"Certainly the Oedipus Rex is a play about the blindness of man and the desperate insecurity of the human condition: in a sense every man must grope in the dark as Oedipus gropes, not knowing who he is or what he has to suffer; we all live in a world of appearance which hides from us who-knows-what dreadful reality. But surely the Oedipus Rex is also a play about human greatness. Oedipus is great, not in virtue of a great worldly position—for his worldly position is an illusion which will vanish like a dream—but in virtue of his inner strength: strength to pursue the truth at whatever personal cost, and strength to accept and endure it when found. ‘This horror is mine,’ he cries, ‘and none but I is strong enough to bear it’ (1414). Oedipus is great because he accepts the responsibility for all his acts, including those which are objectively most horrible, though subjectively innocent.
To me Oedipus personally is a kind of symbol of the human intelligence which cannot rest until it has solved all the riddles—even the last riddle, to which the answer is that human happiness is built on an illusion.” (E.R. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the “Oedipus Rex”’, Greece and Rome, Cambridge University Press, 1966.)
“Beyond the questions of time, change, and the multiplicity and fluidity of identity, Oedipus’ tragedy also asks whether human life is trapped in a pattern of its own or others’ making or is all random, as Jocasta says. He asks, in other words, whether the sources of such suffering lie in an overstructured or an understructured universe, absolute necessity or absolute chance. That question can have no ultimate answer. But to confront the alternatives with such total and open risk is truly to encounter the demonic Sphinx and therewith to leave behind the safe, defined spaces of house and city and cross the dangerous boundaries between man, beast and God.” (Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, 248).
“It is not the action of the gods and their oracles which matter so much but rather, as Knox points out, how Oedipus thinks and feels about the nature of his pollution, and how he acts upon it….the main event is not the fulfillment of the prophecy, but the discovery by Oedipus of his own identity.” (Taboo in the Oedipus Theme, Thalia Phillies Howe, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association)
Oedipus Rex has been the poster child of Greek tragedy for much of its 2500-odd year existence. As a result of this, it carries with it nearly two and a half millennia of scholarship and criticism, with the shadows of Aristotle, Freud and many others looming large over the script. It has been a psychosexual drama and a harbinger of political unrest, a condemnation of and paean to human nature, a murder mystery and a thinly-veiled analogue for Athenian intrigue.
It is all of these. It is none of these. And what we at Court Theatre have made of it is ours and ours alone.
Onward and upward!
-Emma
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