Greek theatre - scholarship

“hold up the serious poetry itself in criticism and ridicule … by selection and exaggeration”

Dover (Tragic parody in comedy No.1)

“combining high-flown tragic diction and allusions to well-known situations with vulgarity or trivial predicaments”

Dover (Tragic parody in comedy No.2)

“Aristophanes is using gods as comic characters”

Macdowell (laughing at the god No.1)

“this does not necessarily mean that he and the audience do not believe in their real existence … the gods were assumed to be sensible enough to take a joke”

Macdowell (laughing at the god No.2)

“comedy was the right time and place for making fun of everyone”

Macdowell (Comedy)

“contrast between them makes comic sense, but … without value as an index of how either Aristophanes or his contemporaries really regarded them”

Kovacs (Aeschylus and Euripides)

“norms of ordinary life to be suspended”

Cartledge (Inversion in comedy)

“since Athenian society imposed a high degree of segregation … and strict standard of decorum on language”

Dover (Athenian society in comparison to comedy)

“sexuality of comedy as a channel for his own ‘excess’ sexuality”

Dover (vulgarity of comedy)

“saffron-coloured robe and buskins (high boots) were generally women’s rather than men’s attire …. ridiculous contrast with the exceedingly virile lion-skin and club”

Macdowell (Dionysus’ comic outfit)

“spectacle of a moving boat”

Dover (charon’s boat)

“if we feel that Dionysus’ treatment of suffering humans was anything by sport, we should remember that he may well be wearing a smiling mask”

Norwood (Dionysus’ enjoyment in Bacchae)

“the god who throughout the play promises joy will at the end bring only suffering and horror”

Garvie (Dionysus being a striking paradox)

“neither completely good not completely bad, he has enough of the positive in him to arouse our sympathy when he is torn to pieces”

Hannah Roisman (Pentheus’ morality)

“his death by dismemberment, then, is not merely a poetic justice done to one who resists the god of fusion, but also a reflection of a psychological and social reality for the society as a whole”

Segal (Pentheus’ death)

“while being the secular and central power … he becomes … the outsider, a man whose acts and ideas are alien, … an effect exacerbated by his tyrannical behaviour”

Chris Carey (Pentheus’ tyranny)

“their ecstatic joy is chilling, while heightening the pathos”

Rosie Wyles "(Chorus’ response to Pentheus’ death)

“she is degraded by what she carries since such treatment of a human being is non-Greek in its barbarism”

Norwood (Agave)

“Agave’s recognition scene is one of the most painful and harrowing scenes in Greek tragedy. No parent can watch it and not sympathise”

Hannah Roisman (Agave’s recognition scene)

“nothing intrinsically Dionysiac about Greek tragedy”

Taplin

Dionysus was not the only god associated with dancing, masks, mysteries or ecstatic possession

Eastling

“choral dancing in Ancient Greek culture always constitutes a form of ritual performance”

Henrichs

“to attend the theatre was a religious duty”

Higgins

“slaves definitely could attend the Dionysian (…not many did)”

Goldhill

“the audience is … in the position of the gods”

Garvie

“war was to a Greek man what marriage was to a Greek woman”

Cartledge

“manner in which aristocrats treat their subordinates is a … mean by which their character is ‘tested’ in tragedy”

Edith hall

“tragedy is much easier to write than comedy, in which everything has to be invented fresh”

Burian

“Tiresias is physically blind while Oedipus … knows nothing”

Garvie (blindness)

“it is not so much his crimes as his discovery of them that leads to his fall”

Garvie

“Oedipus is his own destroyer”

Fagles

“Bacchae is one of Euripides’ most disturbing plays”

Stuttard

“Dionysus is a god in human form; Pentheus is a human but aspires to be like a god in human form”

Sophie Mills

“primary function of the play … is not literary criticism but political action”

Bettendorf