretation of the fate of the House of Laios following the tragic fall of Oedipus. These three tragedies were originally available as single volumes. This volume retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions and adds a single combined glossary and Greek line numbers.