Greek Theatre scholarship

• Dionysus creates a sort of laboratory in which he experiments on humans - Edith Hall
• Dionysus in the Bacchae is the most frightening picture of godhead in Greek tragedy, which we go with because he is so charming - Edith Hall
• Agave‘s recognition scene is one of the most painful and harrowing scenes in Greek tragedy - Roisman
• Neither completely good or completely bad, he has enough of the positive in him to arouse our sympathy when he is torn to shreds - Roisman
• Pentheus is both repulsed by sex and unconsciously desiring it, Dionysus releases in him exactly what Pentheus is trying to suppress - Roisman
• Fascinating and vexing game of cat and mouse - Seidensticker
• Agave‘s carrying of her sons head is one of the most horrifying scenes in Greek tragedy - Seidensticker
• Pentheus is manipulated into the mistake of believing he is dealing with an equal, so watching the whole experience becomes highly uncomfortable - Mills
• The Bacchae was considered so violent that is was seldom performed before the 1960s - Mills
• Pentheus sees Dionysus as a fake and his religion as merely an excuse for women to enjoy sex and wine - Mills
• The chorus’s ecstatic joy at Pentheus’s death is chilling and heightens pathos - Wyles
• The earthquake scene turns the palace from a symbol of royal authority to a symbol of Dionysus’s power - Wyles
• Pentheus’s dress is a representation of Dionysus’s full control - Wyles
• In Frogs, Dionysus has trespassed too far on the human side to qualify any longer for godhead - Cartledge
• Frogs is generally reckoned to be the finest of Aristophanes surviving plays - Cartledge
• Society could not have functioned without some kind of theatre - Cartledge
• Frogs could have been repeated because of the difficulty of writing commissioning and producing new plays during the upheavals of 405-403 - Cartledge
• One could regard Dionysus in Frogs as wish-fulfilment, because when the Greeks were not playing, Dionysus was a force to be reckoned with - Cartledge
• The choice of Eleusinian mysteries as the chorus would reassure the audience that the religious proprieties were not being entirely neglected, even in the topsy turvy carnivalesque world of the Frogs - Cartledge
• Xanthius is deliberately drawn as bold, resourceful, and uppity, in order to bring out the paradoxical humour of his master - Cartledge
• Comedy conveyed political ideas to the masses - Swallow
• Newly freed slaves in the audience of Frogs - Edith Hall
• Comedy kept politicians honest - Michael Scott
• Aristophanes stood for tradition against innovation, whether in politics, religion or art - Dover
• Frogs is unique in providing us with the spectacle of a moving vehicle - Dover
• The chorus of Frogs are a parallel of Athenian citizens who can observe but not intervene in political events - Goldhill
• The core of the ancient comic experience was the chorus and the core of the comic chorus was the parabasis - Marshall
• Comedy includes so much of the visual performance that its hard to recover what it would have been like - Marshall
• Much of the comic effect must be visual for it to be funny - MacDowell
• Aristophanes uses gods as comic characters - MacDowell
• Xanthius has greater strength of character than any earlier slave in theatre - MacDowell
• Much of Oedipus’s appeal for modern readers may derive from its resemblance to a detective novel - Garvie
• Both fate and Oedipus’s character are responsible for his fall - Garvie
• Oedipus the King perfectly illustrates Aristotle’s theory of the best kind of tragedy, someone of high reputation who falls into misfortune, not because he is wicked, but because of some mistake - Garvie
• Oedipus‘s excitement contrasts with Jocasta‘s horror as he gets closer to the truth - Garvie
• Oedipus is his own destroyer - Fagles
• The ridicule of the prophet and the project reflects a change in 5th century Athens when the proponents of reason began to challenge spiritual power - Higgins
• Oedipus is a proud and daring man - Edith Hall
• Perhaps the most famous anagnorisis in tragedy, Oedipus’s recognition of himself is the result of the extorted testimony of a slave - Edith Hall
• It is almost certain the Sophocles wrote Oedipus the King in the midst of the plague in Athens - Dimock