Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans, it is of course so much truer
of the dramatists of classical European antiquity. Soyinka’s adaptation
of Euripides’The Bacchaeis shaped by this factor of a differentiation of
the sources of ritual and its idioms as between literary and non-literary,
primordial matrices.
The very fact thatThe Bacchae of Euripidesis an adapted play would
seem to place the weight of relative priority on literary derivation rather
than primordial matrices in Soyinka’s text, especially with regard to the
obstacles encountered in the observances of the rites of Dionysus and
his Bacchic cult. Pentheus, like Pilkings inDeath and the King’s Horseman,
wishes to stop what he considers “primitive,” barbaric rites. This much
Soyinka takes over from the Euripides text. It could also be argued that
Teiresias’ bitter “anti-ritual” protests as he is brutally whipped as a sub-
stitute for the usual lower-class ritual scapegoat, is also a derivation from
Euripides, albeit an indirect literary derivation since in Euripides’ play,
Teiresias merely enunciates, but does not make himself subject to the
mortifications of ritual frenzy. But there are important changes made by
Soyinka in his adaptation which are not of a literary derivation. One
involves a significant change in the characterization of Dionysus, his
protagonist being far less vengeful than the Dionysus of Euripides’ play.
The other change entails the transubstantiation of the blood dripping
from the severed head of Pentheus into wine. Both of these changes are
recognizable appropriations derived not from any antecedent literary
influences, but from the ritual traditions associated with Ogun and his
cults. The effect of this is to give the ritual sacrifice at the heart of the
play, as extremely gruesome as it is, a more crediblenecessitarianlogic
than its dim, symbolic outlines in the text of the Euripides original. This
is perhaps why this play marks the most convincing dramatization of
Soyinka’s theorization of ritual as a performative matrix for change and
renewal. The final paragraph of Soyinka’s Introduction to his adapta-
tion of Euripides states this point with forcefulness and clarity; it stands
as a sharp contrast with the densely elliptical and esoteric tropes and
metaphors with which he formulates his theoretical apologia for ritual
in “The Fourth Stage”:
I seeThe Bacchae, finally, as a prodigious, barbaric banquet, an insightful man-
ifestation of the universal need of man to match himself against Nature. The
more than hinted at cannibalism corresponds to the periodic needs of humans
to swill, gorge and copulate on a scale as huge as Nature’s on her monstrous
cycle of regeneration. The ritual, sublimated or expressive, is both social ther-
apy and reaffirmation of group solidarity, a hankering back to the origins and