Derek Mahon: The Bacchae

Length/Form Two acts, mostly in heroic couplets; rhyme seems to signal Dionysiac power and possession. The Chorus has shorter lines, sometimes rhyming alternately. Pentheus speech initially lacks rhyme but Dionysus draws him into the call and answer of rhyming couplets in their exchanges. Messanger speeches are in blank verse.

Allusion to Classical figure Dionysus, Zeus, Semele, Hera, Pentheus, Cadmus, Tiresias, Herdsman, Soldiers, Agave, Bacchae, Chorus of Asian Women, etc.

Allusion to classical place Thebes, Cithaeron, Delphi, Athens

Relationship to Classical text Mahon stays close to the sequence of Euripides’ Bacchae and incorporates Greek vocabulary (such as thyrsus, Bacchantes, hubris), compound adjectives (e.g. ‘life-giving’ and ‘pride-infected’, p.23) and English archaisms (‘what grand/ gift can the gods bestow/ more than the conquering hand/ over the fallen foe’). He also preserves the formal conventions of the tragedy, such as the prologue, choral interludes, exchanges in single-line stichomythia, etc. However, much of the dialogue contains contemporary colloquialisms and anachronistic references (‘rock ‘n’ roll’, ‘hanging’s too good for him’, ‘old sport’, etc).

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts Mahon’s play is a reworking of Euripides’ Bacchae.

Classical/post-Classical intertexts The script is prefaced by quotations from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), E. R. Dodds’ The Greek and the Irrational (1951) and Louis MacNeice’s The Poetry of W. B Yeats (1941). Following Dodd’s suggestion that the Maenad is a ‘still observable human type’, Mahon alludes to contemporary manifestations of Maenadism, such as drug culture (p.22, ‘take us […] where ecstacy isn’t banned’) and the ‘pipe and drum’ of unionist marches, road blocks, and bombings (e.g. p.11, Semele’s house is ‘blown to bits’:, . S. Perris, ‘Dionysus the Leprechaun: Genre, Identity, and Parody in Derek Mahon's Bacchae.’ p.68, Arion, Third Series 16.1 (2008), p.53-82.). Cadmus’and Teiresius’ speech is more sedate in its nods to Irish vernacular (Céilí, ‘let’s be going, so,’ etc., p.15-16). The chorus borrow from a 19^th century Shaker hymn, describing Dionysus three times as ‘lord of the dance’ (p.14-15), whereas ‘It's still the same old story / A fight for love and glory’ (p.62), is a quotation from ‘As Time Goes By’, the theme tune to the film Casablanca (1942). In 1991, the year after Seamus Heaney's play premiered, Mahon boasted that his forthcoming Bacchae would ‘knock The Cure at Troy into a cocked hat’. (See W. Scammell, ‘Derek Mahon Interviewed,’ Poetry Review 81.2 (1991), p.6. Heaney’s The Cure at Troy was published in 1990 by Faber and Faber. Irish reworkings of Greek Tragedies, by the likes of Mahon and Heaney have often received politicized readings, though as many scholars have criticized this line of approach: see L. Hardwick, Translating Words, Translating Cultures (London: Duckworth, 2000), p.79-95, for an overview.)

Further Comment  See also Mahon’s poem ‘At the gate theatre’ (CP, p.241), which emphasises the suggestions of comedy in Euripidean tragedy and also quotes from Mahon’s Bacchae.