The Bacchae, by Euripides
This talk looks at one of the most frightening and unsettling tragedies to survive from classical Athens. It turns on the consequences of the arrival in Thebes of the new god Dionysus, uncanny and androgynous deity of the vine and ecstasy, personifcation of nature’s indifference to all human categories. It is a play about nature, the divine, theatre, gender, and madness, and the purpose of this talk is to unpack some of its many meanings and its relevance for today’s world.
Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. John Davie and Richard Rutherford
Bio
Dr Mark Williams is Fellow and Tutor in English at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. He is a specialist in the medieval languages and literatures of Wales and Ireland, and the author of Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton, 2016), and The Celtic Myths that Shaped the Way We Think (Thames & Hudson, 2021). He is in training as a Jungian psychoanalyst
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