Some Aspects of Seeing in Euripides‘ Bacchae

Abstract

Absent from Thebes at the first outbreak of Bacchic excitement, King Pentheus returns in haste, deeply troubled by reports of revelry on Mount Cithaeron and accounts of the captivating stranger who has led the Theban women astray (Ba. 212–38). When he meets the stranger he asks him about the appearance of the god (469,477) and the features of the rites (471) and complains that he cannot see the divinity who, the stranger assures him, is right at hand (500,502). Pentheus manifests great eagerness to see the Bacchantes with his own eyes, and it is by playing on this desire that the stranger lures him to Cithaeron and his death (810ff.)

Freedom, Form, and Formlessness: Euripides’Bacchaeand Plato'sRepublic

“…Teiresias reacts to Pentheus' insistence on a world of ordered forms where men are men and not women, where mortals are mortal and not gods: Pentheus may have been without his senses before, but now he is completely mad (memênas, 359). The 5 Recent readings of the Bacchae have addressed questions of perception, subjectivity, theatricality, and meta-theatricality (Barrett 1998;Gregory 1985). Thumiger, focusing on the blurring of the human/animal distinction and attending to the "lack of a fixed line separating the literal and the figural," speaks to issues I highlight (2006,208).…”

“…See also Flaumenhaft (1994, 57-84) who, attending to the practice and experience of play watching, focuses on the permeable boundaries between audience and performer in the experience of play watching and the fluidity that that relation introduces to other aspects of the tragedy. Gregory (1985) reads Pentheus' resistance to fluidity and theatrical illusions as a contrast between divine and secular orientations. This reading, however, avoids the critical question of form.…”

“…Attitudes toward him have fluctuated. Earlier scholarship praised his concern for Thebes and the moral life of its women, understanding him as a good ruler and not as the “typical tragedy-tyrant” he appears to be to many (Dodds 1944, xl, and references in, e.g., Gregory 1985, 24). Others (LaRue 1968) focus on his prurience, and recent scholarship asks whether Pentheus’ discomfort with the androgynous Dionysus is a sign of psychosexual dysfunction (Sale 1972; Segal 1982, 205).…”

“… 5 Recent readings of the Bacchae have addressed questions of perception, subjectivity, theatricality, and meta-theatricality (Barrett 1998; Gregory 1985). Thumiger, focusing on the blurring of the human/animal distinction and attending to the “lack of a fixed line separating the literal and the figural,” speaks to issues I highlight (2006, 208).…”