Aristotle to the Modern Stage
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Aristotle’s Poetics, a fourth-century BC treatise on tragedy, cites Sophocles’ Oedipus the King more often than any other play. Seneca made a Latin tragedy on the same story in the first century AD. French and English dramatists reworked it between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was acted in Greek and in translation in the nineteenth. In the twentieth century it was taken up in psychoanalytic writing, opera, drama and film.
The play’s reception is documented in several kinds of source. There are the ancient critical text and the Latin adaptation, the printed plays of the early modern period, reports of performances, and Freud’s account in The Interpretation of Dreams.
Aristotle’s Poetics on the play
The Poetics names the play in chapters 11, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 24. In chapter 11 it is the example of a reversal (peripeteia): the man who comes to cheer Oedipus and free him from anxiety about his mother reveals his parentage and changes the whole situation. In the play the Corinthian messenger learns of Oedipus’s fear of Merope and tells him that Polybus was not his father. Aristotle adds that a discovery (anagnōrisis) is most effective when it coincides with a reversal, and cites the Oedipus again. In chapter 16 the discovery in the play is the best kind, because it arises from the incidents themselves and needs no external tokens.
Chapter 13 describes the best tragic plot as the fall from good fortune to bad of a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, who falls through some flaw (hamartia, in Fyfe’s rendering “flaw”) and not through villainy. Oedipus is named among such men of high station. The play presents him as the man the priest calls first of mortals, and the Chorus laments his fall in the fourth stasimon and again in the closing lines. In chapter 14 Aristotle says that a person who merely hears the story of Oedipus shudders and feels pity, so that the effect does not depend on spectacle. The play reports the exposure of the child, the killing of Laïus and the death of Iocasta in narrative. Chapter 14 also lists Oedipus among those who act in ignorance and discover the relationship afterwards, and ranks such acts below the case where the discovery comes in time to prevent the deed.
In chapter 15 Aristotle says that anything inexplicable must lie outside the tragedy, and gives Sophocles’ Oedipus as an example. Chapter 24 names it as Oedipus’s not knowing how Laïus died. In the play Oedipus knows of Laïus only by hearsay, asks where and how he died, learns from Creon that one man escaped and spoke of robbers, and asks whether any search was made. Iocasta, his wife for many years, tells him the oracle given to Laïus for the first time in the course of the action.
Chapter 6 defines tragedy as effecting, through pity and fear, relief (katharsis) of such emotions; Fyfe renders the term “relief”. Other translators use “purgation” or “purification”, and its meaning remains disputed.
Seneca’s Oedipus
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (died AD 65), the Roman Stoic philosopher and statesman, wrote a Latin Oedipus of about 1,060 lines, shorter than the 1,530 lines of the Greek play. Seneca’s play keeps the main sequence of Sophocles’ plot. Creon reports the oracle, and Laïus is said to have been killed at a place where three roads meet, in Phocis. Oedipus quarrels with Creon and accuses him of conspiring with the seer. A Corinthian old man announces the death of Polybus, and Oedipus’s pierced ankles establish his identity. The Theban herdsman is reluctant to speak and is compelled. In both plays Oedipus blinds himself and Iocasta dies.
The changes are considerable. Seneca’s Oedipus states the oracle to himself in the opening speech, whereas in Sophocles he tells Iocasta of it in the second episode. Teiresias does not name the murderer at once, as he does at OT 362 and 449–460. He and his daughter Manto read the signs of a sacrifice. Creon then narrates a necromantic rite in a grove in which the ghost of Laïus accuses Oedipus. Iocasta is present in the first scene, urging endurance. After the blinding, which Seneca’s Oedipus performs with his fingers, she confronts him and stabs herself in the womb on the stage. In Sophocles she rushes from the stage in the third episode, and a messenger reports her hanging and the use of her brooches to blind Oedipus. Seneca’s Oedipus goes out into voluntary exile, taking the pestilence with him. In Sophocles Creon defers to Apollo about banishment.
The choral songs also differ. Seneca’s second song is a hymn to Bacchus that makes no reference to the action, a point F. J. Miller notes in his scene-by-scene comparison. The third song uses the story of Icarus as a warning against rising too high.
French and English versions and nineteenth-century performances
Three plays on the subject held the European stage from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. All three are by well-known writers, all add an underplot of secondary characters, and the herdsman is named Phorbas in each, following Seneca. Voltaire defended the underplot in his letters on his own Œdipe, arguing that the subject would not fill a modern five-act tragedy, and that the actors would not accept a play without love. Dryden’s preface to his own version regards it as a convention, and suggests that the Greek method might be the more natural.
On the question of the blinded king on stage, the versions differ. Corneille and Voltaire report the blinding, and Dryden shows it.
Two performances of 1881, at Harvard and in Paris, are recorded by witnesses, above all in Henry Norman’s account of the Harvard production, which also notes the new French production at the Théâtre Français.
The French dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) wrote Œdipe at the urging of his patron, the superintendent Nicolas Fouquet, to whom it is dedicated, after the failure of Pertharite. It was first performed in January 1659. The play adds the love of Theseus for Dircé, a daughter of Laïus. Teiresias does not appear, and the shade of Laïus, called up by him, is reported by a lady-in-waiting, Nérine. In a reported scene the herdsman stabs himself, and Iocasta seizes his dagger and kills herself with it. When Oedipus blinds himself the plague ends.
The poet John Dryden (1631–1700) and the dramatist Nathaniel Lee (c. 1653–1692) wrote Oedipus together; it was first performed in 1678 and printed in 1679. How the writing was divided between the two poets is uncertain. The underplot concerns Eurydicè, a daughter of Laïus, and Adrastus, king of Argos, and Creon is a scheming villain. As in Seneca, the ghost of Laïus and not Teiresias denounces Oedipus, and Dryden brings the ghost onto the stage. In the last act Creon stabs Eurydicè, Adrastus kills Creon and is killed by Creon’s guards, Iocasta kills herself and her children, and Oedipus throws himself from a window. Dryden’s preface says: “Sophocles is admirable everywhere; and therefore we have followed him as close as we possibly could.”
The French writer Voltaire (1694–1778) wrote Œdipe as a young man, and it was first staged in Paris in 1718. It was played forty-five times in succession in 1718. The underplot concerns Philoctetes, once betrothed to Iocasta, who returns to Thebes and is accused of the murder of Laïus. He drops out of the action after the third act, in which Teiresias denounces Oedipus. Voltaire’s fourth-act scene between Oedipus and Iocasta is modelled on the Greek, but Oedipus recalls a portent in a temple in place of the taunt at the feast. The blinding is reported by the High Priest, and Iocasta stabs herself on the stage. In a letter to the Jesuit Porée, Voltaire says he spoiled his piece to please the Parisian actors, who would not hear of an Oedipus without love.
In May 1881 members of Harvard University acted the play in Greek at Sanders Theatre, with music by John Knowles Paine. Henry Norman’s An Account of the Harvard Greek Play (Boston, 1882) records that the blinded Oedipus entered “his pale face marred by bloody stains.” Norman himself acted Creon. Norman reports that about six thousand people saw it and that they “listened with bated breath, and separated in silence.”
In autumn 1881 the play was revived at the Théâtre Français, the house of the Comédie-Française in Paris, in a French translation, with the actor Jean Mounet-Sully (1841–1916) as Oedipus. The translation was Jules Lacroix’s, first played there in 1858.
Freud and the “Oedipus complex”
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the Viennese neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, first mentions Oedipus in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess of 15 October 1897. He develops the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, published in November 1899 and dated 1900), in chapter V.
In A. A. Brill’s translation (1913), Freud summarises the legend and the action of the play, which he describes as resembling a psychoanalysis in its gradual and delayed revelation. He rejects the view that the play’s effect rests on the opposition between the will of the gods and human resistance. He argues instead that it moves modern audiences because the story realises a wish of childhood, the child’s first sexual impulse toward the mother and hatred of the father, and that Oedipus is “the realised wish of our childhood.” He cites Iocasta’s remark that many men have dreamed of union with their mothers as an unmistakable reference in the text to this dream material. On his account the dream of intercourse with the mother is the key to the tragedy, together with the dream of the father’s death.
Freud used the term “Oedipus complex” (Ödipuskomplex) from about 1910, and it became a central concept of psychoanalytic theory. It is contested. The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), questioned its universality. The classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant, in “Oedipus without the Complex” (1967), argued that the play’s concerns are not those the psychoanalytic reading assigns to it.
The modern stage and screen
Twentieth-century versions often depart from Sophocles’ structure. Four are well documented.
The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) wrote Oedipus Rex as an opera-oratorio in two acts. The text is by Jean Cocteau after Sophocles, translated into Latin by Jean Daniélou, with a narrator speaking in the language of the audience. It was first given in concert in Paris on 30 May 1927 and staged at the Vienna State Opera on 23 February 1928.
The French writer Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) wrote La Machine infernale (“The Infernal Machine”) in four acts. It was first performed in Paris in April 1934. One act dramatises the encounter with the Sphinx, which the Greek play mentions only in retrospect.
The poet Ted Hughes made an English adaptation of Seneca’s Oedipus, staged by the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1968, directed by Peter Hall, with John Gielgud as Oedipus and Irene Worth as Iocasta.
The Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) made Edipo re, a film based on the play, with Franco Citti as Oedipus and Silvana Mangano as Iocasta. It has a prologue and epilogue set in modern Italy.
Books
The Interpretation of Dreams — trans. Joyce Crick (1999)
- For: General readers
- Form: Translation with introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson
Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues (1985)
- For: Scholars
- Form: Monograph
Seneca’s Oedipus — trans. Ted Hughes (adaptation) (1969)
- For: General readers
- Form: Verse adaptation for the stage
The Gods Are Not to Blame (1971)
- For: General readers
- Form: Play
Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914 (2005)
- For: Scholars
- Form: Monograph