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Episode 7: Bacchae
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In this episode, we talk about Euripides’ Bacchae. Dr. Lucy Jackson (Durham University) joins Naomi to explore the theatricality of this play about Dionysus, the questions it raises about gender, and how it has been reimagined in modern productions. Professor Monica Youn (University of California, Irvine) gives a reading of her poem “Study of Two Figures, Agave/Pentheus” from the collection From From (2023) and talks with Naomi about how this work traces constructions of Asianness, ancient and modern.
Guests:
Lucy Jackson is an associate professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She has published widely on ancient Greek theater and choral culture, especially tragedy, and is the author of The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE: Presence and Representation (2019). Lucy is also an expert on modern and early modern receptions of Greek drama, and has worked closely with the National Theatre in London on bringing their various stagings of ancient plays to a wide range of audiences.
Monica Youn is a multi-award-winning poet, lawyer, and professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to publishing poems in many magazines and journals, she has authored four poetry collections: Barter (2003), Ignatz (2010), Blackacre (2016), and From From (2023), which includes “A Study of Two Figures (Agave/Pentheus).” From From was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and Best Poetry Book of 2023. It was also deemed Best Book of 2023 by Time, NPR, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Electric Literature.
Watch Lucy Jackson discussing stagings of Euripides’ Bacchae with Erin Lee, Head of Archive at the National Theatre, London:
Recommended Translations:
Carson, A. 2017. Euripides: Bakkhai. New York: New Directions.
Grene, D. and R. Lattimore. 2013. Euripides V: The Bacchae, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Cyclops, Rhesus. 3rd edition, ed. M. Griffith and G. W. Most. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lefkowitz, M. and J. Romm, ed. 2016. The Greek Plays. New York: Penguin Random House. (Bacchae translation by E. Wilson.)
Some Further Reading:
Fischer-Lichte, E. 2014. Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Foley, H. 1980. “The Masque of Dionysus.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 110:107–133.
Henrichs, A. 1978. “Greek Maenadism from Olympia to Messalina.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 82: 121-60.
Mills, S. 2006. Euripides: Bacchae. London: Duckworth.
Segal, C. P. 1997. Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ruffell, I. 2022. “Bacchae—“An Excessively High Price to Pay for Being Reluctant to Emerge from the Closet”? In S. Olsen and M. Telò, eds, Queer Euripides: Re-Readings in Greek Tragedy, 229–48. London: Bloomsbury.
Youn, M. 2023. From From. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
Zeitlin, F. 1995. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapter 8: “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama” (originally published 1985).
Zeitlin, F. 2023. The Retrospective Muse: Pathways through Ancient Greek Literature and Culture. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Chapter 12: “Radical Theater: Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69”(originally published 2004).