Chapter 11 - Performance and Performability

Summary

The Bacchae is a particularly fitting work with which to end my study of Greek tragedy. Not only is it one of the latest extant plays – Euripides’ final masterpiece – but also the dense texture of image and theme in this extraordinary drama recalls so many of the ideas I have explored in the previous chapters. It is a text concerned with a man and a city and relations with the divine (embodied in the disguised Dionysus), and the work has often been read as a fundamentally religious statement, either in terms of a defence of Dionysus (justified divine vengeance); or an attack on the malicious element of destruction and disorder in Dionysiac or similar cult attitudes; or in terms of a recognition and demonstration of the necessary place of the irrational in man.¹ As Foley has recently written, ‘the text undeniably raises questions about the nature of divinity and reflects the precariousness of social and political life in late fifth-century Athens’.²