Pentheus and the Spectator in Euripides' Bacchae

In an article examining the various reports from Cithaeron in Euripides’ Bacchae, Richard Buxton argues against reading the narratives of Euripidean messengers as impartial or transparent accounts of the events they describe. In concluding his careful analysis of the messengers in this play he claims that “these narrators too stand firmly within the drama” (1991, 46).¹ From articulating what distinguishes the narratives of these figures, Buxton proceeds to including the messengers with the other dramatis personae in a single category of those “within the drama.” The narratives of the messengers, like everything else said onstage, Buxton argues, are imbued with their own distinctive emotion and rhetoric: “in no two cases is the relationship between content and narrator identical” (1991, 40). His argument directs itself against a tendency among critics silently to grant a distinct and privileged status to the narratives of tragic messengers.²

Buxton’s analysis complements that of de Jong (1991), who argues against the practice of regarding the messenger’s narrative as a privileged form of discourse. Buxton in fact rejects the use of the term “messenger” in the singular as injuriously general and neglectful of “the subtle divergences between the reports” (1991, 46). But laudable as it is for the attention it pays to rhetorical variation in the narratives it studies, Buxton’s formulation simplifies the status of the messengers in Euripides’ play. Rather than being “firmly within the drama,” the messengers occupy a place on the stage very different from that of the other dramatis personae. A reading founded on metatheatrical studies of the play shows that an important part of Bacchae’s self–conscious interest is directed at the status of the messengers, particularly with respect to how they define and are defined by Pentheus. I argue here that the play produces messengers substantially “outside” the drama—virtual “spectators–in–the–text”³—and in so doing expands our notion of what is possible on the tragic stage while clarifying the status of the spectator within the play’s metatheater.

The metatheatricality of the play has found extensive critical exposition in recent years. The studies of Segal (1982, 215–71) and Foley (1985, 205–58)⁴ remain central to any discussion of the play as meta-theater, while that of Bierl (1991, 186–217) pushes the fundamental insights of Segal and Foley close to their limits. All of these studies depart in principle from the fact that Dionysos is both the god of theater and the focus of the play: with this as a foundation, the text amply suggests that we read it as a prolonged reflection on theater itself.

Both Segal and Foley astutely discuss the play–within–the–play, Dionysos as director and Pentheus as unwitting protagonist. Segal remarks: “As an actor among actors, Dionysus stands on the same level as the other characters in the orchestra. But he is also director, dressing and instructing his ‘actors’ for the role they will have to play” (1982, 225). Pentheus’ pilgrimage to Mount Cithaeron to watch the Maenads and the sparagmos that forms the climax of the play become under Dionysos’ direction a performance akin to tragedy in the theater of Dionysos at Athens. Indeed, the play–within–the–play coincides largely with the play we call Bacchae.

As Segal and Foley have shown, Pentheus’ status as would–be spectator is central to the play’s metatheatricality: much of the elaborate “drama” organized by Dionysos turns on Pentheus’ desire to watch the Maenads in the mountains while remaining unseen himself. He, like the audience in the theater, wants to be a (829). And like the spectator in the theater, he is tempted by the offer Dionysos makes to see the “performance” on the mountain. In fact, the persistent thematic importance of vision underlies much of the metatheater of the play: the prospect of seeing the Bacchants marks a turning point for Pentheus. Dionysos asks him:

(811)

Do you want to see them sitting together in the mountains?

And if Dionysos’ taunt,

(829)

You are no longer eager to be the spectator of Maenads,

suggests the parallel with...