Williams is also an acclaimed translator, notably of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and Euripides’ The Bacchae, as well as of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and the French poet Francis Ponge.
They were merely restating in a modern context the psychology of Dionysus set forth in the accepted and acceptable play The Bacchae by Euripides.
He played opposite Annabella Sciorra in MCC's production of Spain at the Lucille Lortel Theatre; Dionysus in The Bacchae 2.1; and Edgar in an award-winning production of King Lear.
In addition to imitating the Septuagint and Homer's Odyssey, MacDonald proposes that Mark's Gospel and Luke-Acts used the following literary models: Homer's Iliad, several Homeric Hymns, Euripides' Bacchae and Madness of Heracles, and dialogues by Plato and Xenophon about Socrates.
Arrowsmith is remembered for his translations of Petronius’s Satyricon (1959) and Aristophanes’ plays The Birds (1961) and The Clouds (1962), as well as Euripides’ Alcestis, Cyclops, Heracles, Orestes, Hecuba, and The Bacchae, as well as other classical and contemporary works.