ABSTRACT
As Wilson Knight (1962) pointed out, the patron god of the performing arts, Dionysus, has always been an enemy of orderly government: ‘…he is always threatening it, both with lusts, indecencies and indignities, and with crimes, ghosts and death. There is nothing respectable or civilised about him: he is the enemy of such qualities.’ This ancient truth should remind us that the most benign of governments will sometimes even now try to suppress dramas, books and paintings which are Dionysian in spirit: that is, works which seem to them to be morally irresponsible, subversive in thought or an incitement to revolution. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, for example, was thought by the British to be too dangerous for performance in English until the 1930s. Sometimes even music may be suppressed by a government because it seems to be linked with an enemy of the state; thus the music of Wagner (said to be Hitler’s favourite composer) is still actively discouraged today in Israel.
