OVERTHROWING THE STATUS QUO: INTERPRETING WOLE SOYINKA`S THE BACCHAE OF EURIPIDES FROM A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE

Certain critics of contemporary Nigerian drama represented by Abiola Irele, for example, seem to place the plays of Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel laureate on literature, squarely within the confines of ritual aesthetics, in terms of dramatic taxonomy. Although ritual, especially Ogunism, exerts a huge influence and, no doubt, constitutes a major master code for interpreting a play like The Bacchae of Euripides, this paper argues that the religious elements in this transnational play merely serve as a camouflage for the exploration of class struggle. Class consciousness, though expressed through religious symbolism, is given much force and weight in the play from its beginning to the end that it seems to be the principal theme of this play. In the text, the masses knowledge of their position as not given, constrains them to remain steadfast and pushful until they overthrow the status quo through mass revolution, thereby securing unfettered freedom for themselves. In the light of the foregoing, this paper will attempt to interpret The Bacchae from Marxist perspective in order to show that not all Soyinka`s plays lack solid class ideology.