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consequences that one could see in Vietnam crimes or the massacre committed by Charles Manson. In his study Tragedy and Philosophy Walter Kaufman says that the "inexorable one-sidedness of the two adversaries, Pentheus and Dionysus, contributes to the tragedy. The poetic force of The Bacchae carries the symbolic strength of an incredible conclusion: the reasonable fear of passion becomes lustful and a man, blind to the immense beauty of irrational experience, is destroyed by those who, relinquishing reason, revel in the blindness of their frenzy." This inner battle is even stronger in a modern man, believes Carl Gustav Jung when he talks about "the Apollonian and the Dionysian" as psychological types: "in a civilized man blocked urges are tremendously destructive and more dangerous than the urges of a primitive man who, to a certain degree, incessantly gives vent to his negative urges. We can consider The Bacchae as a classic illustration of this phenomenon. Agave and other Bacchae who tear to pieces her son, Pentheus, are not barbarians but hyper-civilized mockers of faith whom Dionysus punishes by making theirfrenzy beastly to the extreme. During the rehearsals director Holm consistently reminded actors that the first two-thirds of The Bacchae are a comedy and the play's last part a brutal tragedy (so much so that Aristotle declared Euripides "the poet of what is the most tragic"). The rationale for such interpretation is in Euripides's method. "The amusing parts exist precisely to make the tragedy even more poignant and horrifying," says Holm. There is no paradox in Holm's assertion. Othertragic dramatists also resorted to dramatic irony and comic situations and dialogues and, in several cases Aeschylus', Sophocles' and Euripides' tragedies do not have an unhappy ending. At the time when the tragedy was at its peak and was,

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