Wole Soyinka
formation of guilds and phratries. Man reaffirms his indebtedness to earth,
dedicates himself to the demands of continuity and invokes the energies of pro-
ductivity. Reabsorbed within the communal psyche he provokes the resources
of Nature; he is in turn replenished for the cyclic drain in his fragile individual
potency. (TBE, x–xi)
After the terrible sacrificial price exacted not only from Pentheus and his
mother Agave, but from the whole house of Cadmus, a narrowly “sociol-
ogistic” and literal-minded critic might deem it absurd for Soyinka to wax
lyrical in this passage about ritual: “both as therapy and affirmation of
group solidarity, a hankering back to the origins and formation of guilds
and phrateries.” But such critical response could be made only on the
basis of ignoring the paradox of ritual. For it is true that, in its religious,
cultural and institutional contexts, ritual also binds groups together for
the enhancement of the values of cooperation, solidarity and renewal,
even if this is a consequence of the death of the sacrificial “carrier” or
scapegoat. This paradoxical face of ritual is extensively dramatized in
The Bacchae of Euripides. Soyinka in fact goes out of his way to amplifythis
dimension of ritual beyond what there is of it in the Euripides text, as
this exchange between Kadmos and Teiresias indicates:
:... only fools trifle with divinity. People will say, Aren’t you
ashamed? At your age, dancing, wreathing your head with ivy? Have you
caught it?...
: I am not ashamed. Damn them, did the god declare that only the
young or women must dance? They mean to kill us off before our time.
: He has broken the barrier of age, the barrier of sex or slave and
master. It is the will of Dionysus that no one be excluded from his worship.
(TBE,)
It is consistent with the paradox of ritual that until Pentheus’ secretive and
“impious” invasion of the rites of the Bacchantes, their frenzy and ecstasy
had been expressed mostly in edenic, utopian forms. Thus, Soyinka’s
reading of Euripides’ play as a “prodigious, barbaric banquet” which
seeks to match nature’s elemental force in both its terrifying forms and its
benevolent, life-sustaining expressions is the closest we get in his dramas
to an altogether positive resolution of the “ritual problematic.”
ThatThe Bacchae of Euripidesrepeats many of the lapses ofA Danceis
best conveyed by the fact that Soyinka’s adaptation is much longer than
the Euripides text, some of his expansion of scenes or subplots working
to stall the action of the play needlessly. It is of course true that most of
the changes made by Soyinka in his adaptation are intended to make the
link between Dionysianism and social revolution more explicit and more