Word: dionysiacs
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...profound presentation. That madness may be better than sanity--who are we, who have never known true madness, to judge--goes back as far as you want to take it into Western thought. What Equus does is make it into good theater. Shaffer's play is propaganda for the Dionysiac element in human nature, with a rhetorical impact that outweighs its criticism of psychiatric assumptions. Shaffer doesn't take the extreme position of many modern playwrights, that madness is better than sanity; he only goes so far as to say that madness might be better than sanity, in some cases...
...very small) never goes beyond the verbal stage. Sometimes, particularly in the opening scene of the bonfire with which the town welcomes the spring, there is a hint of menace, but these hints are always resolved into a joke. Fellini shows us only one side of the dionysiac, and only avoids getting sappy as a Christmas card by making his all-encompassing benevolence bittersweet. The director's old persona as the Hitchcock or Resnais or Welles who set out to terrify or bewilder or impress his audience is replaced by kindly old Father Christmas figures like Fellini and Jean Renoir...
...have to appear before the incorruptible judge, Dionysus,"-the Greek god of ecstasy, intoxication and madness, the deus ex machina of all the highs. Nietzsche even imagined the scene: "How cadaverous and ghostly the 'sanity' " of all the obsolescent rationalists will appear as "the intense throng of Dionysiac revelers sweeps past them." That day, in all its mixed exhilaration and despair, seems near...
Elegiac Worst. With the onset of World War II, "the smouldering heart, the seamless brow" of the youthful Day-Lewis began a slow, often painful search for order-a quest that some critics fear may have put his "less Dionysiac" verse at the Establishment's doorstep. Yet the best of his lyrical and narrative poems display a trim, controlled power...
...tenors of Princeton and Harvard traded high B-flats and harmonized with a police siren last night in the annual Harvard-Princeton Football Concert. For Cambridge this is a musical ritual matched only by the semi-annual Dionysiac rites of the Gilbert and Sullivan players...