Read this if you…
- want a fun, fucked up plot where a bunch of partying ladies go nuts
- loved Medea and want more Euripides
Skip this if you…
- haven't read Medea to see if you like Euripides
The 
Take
Fun little play about Dionysus brainwashing everyone and having the mother of the kings and a bunch of other ladies tear him to pieces, all because they don’t acknowledge the god of partying. Gotta love he got pentheus to dress up as a lady
Depicted in Art
Two maenads in a frenzy seize Pentheus by the limbs and tear him apart; a third figure recoils. Interior shows a single dancing maenad.
Douris, -480
Pentheus, half-fallen, is set upon by maenads on a rocky slope: his mother and aunt rip at his arms while another swings a rock and others wield thyrsi like clubs.
70
Pentheus, disguised as a woman in Bacchic dress, flees in terror across a wooded landscape while the maenads close in.
Charles Gleyre
Pentheus is pulled to the ground in an open landscape as his mother and sisters grapple at his limbs to tear him apart.
Antonio Tempesta, 1606
Recommended Editions
Robin Robertson
Free Press · 2008
Robertson's Bacchae is propulsive verse from a poet who understands that Dionysus is supposed to be terrifying, not symbolic. The messenger speeches read like horror, which is the point.
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Notable Quotes
There be many shapes of mystery. And many things God makes to be, past hope or fear. And the end men looked for cometh not, and a path is there where no man thought.
Screen & Stage
looseThe Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite
Stage · 1973
Wole Soyinka
looseDionysus in '69
Film · 1970
Brian De Palma
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Ingmar Bergman, Swedish filmmaker and theater director, 1918-2007: Bergman initiated and directed Backanterna, Börtz's operatic Bacchae, a late-career stage-and-television obsession.
- Donna Tartt, Pulitzer-winning novelist, b. 1963: "Anybody wanting to know more about the ideas behind the book should read 'Bacchae' by Euripides (I like the Richmond Lattimore translation)."
- Philip Glass, American composer, 1937-: Glass composed the original choral score for Akalaitis's 2009 Public Theater Bacchae.
- Brian De Palma, American film director, 1940-: De Palma filmed Richard Schechner's Dionysus in 69, preserving the radical environmental-theater Bacchae that made Euripides feel dangerous again.
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