in advance the answer to the riddle he must solve. Despite his initial bravado, Oedipus is a helpless coward in her hands, but he solves the riddle. He shows no gratitude but hurries off. After Anubis and the Sphinx discuss the fate that awaits him, he returns, seeking the body of the Sphinx as proof of his triumph, before going to Thebes to claim his reward.

Act 3, “The Wedding Night,” again begins on a stifling, stormy night. The bridal bed is the bed of Jocasta and Laius, the cradle is beside it, and the room is blood-red. Oedipus and Jocasta, in their heavy ceremonial robes, are exhausted and move as if drugged. Tiresias comes to warn Oedipus of danger, but Oedipus thinks that the high priest is in league with Creon against him and fails totally to penetrate his meaning. During the night, he dreams of his encounter with the Sphinx. Jocasta’s soothing response to his distress is quasi-maternal; this and many other hints of his real identity are placed before them, but they are ignored or explained away. A drunkard sings a satirical song about the difference in age between Jocasta and Oedipus, and while he is chased away by the young soldier with whom Jocasta had flirted in the first act, Oedipus sleeps with his head against the cradle, gently rocked by Jocasta.

Act 4, the shortest, is titled “Oedipus the King.” Seventeen years have passed; Oedipus and Jocasta have two sons and two daughters. The prophecy has been fulfilled, and the consequences emerge. The action speeds up appreciably as the “infernal machine” completes its process. A plague has hit Thebes. A messenger from Corinth announces the death of Polybus but also reveals that Oedipus was not the natural son of Polybus and Merope. Oedipus determines to discover the truth, despite the warnings of Creon and Tiresias, who have known for a long time but have kept their knowledge secret. Jocasta, and then Oedipus, are brought to realize Oedipus’s identity. Jocasta hangs herself with her scarf; Oedipus puts out his eyes with her brooch. As Creon begins to take over the reins of power, the ghost of Jocasta—Oedipus’s mother rather than his wife—fusing with the person of their daughter Antigone, leads away the blind Oedipus, who accepts the blind Tiresias’s stick and thus at last acknowledges the old man’s integrity.

Jean Cocteau in The Infernal Machine parades his genius for combining elements from different genres, by unifying the bawdy hilarity of bedroom farce and the solemnity of classical Greek tragedy. To this he adds burlesque (not only Oedipus’s mock-heroic triumph over the Sphinx, when the powerless youth is a craven coward and shows no generosity in victory, but also the affectionate parody of the ghost scenes in the first act of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, pr. c. 1600-1601), drawing-room comedy (Jocasta’s flirtation with the soldier, Oedipus’s outrageous misapprehension of Tiresias’s motives), comedy of morals (the soldiers and their preoccupations, the garrulous mother), deft touches of characterization (the impatient Creon, straining to take the reins of power), and especially the striking irony of visual devices (the metaphor of the blood-red bedroom, the cradle, Jocasta’s maternal response to the sleeping Oedipus as she tiptoes about the room so as not to wake him, the scarf that so often nearly strangles her, the brooch). Another aspect is the bathing of the entire action in lurid violet light from mercury lamps, a device achieved in the first performance and often re-created in modern performances. In addition, the unseen Voice is to some extent a modern-day realization of the classical Greek chorus, summarizing, pointing out the moral, and above all emphasizing the theatrical locus of the action.

All of this, together with the many verbal prefigurations of what is to come, constitutes what Cocteau regarded as “the poetry of the theater,” by which he meant the process of making apparent the theater’s very specificity as theater. This concept was something Cocteau emphatically contrasted to the mere employment of poetry in a play, a method left over from before World War I and one he condemned as jaded and inappropriate to the world of the 1930’s. For him, playwrights were wrong to use the theater as a vehicle for what was poetic rather than dramatic. Cocteau believed that the visible (both static and active) was the essential part of the spectator’s experience of theater—not simply as a decorative addendum but as a living part of the drama. Thus, for example, stage properties such as the scarf, the brooch, the bed, and the cradle (even the stairs) seem to take on a life of their own and are invested with sinister significance; at the end of act 3, Jocasta’s mirror comes to be identified with the audience itself, which knows the hideous immoral act she has committed. Indeed, Cocteau is never satisfied with a verbal account when visible action can be presented. Just as the audience witnesses Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx, so too, unlike Sophocles, who permits himself little more than a coy reference to the crime of incest, Cocteau takes the audience right into the bedchamber and almost confronts the spectator with the very act, at once challenging prudish responses and repudiating Freudian explanations, which might seek to foreground the purely symbolic aspect of the crime.