The Bacchae

euripides c.k. williams martha c. nussbaum

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams presents this fluent and accessible version of the Athenian playwright Euripides's great tragedy.

Based on the Greek myth of the god Dionysus's punishment of King Pentheus and his mother Agave, Williams' The Bacchae of Euripides is a unique interpretation of one of the most celebrated plays in the history of dramatic theater.

With an Introduction by Martha Nussbaum, award-winning author of The Fragility of Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy

Genres classicsplaysdramamythologyfictiontheatrepoetryschoolliteraturetragedy

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,-0405

Places

thebes,

This edition

Format: 144 pages, Paperback
Published: August 23, 1990 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374522063
ASIN: 0374522065
Language: English

Characters More characters

Dionysus (mythology)

Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. He is a god of epiphany, "the god that comes," and his "foreignness" as an arriving outsider-god may be inherent and essential to his cults. ...
Pentheus

In Greek mythology, Pentheus (Greek: Πενθεύς) was a king of Thebes. His father was Echion, the wisest of the Spartes. His mother was Agave, the daughter of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, and the goddess Harmonia. His sister was Epeiros. He resisted agains...
Cadmus (mythology)

Cadmus or Kadmos (Ancient Greek: Κάδμος), in Greek mythology, was a Phoenician prince, the son of king Agenor and queen Telephassa of Tyre and the brother of Phoenix, Cilix and Europa. He was originally sent by his royal parents to seek out and escort his...
Tiresias

In Greek mythology, Tiresias (/taɪˈriːsiəs/; Greek: Τειρεσίας, Teiresias) was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. He was the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo...
Agave

...

About the author

euripides

Euripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of William Shakespeare's Othello, Jean Racine's Phèdre, of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.