CHAPTER THREE

THE AUDIENCE RESPONSE

From the history of the interpretation of the Bacchae, outlined in Chapter 2, it is plain that widely differing opinions are held about the role of Pentheus. On the other hand it has earlier been suggested (p. 14) that an approach to the Bacchae which concentrates on the role of Pentheus of­ fers clear advantages-at least initially-over one which puts Dionysus as the central point, because Dionysus is a god, with all the resulting complications (What does Dionysus the god signify to Euripides and to his public? What significance has his appearance on the tragic stage?); and because the god appears in the action in such a way that the other characters only see in him a stranger from Lydia. But the public know that the stranger is the god Dionysus, and measure events by the yard­ stick of this predominant fact. The Bacchae is, therefore, even more than Oedipus Rex, a play in which a single sustained motif of tragic irony per­ vades practically the whole action, and this applies to all characters in the play with the exception of the god himself. This is the fundamental device used by the poet in the plot of the Bacchae. Diller in his observations (cf. n. 34) made two interesting contributions to the study of the Bacchae; one, on the place of the Bacchae in Euripides' later work, will be dealt with in Chapter 5, 55 the other reviews the psy­ chological approach to the role of Pentheus. Diller objected to Winnington-lngram's theory that Pentheus' opposition to the god was caused by his own Dionysiac qualities: sexual passions and lust for power. Schwinge (op. cit. 380 and his n. 77) supports Diller in this objec­ tion. Indeed Winnington-Ingram's ideas can lead to the assumption that the motives for the action of dramatic characters are inherent in their psychological make-up and not in the complications of the plot. Disagree­ ment with this assumption need not lead-as Diller had already stated-to an acceptance of Ziircher's proposal that Euripides created no consistent characters, but made them all subordinate to the dramatic ef­ fectiveness of the moment. 56

55 Diller suggests in this that Pcnthcus loses the battle of croq,fot. He produces evidence to show that the Bacchae and the Ion have a remarkable correspondence in structure (p. 488): 'frcilich ist dcr Ion das untragischc Gcgcnstiick zu den Bakchen'. Sec p. 75ff., and note 187. 56 W. Zurcher, Die Darstellung des Menschen im Drama des Euripides, Basel 1947. THE AUDIENCE RESPONSE 21

I believe that one should not rely exclusively here on Aristotle, who ascribes greater importance to the plot than to the characters (Poetics 1450a 20 ff.). The greater importance of the plot is given by the nature of the literary work itself, which is a stage play intended for performance. After all, there is no reason to suppose that the ancient spectator of a dramatic performance followed it in any other way than we do; that is in a continuous response to the action. This response is forward looking: expectations are continually being awakened and disappointed in the audience, and this includes expectations about the characters. The spectator's activity is ruled by the dramatic situation of the moment. An exception must perhaps be made for the psycho-drama, in so far as this has the object of revealing the motives of a given character by means of the dramatic action. We then end up, however, with a dramatic case history; even Ibsen (who is sometimes compared with Euripides) wrote plays which cannot be confined within such a narrow compass. In Pentheus, as with most characters in most literary dramas, we are dealing with an imaginary person, who is thought of by the poet not in terms of his personality, but in terms of the action within which he must operate. In doing this the poet naturally imposes on himself all sorts of restrictions; he takes into account the function of the person, the recognizability of such a person, and so on, but still the character of the person exists only by virtue of the action in which he appears. Diller was not wrong in raising objections 'gegen eine Psychologie, die mit Hilfe von Momente, die jenseits des dramatischen Spiels liegen, zu motivieren versucht' (p. 477). When therefore we ask ourselves why a character in a play acts in such or such a way, we can best look for a reliable answer in the action, and at the moment that this action is being performed; methods based on assembling from the text random statements by the characters leave much to be desired. The action at the moment that it is performed has been written by the poet with his eye on the audience; what we must study is the audience's probable response to the action. It is there that the intention of the poet lies; there too perhaps lies an answer to questions about a character or about his motives for action. This picture of the situation is really too simple. From the previous chapter it is abundantly clear how far opinions diverge when people describe Euripides' intentions with the Bacchae. This could not happen if the audience's response and the author's intention corresponded closely with each other; but one meets as great a divergence of appraisal in the audience's response to a dramatic work, as one does in the response of readers to a literary work; a modern illustration of this is, as we have seen, the response of the audience to Pasolini's Teorema. On the other hand we must stick to the assumption that the intention of the dramatic