As revenge for a personal slight, Dionysus plans to spread his cult among the people of Thebes. His adversary King Pentheus, fearing the spreading disorder of the cult, imprisons Dionysus in order to suppress his influence. This misguided attempt to thwart the will of a god leads to catastrophe for Pentheus and his entire family.
The bacchants referred to Dionysus as “the god of letting go,” reminding us that if we do not respect the wildness that is part and parcel of being human, we may fall prey to the tyranny of excessive order or the frenzy of collective passion. Today the play resonates with our current social and political situation. We must learn to curb our hubris and our fear of the irrational, the unknown and the foreign.
Translator’s Note:
My translation of The Bacchae is exceptional in that it is intended for live performance. This emphasis means both that the translation is comprehensible on a first hearing, and that is preserves, formally, the incantatory quality of the poetry in the original. I translated the dialogue and narrative sections into the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and set the choral sections apart with different rhythms and with rhyme–to make clear that these sections are song and not conversational speech. The resulting translations is a musical experience that modulates, as the original does, between spoken and sung lines of verse. Euripides was, famously, a poetic virtuoso, and have done all I can to recreate the sonic richness of his original version in English.
