Utopia and Uneven Space in Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides

Abstract

The Bacchae is remarkable for its antinomies of time and space. Euripides’ play stages a conflict between established regimes—the house of Cadmus, the pantheon of Zeus—and incipient ones, doubly registered in the establishment of Dionysiac rites in Thebes and the entry of Dionysus himself as a new god into the canon of religious worship. These structures and characters become indices for certain forms of social struggle; The Bacchae interrelates them when these struggles come to a point of rupture. The play supplies spatial corollaries for its temporal poles: while the drama is set in Thebes, the chorus of Theban maenads on Cithaeron, Pentheus’s plan to lead an attack against them, his departure up the mountainside led by the god in disguise, and the two messenger speeches that report the Bacchic rites all vividly conjure images and narratives of the mountain. These antinomies of space and time pair off in analogic fashion: we may say that Thebes is to Cithaeron as Pentheus is to Dionysus, or as what is relates to what is to come. What is at stake in adapting The Bacchae at a given conjuncture1 and what elements of the parent text are important in the act of adaptation? While for The Bacchae, the points of contact between Euripides’ play and the social upheavals of the past half century may seem apparent enough—and here we might think of the invocations of mass movements,