SOURCE: “The Theban Plays: Illusion into Reality,” in Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Role Playing in Sophocles, The University of North Carolina Press, 1998, pp. 67-99.

[In the following excerpt, Ringer analyzes the different levels of illusion Sophocles uses in his Theban plays and discusses the audience's involvement in these illusions.]

All of Sophocles' tragedies engage the spectator in the fundamental metatheatrical problem of appearance versus reality. The dichotomy of appearance and essence is one of the favorite subjects of serious drama. By its very nature, drama deals in illusion, in the creative tension of one person or object standing in for or representing something else. As one of the masters of dramatic irony, Sophocles exhibits the keenest appreciation of the often invisible gulf that separates deeds from words and perception from reality. It is natural that someone so attuned to these fissures in experience would want to explore thoroughly the boundaries of his aesthetic medium. This exploration often calls attention to the irony of a character's situation in the story as well as the irony of the theatrical situation itself, the flickering “in and out” of illusion that is repeatedly created and destroyed in the course of a performance.

The so-called Theban Plays, Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, and Oedipus at Colonus, were not viewed by Sophocles as a deliberate cycle or trilogy. Oedipus at Colonus may be securely dated around 406, at the very end of the poet's long life; the other two plays came from earlier in Sophocles' career. There is evidence that Antigone dates from around 442, and Oedipus Tyrannus may have appeared between 429 and 425.¹ While Sophocles was not the only tragedian to return to a particular myth at different stages of his career, the story of Oedipus' family obviously held a special fascination for him, drawing the enormous concentration of his powers in these three plays. In varying degrees, Sophocles' three most famous tragedies represent drama about drama.

ANTIGONE

All three Theban Plays use the illusion-versus-reality motif as a major component of their thematics. Antigone, the earliest of the three tragedies, is built on two contrasting visions of reality: the brutal, corporal world of the literalist Creon and the invisible world of the dead, which Antigone seeks to honor. One critic observes that during the course of the play, “Death will finally reveal the true apolis [cityless one] and the true hypsipolis [person held in high esteem by the city] and separate the illusion from the reality.”² These contrasting visions of reality are embodied by two characters who strive for dominance as playwrights-within-the-play.

Sophocles was elected as a general in 441/40. One of the ancient hypotheses of Antigone claims that Sophocles won this post due to the popularity of this play. If true, this would place Antigone close to 442. Even if the anonymous author of the hypothesis is incorrect, it seems plausible that such a detail would not have been recorded unless it were at least chronologically possible. As a growing imperial power, Athens would have found particular resonance in a tragedy dealing with conflicts between state authority and private or local traditions and beliefs. Few surviving tragedies suggest the notion of the poet as [didáskalos] or “teacher of the polis” as clearly as does Antigone. The verb derived from [didáskalos] serves literally as the play's last word … (“The old are taught wisdom,” 1353). The tragedy serves as an object lesson in the dangers of tyrannical power—the kind of power that has come to the untested Creon and the expanding Athenian Empire.

Antigone is one of the few Sophoclean heroines who unequivocally sustains the weight of Cedric Whitman's vision of [areté]. Her self-image never suffers the kind of compromises that either threaten, injure, or overtake characters like Ajax or Electra. With Antigone, word and deed are never separate. Creon, on the other hand, offers a fine example of just such a fragmentation. The play ruthlessly exposes the dichotomy of Creon's noble-sounding speeches and sentiments and the hollowness that lies beneath them, a hollowness comparable with that of an egocentric actor.

It does not minimize Antigone's radiant moral purpose that the brunt of the dialogue and stage time is given to the character of Creon. Antigone, during the course of its action, strips away the illusion of Creon's integrity as a ruler, while affirming the real integrity of the heroine. The perception of his true identity as a petty, empty figure grows and develops throughout the play. In Creon's first appearance, his “ship of state” speech (162-210) is an impressive piece of self-representation. There is evidence that this speech was regarded in antiquity as a model of statesmanship. Demosthenes' great rival, Aeschines, had been an actor before turning to oratory; and one of his more notable roles had been Creon in Antigone. In order to bait his opponent about his deficiencies in citizenship, Demosthenes ordered that the “ship of state” speech be read over to Aeschines to remind him of the duties of a true statesman. Demosthenes' tactic would lack point unless Creon's speech were regarded by the average fourth-century audience as an idealistic statement of principle. In ridiculing the former actor, Demosthenes refers to him as “Creon-Aeschines” and berates him for not “repeating [the speech] over to himself to guide him as an ambassador.” Demosthenes might even have seen a deeper similarity between Sophocles' tyrant and “Creon-Aeschines”: both the dramatic character and the ex-actor have a fine patriotic speech in their “repertory” that only serves to illustrate their inner hollowness as politicians and as men.³

Sophocles' Creon provides his audience with the necessary criteria to appreciate how far he falls from his own standard for the ideal ruler and citizen. The play's central development takes this exemplary speech of Creon's as a starting point, then steadily reveals his actual character through his ensuing actions. On a metatheatrical plane, Creon sets himself a noble role to play but fails to live up to the part. His selfish and cruel deeds … jar with his noble sounding words. … His failure as a ruler and as a man is a kind of theatrical-performative failure. His blustering tirades and posturing disintegrate his own family, revealing him to be “one who does not exist, equal to nothing” (1325). The “big words of the excessively boastful are punished with great blows” (… 1350-53).

While Ajax afforded examples of stage tyranny in the bullying figures of Menelaus and Agamemnon (who, like Creon, concern themselves with obstructing a burial), Creon's tyranny is made all the more memorable for its added metatheatrical dimension. During his confrontation with the captured Antigone, the princess remarks that “tyranny is happy in many things / particularly in being able to do and say whatever it wants …” (506-7). Creon's power is theatrically or performatively defined throughout Antigone. Like an egotistical actor/playwright, he controls what may be done … or said … as well as what may be seen and heard. He even endeavors to control other characters' exits and entrances. His attempts at being the only actor or speaker within the theater meet with opposition and failure from early on in the tragedy. By the end of the play, Creon has lost all of his “theatrical” control. Other voices successfully contend with his. He ends the tragedy not as the master of what may be shown or discussed but as a spectatorial object standing amid the ruins of his own family.

Creon will deliver his first public address as ruler as a kind of self-styled herald. … Antigone warns Ismene that he is about to come “here … and make proclamation … to those who do not know his rulings” (33-34). Creon himself uses the same language of heralding in respect to his proclamation: “I make proclamation … to the citizens …” (192-93). Creon's authority as herald is challenged when Antigone tells him, “It was not Zeus who made this proclamation” (450). Creon's authority as a “speaker” or “announcer to all” is directly threatened.

The exposure of Polyneices' corpse is referred to as a kind of ghastly act of showmanship. The body is left “to be seen … as a feast for dogs and birds” (206). This same presentational or spectatorial language is adopted by the Sentry, who describes the mysterious first burial of the body as causing the corpse to “vanish” (… 255). Creon, the cruel showman, is incensed that the grotesque spectacle might be taken from the gaze of his captive audience, the Theban citizens. The worst extremes of Creon's hubris are attained when the king orders Antigone to be brought onstage so that she may be killed “right in front of her bridegroom” (760-61). Haemon averts this ghastly spectacle by leaving the stage.

As ruler, Creon views himself as the ultimate speaker or doer. The burial is referred to repeatedly as “the deed,” that action which the chief “actor” will not allow (252, 262, 273). The presence of the comic Sentry serves to highlight the disparity between Creon's self-image and his real nature. The Sentry allows us to examine, in Reinhardt's words, “the mighty man … seen by a creature who shrieks and shakes, is chosen by lot, dilly-dallies, and comforts himself tragically with ‘fate.’”⁴ David Grene has described the role of the Sentry as “a remarkable experiment in Greek tragedy in the direction of naturalism of speech.”⁵ Grene seems to have mistaken the most remarkable aspect of the Sentry's words: his speech is notable not so much for “naturalism,” an effect difficult to achieve in Greek tragic verse, as for the character's use of an inflated, pseudotragic tone (223-24, 235-36). The Sentry speaks as a comic figure, aware that he has been thrust into a tragic setting. He self-consciously views himself as a messenger … bearing bad news (… 277). His self-conscious status as a messenger puts him in contention with Creon who quickly tries to control this “rival” performer, angrily ordering him to say his piece and leave quickly (244). But the Sentry cannot be controlled so easily. The Sentry's ability to share and dominate stage time helps to undermine Creon's authority on stage. Clearly Creon is not the only doer and speaker. In fact, he is powerless to silence even this lowliest of characters and drive him from the stage before the Sentry establishes an easy rapport with the theater audience. The Sentry also displays an ability to “stage” his arguments with himself for the audience's benefit.

Often I was halted by my thoughts,
making me turn myself around in circles.
For my soul … found a voice, speaking many things to me:
“Wretch, why go where you'll pay the price on arrival?”
“Poor one, stalling again? And if Creon learns this
from another man, how could you not suffer for it?”
Revolving like this, I made a short journey long …

(225-31)

His description of “revolving,” “turning in circles,” and the reported speech of his “soul” suggests rich mimetic possibilities for the actor. For the passage to be effective, the contrast between the Sentry's persona and his “soul” needs to be strongly highlighted by the actor. This reenacted self-interrogation is full of comic potential and prefigures the self-interrogation performed by slave characters in Plautine comedy.⁶

By his words and body language, the lowly comic character calls attention to playacting. We see an actor playing a character who suddenly fragments into several “characters,” all aspects of the same theatrically represented figure. The Sentry's tendency to “fragment” into different voices makes him appear a character of less dramatic integrity than Creon, with whom he shares the stage. But the Sentry's brief, comic role playing momentarily destabilizes Creon's illusory sense of power; and his ludicrous cringing before Creon somehow makes Creon share in his ridiculousness.

The Sentry's inept use of a tragic-style gnome (“For I come with a firm grasp on the hope / that one cannot suffer anything other than what is fated,” 235-36) along with his explanation of his breathless entry (“My lord, I will not say that I have arrived breathless / due to speed, plying a nimble foot,” 223-24) have a touch of the metatheatrical. They all suggest a consciousness of theatrical convention.⁷ Speech and action … are the principal building blocks of all drama, and they are the things Creon most wants to monopolize and control. The Sentry's talkative personality is an affront to Creon's stage management. “You are a chatterer by nature, it is clear,” the tyrant proclaims. Picking up on Creon's need for control, the Sentry responds, “Yes, but at least I'm not the one who did this deed …” (320-21). Another speaker is exasperating enough for Creon in his theater/state, but not as exasperating as another “doer.”

As the Sentry leaves the stage under Creon's bitter mandate to find the criminal, he bids farewell to his monarch.

Well, may [the criminal] be found, that's most important. But
whether he is caught or not, for fortune will decide that,
you shall certainly not see me coming here again.
As it is, I have been saved beyond hope and my own
expectation, and owe the gods much thanks.

(327-31)

The force of these lines is directed not at Creon but to the audience. The Sentry's entertaining performance and his incongruous presence have undermined Creon's authority before the eyes of the theater spectators. His promise never to return “here” (… 329) is the remark not only of a character leaving the stage but of a comic actor self-consciously saying good-bye to his audience.

The Sentry's later reentry reminds the audience of his earlier promise.

My lord, men should never swear an oath not to do something.
Afterthought belies intention. I could have sworn that
it would be long before I came here again because of
your threats which lashed at me.

(388-91)

The comedy in the Sentry's reentrance is muted by the fact that he is bearing Antigone to her doom. It is typical of his ambiguous placement within the tragedy that, while offering momentary diversion from the rising tensions of the action, this peripheral figure hints so succinctly at the serious issue of Creon's dangerous stubbornness: unlike the Sentry, Creon will not learn to change his mind before it is too late.

The question of who is the central character of the play, Antigone or Creon, would probably have been of little interest to an ancient audience. Modern criticism has exerted much energy on this vexed question, which arises from Antigone's disappearance from the stage in the middle of the play and Creon's control of the rest of the tragedy. This structural feature has led the play to be termed a “diptych,” the result of Sophocles' relative immaturity as a dramatist, before achieving structural perfection in his later plays. The same charge has been brought against Ajax and Trachiniae. These concerns vanish when the performance conditions of the ancient theater are taken into account in all three of these allegedly “diptych” dramatic structures. The allocation of roles between the three actors is particularly evocative in Antigone. One actor doubled as Antigone with Teiresias and either Eurydice or the Messenger. A second actor doubled as Ismene, the Sentry, Haemon, and either the Messenger or Eurydice. One actor played Creon only. The voice and physical presence which brought Antigone to life before the ancient audience would go on to assume the role of Teiresias, the seer who reveals the Gods' anger and leads Creon to yield belatedly to their will (and Antigone's). The same “Antigone” actor would also impersonate either the Messenger, who relates the heroine's fate, or Eurydice, whose brief appearance signals the final destruction of Creon's family wrought by his opposition to Antigone. The “Ismene” actor would enjoy a similar association with his later roles. The Sentry and Haemon represent sympathetic figures who, for all their many contrasts, are both falsely accused by Creon.⁸

These probable role assignments point to an aesthetic unity attained by the act of ancient theatrical performance. Viewed in this light, the tragedy is no longer a diptych when we can hear and see the “Antigone” actor absorbed into other characters who maintain the conflict “she” had instigated with Creon. Creon's function as a solo role defines that character's position in the play. He is isolated both by his extreme political stance and by the physical realities of performance within the Theater of Dionysus. His role is played by a single actor surrounded by colleagues who continually change their roles. As Creon is isolated from his surrounding actors, so too is he isolated from the polis of Thebes and the polis represented by the theater audience. The play makes frequent reference to the ruler and the polis, often contrasting the populous city-state and the isolated nature of the tyrant. This contrast contains a latent theatrical corollary, the opposition of a crowded theatron and a single actor performing before it.

The tragedy opens with Antigone and Ismene furtively entering from the skene door to discuss what Antigone has learned about Creon's decree. The skene becomes the Theban royal palace, and the two women see their situation as one that will potentially isolate them from their polis. That polis, the citizens who make up Thebes, is inescapably equated with the polis that fills the theater auditorium. Ismene balks at setting herself against the overwhelming force of Creon and the city. “What, you intend to bury [the corpse] when the polis has forbidden it?” (44). Ismene tells Antigone she is incapable of defying the citizens (… 79). The performative implications of these two theatrical figures, caught between the skene and the vast auditorium containing thousands of Athenian citizens, resonates throughout these lines.

Antigone proposes the clandestine burial to her sister as a kind of action which will reveal Ismene's inner nature. “You will show … / whether your nature is noble or if you are a coward sprung from a noble line” (37-38). Ismene refuses “to act against the citizens” (… 79). She argues that she is weak and incapable of defying those in power. While she may be as appalled as Antigone by the proclamation, Ismene counsels that the sisters keep their feelings to themselves and endure this and whatever worse may follow (61-64). Antigone's rage against her sister is charged with the performative language of action and deeds. “I would not tell you to do it, even if you were / willing to act … after all, nor would I be content for you to act … with me. / Rather you be … the sort of person that you decide, but for my part / I shall bury him. It's noble for me to do … this and die” (69-72). Antigone refuses to separate her inner and outer nature. She insists on acting or doing the deed dictated by her inherent nobility. By her insistence on action, she irrevocably breaks from her sister and sets in motion her challenge to Creon's political and performative authority. The tyrant's rule necessitates subjects who will be too intimidated to speak or act against the ruler. For Antigone, action and intention are inseparable. She will not be the fragmented, doubly theatrical figure her sister has become. When Ismene attempts to share her sister's punishment, Antigone rejects her. “I don't tolerate a loved one who only loves in words …” (543). Unlike Ismene or the Sentry, both of whom were undertaken by the same actor, Antigone is unafraid to link deed with word in challenging Creon's autocratic rule. “Did you do this deed?” … Creon demands when she is brought before him. “I say that I did it and I do not deny it” … (442-43). This conflict of inner and outer nature, of word and action, will be developed further by Sophocles in the relationship between Electra, Chrysothemis, and Clytemnestra.

Antigone will make frequent reference to the phenomenon of the single individual (or performer) opposing the will of a vast polis (or audience). At first it is Antigone who is portrayed as the lone outsider. But as the play progresses, Creon is presented increasingly as the lone individual whose folly leads him to oppose the polis and the gods. Antigone's arraignment before Creon marks a turning point in the audience's perception of the outsider or “cityless one,” as well as a development of the conceit of the audience standing in for the Theban polis. Antigone says:

How could I have achieved more glory
Than by burying my brother?
These here all … would
Say this if fear didn't seal their mouths.
But tyranny is happy in many things,
Particularly in doing and saying whatever it wants.
Creon: You alone … among these Cadmeans see this.
Antigone: They … see it too; but they keep their mouths
shut because of you.

(502-9)

The “Theban citizens” or “polis” now becomes the Chorus and the theater audience as well. The theater audience's silence and attentiveness to the “actor” Creon blend into the stage illusion of the Chorus, the onstage audience. This passage begins Creon's isolation from all other stage figures, an isolation that will increase with Creon's condemnation of Antigone. The rhetorical figure of the single person opposing the polis, as enunciated by the Chorus's preceding songs (106, 370), now seems to be identified as Creon alone. In his argument with his father, Haemon cautions Creon: “I can hear in the dark how the city mourns for this girl” (692-93). Creon has replaced Antigone as the figure isolated from the audience and surrounding theatrical environment, the on- and offstage cities.

Haemon: No city … belongs to one man.
Creon: Isn't the city considered to belong to its rulers?
Haemon: You would be an excellent monarch for a desert.

(737-39)

Sophocles signals Creon's final collapse as the playwright/director-within-the-play when he crumbles before the Chorus and asks “What must I do then? Tell me, and I will obey” … (1099). Even after Creon learns his mistake and rushes to undo his error, the polis-audience relationship is maintained. When Eurydice silently exits to commit suicide after the Messenger's speech, the Messenger reasons that she does not think it proper to utter laments before the city (1246-50). The last scene, when Creon bears Haemon's body into the theater, is charged with the language of revelation and visual presentation. Creon, the arch realist, has come to acknowledge the unseen forces that drove Antigone. His folly is manifested in the dead son he bears and the dead wife revealed to him on the eccyclema. He and the characters on stage with him regard him and the carnage surrounding him as spectatorial objects or theatrical symbols exemplifying a moral lesson (1263-64, 1270, 1279-80, 1293-95, 1297-99).⁹

Twice during the course of the tragedy, the Chorus makes direct reference to the god of theater.¹⁰ During the parodos celebrating the defeat of the Argive forces, the Chorus calls on Bacchus to be its leader in night-long celebratory dances at the gods' temples … (152-55). This passage is interesting not only for its references to the god but for the self-reflexive device of the Chorus discussing its primary performative function. … This image of Bacchus leading his dancing Theban countrymen is soon contrasted with Creon's first entrance and his proclamation. After Teiresias' warnings have finally prevailed upon Creon and he leaves to release Antigone, the Chorus bursts into an excited hymn to Dionysus (1115-52). As in comparable moments in Ajax, Trachiniae, and Oedipus Tyrannus, the Chorus prematurely predicts a happy resolution to the play's action. Dionysus, the “dance leader of the fire-breathing stars” ( … 1146-47) is urged to appear “with cleansing foot” (1144).

These two references to Dionysus are rich in suggestiveness. Each is placed at a deciding moment in the drama: before Creon proclaims his fateful edict and after he has renounced his stance against Antigone. The passages encourage the listener to look for the theater god's literal or figurative manifestation on stage. After the parodos, Creon symbolically renounces Dionysus in his insistence upon punishing the dead Polyneices. Two of Dionysus' greatest attributes were as a dissolver of boundaries and as a god of ecstatic release. Creon's autocratic rule, with its insistence on male prerogative, stands opposed to any Dionysian impulse. Like Pentheus in the Bacchae, Creon refuses to be bested by a woman, lest he relinquish his masculine authority (484-85). Unlike the god who “makes no distinction of ages” (Bacchae 204-9), Creon refuses to learn from the ideas of the young (726-27). The god of role playing and masks forsakes the actor playing Creon, allowing him only the one role to play, while the other two actors are constantly changing characters.

By the time the Chorus pleads for Dionysus to appear as a redeemer (1115-54), it is already too late. The god's presence is felt in the closing scenes of Antigone, but it is in his role as destroyer and god of destructive madness. Dionysus, through his servant Sophocles, has attempted to teach Creon and the Athenian audience the limits of mortal power and masculine prerogative. By electing Sophocles to the generalship in 441/40, the Athenian audience signaled the playwright that, unlike Creon, it had grasped his lesson, at least for the moment.

OEDIPUS TYRANNUS

One can imagine the disturbing effect of Oedipus Tyrannus upon its original audience, if the consensus of scholarly opinion is correct in dating the play to the early or mid 420s. This period saw Athens, already enmeshed in the Peloponnesian War, undergoing bouts of plague that wiped out hundreds of citizens, including Sophocles' friend Pericles. Sophocles seems to have originated the plotting device of the Theban plague as the motivation behind Oedipus' fateful investigation. The Athenians wanted their tragic playwrights to create distance between the contemporary polis and the catastrophes represented in the theater. With their own plague fresh in the collective memory, the Theban plague would have reminded the Athenians of one of their worst civic calamities. Perhaps this is one of the reasons this play, so often regarded as the highest achievement of the ancient theater, only won second place.

In addition to its startling connection to contemporary events, the play harks back to the earlier Antigone. Jebb perceived an analogy between the first entrance of Creon in Antigone with the proclamation delivered by his ill-fated nephew near the beginning of Oedipus Tyrannus (216-75). “In each case a Theban king addresses Theban elders, announcing a stern decree, adopted in reliance on his own wisdom, and promulgated with haughty consciousness of power; the elders receive the decree with a submissive deference under which we can perceive traces of misgiving; and as the drama proceeds, the elders become spectators of calamities occasioned by the decree, while its author turns to them for comfort.”¹¹ Both tyrannoi engage in similar arguments with Teiresias. Both learn harsh lessons concerning the limitations of human power and the unseen forces that move below the surface of nature. Like Creon in Antigone, Oedipus is a ruler described as a “tyrannos,” a word with associations of nonhereditary kingship and the pejorative sense of “tyranny.” Both tragedies seem to play with the double implications of this word. Like the Creon in Antigone, King Oedipus can be rash and destructive when opposed; and his stubborn determination forces the action of the play to its horrible conclusion. But Oedipus is a far more complex figure than the earlier tyrant. It is as if Sophocles had fused elements of Antigone's character, particularly her propensity to sacrifice herself for a higher cause, with that of her uncle.

Even more than the Creon of Antigone, the protagonist of Oedipus Tyrannus possesses qualities that are analogous to those of a theater artist. Oedipus is a dramatic figure obsessed with performing actions and speeches and revealing truths for the entire polis before his palace/skene. Oedipus promises his citizens and the theater audience that he “shall make manifest” (… 132) the mystery threatening his polis. Ironically, he himself becomes the object revealed (… 1184). His relentless search for the truth about the past ultimately exposes the searcher, much as a finished artwork reveals as much about its artificer as about its subject matter. Oedipus is presented as a master of action and deeds and a genius at the decipherment and manipulation of language. He attained his kingship after engaging in a deadly competition of quasi-literary and performative dimensions. Unaided by gods or men, Oedipus answered the riddle of the Sphinx, described as “the rhapsode hound” (… 391). This curious image of the Sphinx as “rhapsode” makes their encounter an agon not only between human being and monster but between two verbal and performative artists.

After his true parentage has been revealed, Oedipus asks the Shepherd why he had spared the crippled infant's life so many years before. The old man responds, “I pitied it, my lord” (… 1178). From the beginning, Oedipus has been an object of pity, either for the few who were aware of his cursed birth and subsequent mutilation or for the theater audience viewing a man who is blind to the horrid circumstances of his life. Pity, one of the cardinal tragic emotions in Aristotelian literary theory, is at the core of Oedipus' dramatic situation. The Shepherd's line at 1178 reveals that “pity” is, ironically enough, the reason Oedipus survived to experience the present catastrophe. Part of the irony rests in the self-reflexive nature of the Shepherd's “pity.” Oedipus is the ultimate subject for tragedy. He stimulates pity in the theater audience and owes his existence to the pity he generated in the Shepherd.

After the Shepherd's final revelations, the Chorus literally refers to Oedipus as possessing a fate that is a “paradigm” … of humanity's unhappiness (1193). The Second Messenger's first lines, which introduce the tragedy's final revelation, are striking for their explicitly metatheatrical language. “O you who are held in greatest honor in this land, / what deeds you shall hear of, what deeds you shall see, and what / grief you shall endure …, if you still have a kinsmen's regard for the house of Labdacus” (1223-25). These words prepare the audience to view Oedipus' imminent reentry, stumbling and blinded, as a theatrical experience.¹² The Messenger will refer to him as a “sight” … the “beholding” … of which will lead to “pity” (… 1295-96).

Like Antigone's Creon, Oedipus is used to “doing and saying whatever he wants” which, as Antigone observed, is the prerogative of the tyrannos (Ant. 506-7). Like the earlier Creon, Oedipus is a play-wright/director-within-the-play who displays formidable powers in controlling the stage space and other characters' performative behavior, as well as correctly perceiving a challenge to his dramaturgical authority. But in this later, far more ironic work, Oedipus misinterprets the source of this metatheatrical challenge. Oedipus wrongly perceives his rival dramatist to be Creon, who, in Oedipus' view, is scripting and directing subordinates like Teiresias to set the groundwork for a political coup.

After the scene with Teiresias, Oedipus suspects an insurrection is underway. It is particularly ironic that Oedipus, now in Creon's position in Antigone, suspects Creon as the instigator of the alleged plot. Creon, Oedipus charges, is a man with a “daring face” (… 533). The theatrical nature of Creon's alleged duplicity (his deceptive behavior and stage management of others) is registered by Oedipus' use of … a word that means both “face” and the actor's “mask.” Oedipus charges Creon with behaving like a malevolent dramatist. Unlike Antigone's direct challenge to Creon in her play, utilizing defiant words and actions to subvert her uncle's authority, Oedipus perceives a subtler metatheatrical game. Creon, according to Oedipus, is disguising his handiwork and scripting others to do his dirty work for him. Oedipus asks Creon, “Did you think that I would not recognize the act … as yours?” (538). Oedipus is accusing his brother-in-law of dramatist-like behavior, sending (… 705) the “actor” Teiresias into the theater after “persuading him by speeches to tell lying words” (… 526). Creon has allegedly used Teiresias as a mouthpiece for slanderous accusations, which would have tainted his own lips had he spoken them directly (706). Teiresias has served Creon much as an actor serves his playwright. Even the reverend prophet's elderly behavior is challenged as a sham or “seeming” by Oedipus. The prophet will not be physically harmed, Oedipus reasons, because he “seems old” (… 402). Oedipus' position is under threat, but the threat does not come from any of his fellow characters within the play, as Creon had experienced in Antigone. In Oedipus Tyrannus, the threat to the tyrannos's autonomy as playwright/director-within-the-play comes from outside the mimetic world of the tragedy. The challenge resides with the gods and with Sophocles.

Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, Sophocles' Oedipus is a character who has rejected the role thrust upon him by divine (or authorial) prophecy. Oedipus has endeavored to ward off the disasters predicted for him and to script his life in his own way. Oedipus is a character who discovers himself trapped within a play he does not want to write or act in. For all his eagerness to solve Laius' murder and discover his own identity, Oedipus has been “found out, unwillingly, by time, the all seeing” (… 1214). The true metatheatrical rivalry is between Oedipus, the playwright-within-the-play, who fulfills his traditional role “unwillingly” … as incest and parricide, and Sophocles, who enjoys omniscient power over his creations who are striving within the orchestra circle. Something of this character-author conflict has been observed in the frustrating closure of Trachiniae. The idea of a character in conflict with his or her prescribed role has grown in complexity since Hyllus challenged the gods and the playwright for their treatment of their “children” on stage. Sophocles' metadramatic irony has deepened in the time since Trachiniae and Antigone.

As in Antigone, the part of the tyrannos serves as the protagonist's only role in the play, accenting Oedipus' position as the unambiguous focal point of the tragedy. A second actor played the Priest, Jocasta, and the Shepherd. The second actor's parts share interesting resonances. It is fitting that the “Jocasta” actor also plays the Shepherd who received the infant Oedipus from her so many years before (1173). The casting presents Oedipus with the missing link with his mysterious past. It is a piece of extraordinary performative irony that the Priest who represents religious orthodoxy within the play literally speaks with the same voice as Jocasta, the religious skeptic. The third actor played Creon and the Corinthian Messenger, a fitting arrangement since both characters bring misleading “good” news to Oedipus.

The role of Teiresias could have been played by either the second or the third actor. Either assignment contains interesting performative resonances. If Teiresias is played by the “Creon” actor, the irony of Oedipus' accusations against Creon would be intensified. Teiresias would literally be speaking from the same “mouth” (705-6) as Creon. This theatrical situation would give Oedipus' mistaken accusations a delightfully paradoxical dimension. The other possibility, that the “Priest/Jocasta/Shepherd” actor plays Teiresias, is more likely. It is equally attractive in terms of ironic implications and appears more aesthetically elegant in terms of theatrical applicability. If the “Priest” actor plays the prophet, the tritagonist avoids having to rapidly change back and forth between Creon and Teiresias within a little over 350 lines (150-512), certainly a possible feat, but an awkward and unnecessary one, considering the availability of the deuteragonist, who has 480 lines between the Priest's exit and Jocasta's emergence from the skene (150-630). This latter schematic allows for a more equal allotment of acting responsibilities between deuteragonist and tritagonist in the first half of the play. In performative terms, it creates the effect of both the Priest and Teiresias, the two symbols of religious orthodoxy, inhabiting the body and voice of the “Jocasta” actor. Jocasta is the character whose disbelief in oracles and in any middlemen between humans and divinity will so scandalize the Chorus.

The Second Messenger also could have been played by either the second or third actor. Assigning the role to the third actor is attractive for reasons of balance, making his responsibilities more equal to the second in amount of lines and stage time. It also allows one actor to handle all of the messenger roles, a configuration encountered in the tritagonist's doubling of both messenger parts in Euripides' Bacchae.

Oedipus' character suggests the poet's refining vision of the Creon-Antigone opposition of some dozen years earlier; the play also affords a second glimpse of Creon himself. The Creon of this play is hardly the bully of the Antigone, but much of his presence in this later play carries intertextual, metatheatrical associations with the earlier character. Creon's speech about the disadvantages of kingly power (583-602) contains strong irony in light of his royal performance in Antigone. Creon's argument with Oedipus recalls the agon between Creon and Haemon. Stichomythic exchanges like

Oedipus: I must be ruler.
Creon: Not if you rule badly.

(OT [Oedipus Tyrannus] 628-29)

or Creon's remark “I have a share in the city too, it's not yours alone” (630) could easily find a place in the agon scenes of Antigone. The audience member familiar with Antigone would appreciate the ironic role reversal in Creon's position. In Oedipus' tragedy, Creon seems to play Haemon's role by arguing with a tyrannical ruler. For all of Creon's protestations that kingship holds no attractions for him, he assumes kingly responsibility with great alacrity after Oedipus' downfall. Creon's newfound power is manifested by his stage management of his nephew and his children during the exodos. Creon readily tells the blinded Oedipus when and where he may exit the theater space (1429, 1515, 1521). “Do not desire to have power in everything,” Creon admonishes, “for power did not accompany you through all your life” (1522-23). When Oedipus blesses Creon for bringing Antigone and Ismene to their father, it is impossible not to register the irony of Oedipus' wish that better fortune may attend Creon than has overseen Oedipus' fate (1478-79). That wish resonates with the catastrophe of the Antigone play.

Oedipus Tyrannus borrows from situations and characters in Antigone but rephrases them into entirely new configurations. Both tragedies are concerned with the limitations of a ruler's vision. Oedipus Tyrannus, as Karl Reinhardt has written, is a play devoted to the “tragedy of human illusion.” In this play, “the danger to man lies not in the hubris of human self-assertion but in the hubris of seeming as opposed to being.”¹³ Reinhardt's view, with its obvious analog to the conditions of theater itself, an art form created out of appearances and deception, has influenced many subsequent interpreters. Seale, admitting his debt to the German scholar, envisions “the very matter of the tragedy” resting upon the protagonist's perception of his world in the play.¹⁴

Creon's “ship of state” speech in Antigone (162-90) gains ironic power only when viewed against his later actions. The Oedipus Tyrannus begins with the tacit assumption that the theater audience is thoroughly aware of the title character's genuine identity as incestuous parricide. The rich, obsessive irony of Oedipus' words is present from the play's opening speech (1-13). The play strips away the layers of illusion that surround the protagonist until he perceives his true identity, the identity the theater audience was aware of from the beginning.

Ajax and Trachiniae have already afforded examples of one of Sophocles' favorite metatheatrical devices, the phenomenon of the audience-within-the-play. With this strategy, the playwright focuses the spectators' attention on a character whom they watch in order to gauge their own responses to what they see and hear. Oedipus Tyrannus is structured so as to focus attention on how Oedipus receives and processes information. The audience is fascinated to watch how he reacts to the events occurring around him. Near the beginning of the play, Oedipus remarks that no one suffers as much as he does for his dying city (59-61). He insists that the investigation be conducted before the suppliants (and theater audience) who have assembled before the palace door. “Speak before all” (… 93), Oedipus urges, engaging both the characters surrounding him before the skene and the theater audience.¹⁵ During much of the play's action, Oedipus self-consciously plays the part of the ideal monarch—a role he mistakenly believes he has won by merit rather than merely inherited. The suppliants, and, by extension, the theater audience, have come expecting him to act like a king, and his words and actions do not disappoint. He is an ideal audience and ideal actor, suffering with those he sees suffer and then offering himself as the agent and, ultimately, the scapegoat of his community. Throughout the play, the protagonist represents the ultimate actor, “the greatest in all men's eyes” (40).

When the final revelation occurs during the interrogation of the Shepherd, Oedipus turns from one who sees or reveals things for others (… 132) into the thing seen, the person revealed (… 1184). This new, terrible vision of himself as the most horrible of spectatorial objects paradoxically moves him out of the audience's sight with his exit into the skene. Once inside the palace/skene building, Oedipus destroys his eyes, the organs of Apollo and the principal means of perceiving theater, at least in the Greek imagination. The blinded Oedipus will later remark that he would have destroyed his hearing had that been possible (1386-89). Oedipus rejects the senses of sight and hearing, the two “theatrical” senses, ironically transforming himself into the most shocking of theatrical revelations. His self-conscious display of his own degradation at the end of the play is one of the most harrowing sequences in Western drama. Reinhardt observes: “Now there are no biers, no eccyclema, no apparatus. … instead of being brought in, put on show so that men can point him out, the victim is eager to put himself on show, to display the monstrous discovery that he has made in his search for himself: the blinded man he has been all along.”¹⁶ Oedipus is perhaps the greatest of Sophocles' internal director/playwrights. His final transformation into a blind pariah is the supreme example of the duality of human life, its dangerous instability, its ability to turn one being into its apparent opposite. Oedipus becomes the image of Teiresias, his former nemesis. The blinded king, once rooted in power and wealth, is reduced to “a voice” that “floats on the wings of the air” (… 1310). Just as disaster has brought Oedipus closer to his earlier opponent, Teiresias, the haunting image of the blinded Oedipus' “floating voice” suggests he has attained a mysterious parity with an even earlier enemy, the demonic, flying “rhapsode” (391) called the Sphinx.¹⁷

When Oedipus runs from the stage to confront Jocasta and blind himself, the Chorus sings its third stasimon, making Oedipus the “paradigm” of the tragedy of human “seeming.” …

O race of mortals,
I count your life as no more than nothing.
For what man, what man has
more of happiness
than so much as a seeming
and after the seeming a falling away?
As an example, you,
your fate, you, o wretched Oedipus,
I deem no mortal happy.

(1186-96)

Illusion and seeming … are the bane and basis of existence. The horror of life may be seen in its parity with the theatrical experience, where seeming and representation are the foundation of perception. In Oedipus Tyrannus, theatrical seeming is employed to reveal all seeming. By analogy, the theatrical deception is yet another form of the “seeming” of human life. Human happiness, the very will to live, is portrayed as an illusion, as ephemeral as Oedipus' triumph and the present enactment that has recounted his story. The play exists as a means of revealing Oedipus. It is an illusion dependent on the destruction of Oedipus' illusion. Even after the apparent destruction of all “seeming” with Oedipus' self-discovery and blinding, the seeming-versus-reality dichotomy remains. The blinded Oedipus begs Creon to let him touch his children again. “If I lay my hands on them I can seem … to have them with me, as when I could see” (1469-70).

Seeming and duality are at the core of the Oedipus world. When announcing to the citizens his investigation into Laius' death, Oedipus promises: “I shall speak these words as both a stranger to the story, / and as a stranger to the deed” (… 219-20). Oedipus' relationship with the Laius story is as paradoxical as the relationship between the actor playing Oedipus and his role. The actor is a “stranger” to the words and deeds Sophocles has directed him to perform. Nevertheless, the actor says and does these things as if they were his own speeches and actions. Oedipus is actorlike in his taking upon himself words and deeds on the behalf of other characters. … Oedipus' ambiguous relationship to his theatrical environment is analogous to the theater audience's relationship to tragedy. In order to enjoy tragedy as an aesthetic experience, members of the audience must perceive the subject matter of tragedy as something strange … or “other” than their personal lives or experiences. At the same time, tragedy must partake of the deepest fears and anxieties of its audience if it is to excite the pity, fear, and catharsis that Aristotle articulated as the primary results of the tragic experience in the theater. This implicit connection between the deception … of life and the medium of theater works to remove the distance between the play and its audience. Segal has suggested the ways in which “Oedipus' fate in the orchestra mirrors back to the members of the audience.” Their absorption in his tragedy causes them to “temporarily lose [their] identity, [their] secure definition by house, position, friends, and become, like Oedipus, nameless and placeless.”¹⁸

Oedipus is in a dilemma similar to that of Ajax. Both characters perform disastrous acts while under a deluded notion of reality. Both men are destroyed by a hostile cosmos. In Ajax the audience actually sees the divine instigator of the hero's downfall in the character of Athena. But in Oedipus Tyrannus, the metatheatrical role of the god, a playwright-within-the-play, has been absorbed into the fabric of the tragedy with breathtaking subtlety. In Oedipus Tyrannus, Sophocles enjoys a parity with Apollo, the divine artificer of Oedipus' misfortunes. The human playwright's craft portrays the operation of the god's design. Both divine and human artificers are paradoxically omnipresent yet unseen. Apollo's inscrutability and distance from the human characters whose actions he has manipulated serve as metaphors of the playwright's art. Sophocles also maneuvers his subjects into the patterns he desires while remaining outside of his creation. The relationship of Apollo to the playwright and the art of tragedy is suggested by the Chorus in its second stasimon.

In order to calm her husband's mounting anxiety, Jocasta has cast doubt upon the truthfulness of oracles. After the exit of Jocasta and Oedipus, the Chorus sings an ode denouncing impiety. The second strophe of the stasimon must be quoted in full. …

If someone walks with haughtiness
in deed or word,
unafraid of Justice and without
reverence for shrines of Gods,
may an evil fate seize on him,
for his unlucky pride,
if he will not gain advantage justly
and keep away from unholy things
or rashly touches what should not be touched.
Amid such things, what man shall contrive
to defend his life against angry arrows?
For if such deeds are honored
why should I be in a chorus?

(883-96)

In the antistrophe following, the Chorus remarks that it will no longer regard the important shrines of Delphi, Abae, or Olympia “unless these [oracles] do fit together / so as to be pointed at by all mortals” (902-3). Unless the oracles of Apollo are made manifest, an open, public spectacle which may be “pointed to” (… 902), the Chorus will lose its sense of religion and, as it intimates in the preceding strophe, will literally stop “being a chorus” (… 896). If god (or the tragic dramatist) does not bring his prophecies to fruition, the Chorus will give up its principal function in the tragedy being enacted. The words are a challenge both to Apollo and to the playwright.

These lines from the second stasimon are among the most controversial in Sophocles, due to their metatheatrical implications.¹⁹ … Bernard Knox's summary of the parabasis-like effect of 896 eloquently states the implications of Sophocles' trompe l'oeil.

“Why should I dance?” With this phrase the situation is brought out of the past and the myth into the present moment in the Theatre of Dionysus. For these words of the Chorus were accompanied not only by music but, as the Chorus's very name reminds us, by dancing: this is the choral dance and song from which tragedy developed, and which is still what it was in the beginning, an act of religious worship. If the oracles and the truth do not coincide the very performance of the tragedy has no meaning, for tragedy is itself a form of worship of the gods. The phrase “Why should I dance?” is a tour de force which makes the validity of the performance itself depend on the dénouement of the play.²⁰

The placement of the stasimon after Jocasta's rejection of oracular power is telling. Her denunciation of the oracles and the religious beliefs surrounding them is tantamount to her rejecting her place as a character within the play. She and Oedipus have no more freedom from the prophecy than they have from the dramatic script of which they are a part. Neither script nor prophecy may exist without the validation of a higher, divine order. The members of the Chorus intimate that their lives within Thebes and as characters within the present play are in jeopardy. The passage jolts the audience's perceptions by simultaneously calling attention to the Chorus and the play's double nature as story and performance of that story. The Sophoclean stasimon may be compared with an equally self-referential passage in twentieth-century drama. In Beckett's Endgame, Clove threatens that play's continuance in a manner similar to the defiant actions of Oedipus and Jocasta.

Clove: I'll leave you.
Hamm: No!
Clove: What is there to keep me here?
Hamm: The dialogue.(21)

The Chorus will again draw attention to its performative function when singing the ode to Mount Cithaeron (1086-1109). As so often in Sophoclean tragedy, the poet heightens the impact of the final calamity by having the Chorus prematurely celebrate a happy resolution. The direct reference to dancing … at 1092 bestows a self-conscious artificiality upon the Chorus's merrymaking. The Chorus is following its dramatic function—it is “dancing”—but the audience may realize that it is celebrating only because it remains incapable of penetrating the illusion of Oedipus' identity. It is intriguing that the Chorus theorizes that the foundling Oedipus may be the child of Dionysus himself (1105). Earlier, during the parodos, the Chorus had called upon Dionysus to redeem his suffering homeland (211). The wine god's presence is discernible throughout this play. Apollo's brother, a god of role playing and reversal, the patron of the tragic competition itself, Dionysus may be a spiritual father of Oedipus, if not a biological one. A god who often wreaks havoc on the family, who revels in duality and contradiction, is the appropriate force compelling Oedipus to discover his true identity.

Somewhat earlier in the play, Oedipus discussed the claims made by the lone survivor of the attack on Laius at the place where three roads met. The man claimed a troop of robbers committed the crime. Oedipus takes comfort in the alleged plurality of the attackers. “I was not the killer,” he reasons, “for one [man] is not the same as many” (845). Oedipus finally learns how “one may equal many” (845). In the Theater of Dionysus, one man performing actions (… 847) may stand in for any or all of his fellow men. It is this “standing in” that allows the performer and the spectators the scope and resonance that make Oedipus Tyrannus one of the masterpieces of metatheater.²²

OEDIPUS AT COLONUS

In Oedipus at Colonus, the relationship of the play's world to the world of the audience has changed drastically. The title of the play suggests something of what is unique and different in this final work, written at the close of the fifth century. Athens and its immediate environs figure comparatively rarely as a setting for fifth-century tragedy.²³ The Athenian tragedians preferred setting their plays in areas other than Athens to create a sense of distance and perspective for their audiences. Tragedy, with its malfunctioning families and governments, often carries by its very nature an implicit critique of the society in which its action is set. While much of Greek tragedy may be said to offer a critique of fifth-century Athens, it does so obliquely through the comfortably distant mirrors of places like Thebes, Trachis, and Troy. The festival presentation of tragedy, an important propaganda tool of the Athenian Empire, could ill afford to openly criticize its host city by using it as an example of a “tragic” society. It is also probable that Athenian audiences themselves enjoyed the aesthetic distance that a foreign setting brought with it.²⁴ From this perspective we may begin to appreciate Sophocles' boldness in giving his final play an Athenian setting.

Throughout his career, Sophocles devoted careful attention to the physical environments in which he set his plays. We may remember Ajax' solitary tent on the shore. The Paedagogus' opening lines in Electra create a brief but significant entry point to that play. Philoctetes, written only a few years before Oedipus at Colonus, gives significant attention to the depiction of Lemnos, whose desolate landscape carries significance both for the play's action and the nature of the title character. Colonus, however, is given the most detailed and thorough place description in Greek tragedy.

Knowledge of fifth-century skenographia is virtually nonexistent. It will never be known how detailed or schematic the actual stage setting or decoration would have been for this or any fifth-century play in the Theater of Dionysus. Whatever the means of scenic representation, Sophocles is taking a great risk in compelling his audience to compare the stage space representing Colonus with the real model. As one scholar notes, the fifth-century actors and audience “shared the very daylight of the grove one mile away.”²⁵ Antigone, in describing the place to which she and her father have arrived, remarks that “the towers that / shield the city are, to judge by the eye, far off” (14-16). “The towers” are none other than the temples of the Athenian Acropolis, which stood behind the audience in the Theater of Dionysus.²⁶ Sophocles' choice of setting, whatever its physical representation on the ancient stage, displays his confidence in the power of his theater to withstand the comparison of his created scene with the genuine article.

The deme of Colonus and the city of Athens almost constitute dramatic characters within the play. Sophocles' choice of setting was probably influenced by events during the closing years of the Peloponnesian War. A troop of Boeotians was repulsed by Athenian soldiers near the grove of Colonus Hippios in 407 b.c., an action that may well have reminded Athenians of Oedipus' legendary powers within the grove.²⁷ Colonus, like the Theater of Dionysus, is a sacred place where humanity may intermingle with the gods. Both the theater and the grove are located near the very heart of Athenian society. Colonus was Sophocles' own deme. His use of Colonus represents an example of an ancient dramatist “staging” his home and polis, endeavoring to preserve it, through dramatic action and poetry, from the ravages of war and time.

Critics have remarked on the idealizing nature of Sophocles' praise of his homeland, particularly the sublime encomium for Colonus and Athens contained within the first stasimon (668-719). It has been noted that many of the physical and moral features held up for admiration by the poet were already nearing destruction when Sophocles was writing the play. Kirkwood has compared the play's use of Athens with other near-contemporary texts such as Thucydides' version of Pericles' funeral oration and later fourth-century authors who would nostalgically describe the city as a utopia. Sophocles' emphasis on the “justness” or “fairness” … of Athens represents the playwright's attempt to restore this lost trait to his crippled society.²⁸ Athens is the one place capable of receiving a hero such as Oedipus. While Thebes desires possession of his body as a powerful talisman, Athens can accept all of the hero with his strange mixture of blessings and curses. Athens is civilized enough to understand and accept the contradictions inherent in Oedipus, as the city has symbolically accepted so many other tragic heroes into its community during performances at the Theater of Dionysus.

Just as Sophocles shows great daring in his choice of scene, his dramaturgical structure puts unprecedented demands on his three actors. Virtually all fifth-century tragedy may be comfortably performed by three actors without the necessity of a single role being shared between actors. Before Oedipus at Colonus, only a late work by Euripides, the Phoenician Women (411-409 b.c.), required a role to be shared by two actors and this text may well have been substantially altered for performances during the fourth century. In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles requires his deuteragonist and tritagonist to share the role of Antigone, while all three actors share the part of Theseus. This doubling feat sustains Sophocles' extraordinarily fluid dramatic structure and stands as a testimony to the versatility of late fifth-century actors, as well as to the innovative courage of the octogenarian playwright. Sophocles obviously wanted his last play to stand as a repository of spiritual and poetic vision as well as a testament to his unsurpassed technical skill. As so often occurs, Sophocles' doubling of roles will carry thematic and structural resonances for the tragedy's performative meaning. The protagonist played Oedipus throughout the play, returning, appropriately enough, to narrate his previous character's death in the guise of the Messenger. As if this were not enough, Sophocles required the protagonist to be recycled as Theseus for that character's final entrance from line 1750 to the end of the play. The deuteragonist played Antigone from lines 1-847, Theseus in that character's second and third scenes (886-1210 and 1500-1555), Polyneices, and Antigone again, from line 1670 to the end. The tritagonist played the Citizen, Ismene, Theseus at that character's first appearance (551-667), Creon, Antigone (1099-1555), and resumed the role of Ismene from line 1670 to the end.

If this scheme of doubling seems wildly complex and challenging, even for a cast of accomplished actors, it is. Some scholars, including Jebb, have postulated that Sophocles must have composed the play with a fourth actor in mind, but there is no evidence of a fourth actor being used for fifth-century tragedy. No other tragedy requires it; and the availability of a fourth actor would obviate the play's carefully orchestrated patterns of entrances and exits. Furthermore, this remarkable pattern of role allocation strongly suggests performative meaning. All three actors are allowed to play members of the Theban royal family. The role of Antigone, already one of the most popular heroines of classical tragedy, journeys from the deuteragonist to the tritagonist and back again to the original actor. The role of Theseus undergoes a far more remarkable journey with the role being played by all three actors in succession from the third, to the second, to the first agonist. Brian Johnston has written that “Theseus' role gradually increases in mimetic authority” during the course of the tragedy until, with Oedipus' transfiguration, Theseus stands as the last living link with Oedipus' heroism and as the custodian of Oedipus' legacy for Athens. At this point, Oedipus' voice literally speaks through the mask of Theseus. Theseus, by the end of the play, “has earned the right, as it were, to be ‘performed’ by the Oedipus actor. He has become the closest to Oedipus, underscored by the fact that he alone, and not Antigone nor Ismene, is privileged to witness Oedipus' wonderful death. … [The protagonist's assumption of Theseus at 1750] is the theatrical manifestation of Oedipus' gift to Athens.”²⁹

Sophocles' virtuosity as a playwright and the virtuosity he demands of his cast illustrate the void separating modern, naturalistic acting and production styles from those of classical Athens. They also reveal a playwright capable of great technical daring, even at the end of an unusually long and successful career. Only Verdi's stylistic self-recreation in his late operas, Otello and Falstaff, seems a comparable example of octogenarian creativity. The doubling and tripling of roles also points to the self-consciousness of Sophocles' dramaturgy, the way dramatic convention becomes part of a play's very meaning.

Unlike the Oedipus character in the Tyrannus play, the aged Oedipus has had from the opening moments of Oedipus at Colonus a clear perception of his true status and relation to the stage world that surrounds him. The “Oedipus” actor has stood his ground while the deuteragonist and tritagonist have each played deceptive characters like Creon and Polyneices, figures whose crafty and duplicitous speeches serve to disguise their ulterior motives. In the play's concluding moments, Theseus replaces Oedipus in the body and voice of the protagonist, whose voice and stage presence have, through the roles of Oedipus and the Messenger, represented the spiritual “reality” and integrity that lie at the core of Sophocles' play.

Were intertextual reference to other dramatic texts the sole criterion of metatheatricality, Oedipus at Colonus would rank among the most metatheatrical of ancient tragedies.³⁰ While tragedy frequently carries allusions to earlier texts, tragic or epic, Oedipus at Colonus is particularly “bookish.”³¹ Sophocles adopted the pattern of earlier tragedies based on the theme of the suppliant. These “suppliant” plays, Aeschylus' Suppliants, Euripides' Children of Heracles and Suppliants, and many lost examples, served as the models for Oedipus at Colonus. Suppliant dramas are made up of a fairly traditional set of encounters: the suppliant meets and pleads with the host; an enemy seriously challenges the suppliant's security; the host encounters and defeats the enemy in a military action, winning security for the suppliant. In addition to the suppliant play schematic, Oedipus at Colonus presupposes an audience familiar with the two earlier Sophoclean Theban tragedies as well as Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes and Euripides' Phoenician Women. The wrangling between Eteocles and Polyneices, described by Ismene (OC 336, 365-81), and the chillingly prophetic scene where Polyneices begs Antigone to give him burial, should he die in his campaign (OC 1399-1446), all suggest these earlier plays, which were already very famous when Oedipus at Colonus was written. Echoes of the Antigone prologue are evident in the brief exchange between the two grieving sisters, when Ismene sensibly tries to restrain the impulsive Antigone from visiting her father's mysterious burial place (OC 1724-36). Creon's seizure of Oedipus' daughters and their eventual restoration by Theseus rephrases and resolves the wrenching exodos of Oedipus Tyrannus, where the blind Oedipus is presented with his children and then is forcibly parted from them by Creon. Sophocles is compelling us to look not only beyond the closure of the present play into an uncertain future: he is compelling us to look into other plays as well; plays by himself and by other poets.

Sophocles devotes much important stage time in Oedipus at Colonus to debating issues raised by Oedipus Tyrannus, particularly Oedipus' speeches of self-defense before the ghoulishly inquisitive Chorus of Colonian elders and, later, his enemy Creon (510-48, 960-1000). The present play functions as a belated sequel to the earlier tragedy. Like the Eumenides, which closed Aeschylus' Oresteia by bringing the action to an Athenian setting, Oedipus at Colonus uses its Athenian locale as a site of final consummation both for Oedipus and, by extension, for Attic tragedy itself. By absorbing the contradictions inherent in Oedipus (and in tragedy), Athens reaps the benefit of a mysterious protective power.

In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles reverses the structure of dramatic irony that he used to such great effect in Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus. In those earlier plays the audience beheld the struggle of two rulers, Creon and Oedipus, who each attempt to maintain a vision of the world based either on misapprehension or illusion. By the end of each tragedy, the rulers meet their downfall after finally seeing the truth of their situation, a truth that the audience has either known all along or has realized long before the character. In Oedipus at Colonus the protagonist moves from the lowest fortune to a state of deification. This last Sophoclean tragedy serves as a kind of “antitragedy,” a work that self-consciously reverses the tragic pattern of earlier plays. The Colonus play begins with an Oedipus who seems in some ways similar to the figure who exits the stage at the end of the Tyrannus. Like the earlier rendering of the character, the aged Oedipus has a habit of blundering upon places that are not to be touched by ordinary humans. Soon after Oedipus' first entrance in the orchestra, the Chorus describes him as “Terrible to see, terrible to hear” (… 141). These theatrically charged words are reminiscent of the description given the newly blinded Oedipus by the Second Messenger in Oedipus Tyrannus: “what deeds you shall hear of, what deeds you shall see, and what / grief you shall endure” (… OT 1224-25). At the start of Sophocles' last play, Oedipus remains the paradigm of theatrical suffering and misfortune. But this similarity to his earlier self is superficial. The Chorus is soon won over by the old man's suffering. Antigone pleads for the Chorus and, by extension, the theater audience, to view the aged wanderer with “pity” (… 242). This “pity” will move the Colonians to sympathize with Oedipus to the point that they accept him into their community. … Ismene will wonder “when will the gods take pity … on [Oedipus'] sorrows?” (383-84). By the end of the play, even these distant, mysterious beings, Oedipus' cosmic audience, “take pity” and accept the old man into their company.

In Sophocles' last tragedy, the spectators and the protagonist share a “conspiracy of knowledge” from the opening moments of the play.³² The audience is assured of the “reality” of Oedipus' ultimate destiny, and the assurance is maintained throughout all of the challenges that face the protagonist before his final apotheosis. As Peter Burian has shown, the play follows a pattern, discernible in other suppliant dramas, that helps to assure the audience of Oedipus' ultimate victory.³³

The protagonist now represents a kind of “truth,” while all the obstacles he faces (the initial rejection by the Chorus, the evil machinations of Creon, the pleas of Polyneices) almost seem illusory, since they “are waged against [the certain] knowledge” of Oedipus' redemption.³⁴ Oedipus' security seems so assured that the numerous threats posed to his position in the grove have about them the air of dramaturgical contrivance. Reinhardt notes the “baroque” tendencies of this final Sophoclean play with its fascination for minute detail representing a “struggle to create drama within drama itself.” Reinhardt describes Ismene's arrival as “a whole recognition scene in miniature,” as Antigone painstakingly describes her sister's distant approach from the parodos (310-21).³⁵

Oedipus' certainty concerning his destiny and rightful place within the Eumenides' grove protects his character from the ironic separation of word and action that occurs so frequently in Sophoclean drama. Oedipus and Athens itself, as personified by Theseus and the Chorus, are incapable of subterfuge and are able to see through the hypocritical “performances” of outsiders such as Creon and the Theban government he represents. Oedipus, the last of the tragic protagonists of fifth-century drama, is accepted into a society where word and action go hand in hand. This helps to make Oedipus at Colonus into a “tragedy to end tragedy,” a deliberate resolution of the nagging ambiguities at the core of so much fifth-century drama. Both Creon and the polis he represents reveal a false, “theatricalized” nature, in which appearance is more important than essence and where human beings are exploited as empty material objects. This is exemplified by Creon's scheme to force Oedipus back to Thebes, where he will live a prisoner outside the city perimeter. This cruel plot will enable Thebes to reap the benefit of Oedipus' physical presence while protecting the city from actual contact with the pariah. It may now be seen why Sophocles gives Ismene the grand entrance, which Reinhardt described as a “miniature recognition scene.” Ismene reports the oracle, enabling Oedipus to unmask Creon even before he enters the stage and begins his elaborate “performance” of sympathy with his wretched cousin. This oracle will prove the final salvation for both Oedipus and Athens.

Eteocles and Polyneices share a good part of Creon's “theatrical” perfidy. For the sons of Oedipus, Reinhardt observes, “action has parted company with meaning,” as has “the appearance of justice with its reality.”³⁶ Athens represents a place where word and action exist in harmony, a place that can accept the paradox of Oedipus and, by extension, the paradox of tragic drama itself, which uses masks to “unmask truth.” Segal has argued that the character of Oedipus in this last play may be equated symbolically with the entire genre of tragedy. “By returning to this figure whose life contains the most extreme of tragic reversals, Sophocles seems to be consciously reflecting upon and transcending the tragic pattern which he did so much to develop.”³⁷

Just as Oedipus may be equated with the performative genre in which he appears, so too may the aged playwright be found reflected in his title character. In no other Greek tragedy is it so natural to speak of a personal identification between a character and a playwright. Like Oedipus and the Chorus, Sophocles was an old man by the time he wrote his last play. That Sophocles was held as a symbol of veneration during the latter stages of his life may be inferred by the fact that he was given the cult name of Dexion (“Receiver,” or “Hospitable One”) after his death and was worshiped as a beneficent deity (Vita 17). This curious historical fact unavoidably reminds the reader of the more spectacular deification that Oedipus undergoes in Sophocles' final play.

Several Greek and Roman sources preserve an anecdote that the octogenarian Sophocles was brought before a lawcourt by his middle-aged sons, who hoped to have the old man declared senile so that they might take control of his property. By way of self-defense, Sophocles was said to have read the jury the first stasimon of the play he was currently writing, Oedipus at Colonus (668-719), comprising the ode to Colonus and Athens. Sophocles won his case and “was escorted from the court as if from the theater …, with the applause and shouts of those present.”³⁸ While such a story cannot be verified, its very existence suggests something of the remarkable personal identification perceived in the ancient world between Oedipus at Colonus and its creator. Whatever the reality of Sophocles' domestic situation in his last years, Oedipus' expression of love for Athens and his terrifying revilement of his son have encouraged ancient as well as modern readers to read an autobiographical element into the character. While this is a dubious practice at best, it would be impossible as well as absurd to attempt it with any other character from Greek tragedy.

Sophocles did not live to see the final capitulation of Athens to Sparta. His final play allows the playwright, through the voice of his protagonist, to utter a lasting benediction for his homeland. A conspiracy of knowledge has been forged between Oedipus and the spectators from the very first moments of the drama. The audience has been allowed to share with the aging hero a sure knowledge of his destiny. Now with his daughters and Theseus at his side, Oedipus hears the sound of thunder that presages his passing from this world.

I will teach you, Aegeus' son, something which shall
be a treasure for your city that age cannot hurt.

(1518-19)

Oedipus commands Theseus not to describe his final moments to anyone, neither “to these citizens” … (1528), nor “to my own children, though they are dear all the same” (1529). By “citizens” Oedipus is ostensibly referring to the Chorus, but his words must surely carry to the theater full of Athenian citizens who, until this moment, have enjoyed their position as Oedipus' passive confidant. Oedipus is now passing into a stage of his journey that may be neither seen nor spoken about. It is impossible not to hear in Oedipus' final lines, before his onstage audience, the aged poet's farewell to his theater audience and to his city.³⁹

                    Come, dearest of friends,
may you yourself and this land and your helpers
be blessed, and in that prosperous state remember
me, one of the dead, and be fortunate forever.

(1552-55)

Oedipus at Colonus was first performed in 401 b.c., some four years after the death of Sophocles (406/5) and three years after the capitulation of Athens (404). Contemporary audiences must have been keenly aware of the play's unique status as the author's posthumous farewell to his community. The play forms a deliberate closure to Sophocles' career as a tragedian. In telling the story of Oedipus' final moments, Sophocles has found a means of absorbing his own persona into the artifice of the play. In effect, he “stages” himself before the citizens in the Theater of Dionysus, fashioning a dramatic character that may stand in for himself as artistic creator and defender of Athenian society. By immortalizing himself in the stage figure of Oedipus, Sophocles also seeks to give a mythic, theatrical permanence to his city's greatness, just as that greatness may well have seemed about to slip into the realm of history and myth. Sophocles understood the paradox of theatrical illusion as well as he did the paradox of tragic heroism. When Oedipus, the aged pariah, learns that his wretched body contains a beneficent power for whatever land may claim him, he asks incredulously, “When I am nothing, then am I a man?” (393). By transferring the image of a noble, stainless Athens into the seemingly fragile medium of a dramatic text, Sophocles bestows the gift of eternity upon his polis and himself as an artistic creator. Sophocles has learned the lessons of over sixty years in the service of Dionysus, that stage illusion may mirror spiritual truth. He knows that the craftsmen of Dionysus practice an art as magical as the deathless, self-renewing Athenian olive trees.

Notes

1. Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry, pp. 133, 152. For a more recent examination on the Antigone date, see the edition of Brown, p. 2.

2. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, p. 444 n. 49. Both Segal and Seale have written about the play's inexorable revelation of truth. Rosevach, “The Two Worlds of the Antigone,” pp. 16-26, is also interesting for its interpretation of the play's structure and thematics.

3. Demosthenes, “On the Embassy,” 19.246.

4. Reinhardt, Sophocles, p. 71.

5. Sophocles (ed. Grene and Lattimore, 2nd ed.), 1:169.

6. See especially Niall Slater's view of the monologue from Epidicus (81-103), in Plautus, p. 21. A near contemporary parallel to Sophocles' Sentry may be found in Aristophanes' Acharnians when Dicaeopolis repeatedly addresses his “soul” (… 480, 483) and his “suffering heart” (… 485) in humorously melodramatic fashion. There is also an obvious similarity between the Sentry and a Shakespearean clown such as Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice. Sophocles' bold juxtaposition of low- and high-born characters gives Antigone an unusually varied social view, comparable with Shakespeare's combination of Cleopatra and the asp salesman.

7. See also Brown, who cites the “out of breath messenger” motif as it appears in Euripides' Medea (1119-20) and Aristophanes' Birds (1121-22). Antigone 223-24 (ed. Brown).

8. See also Damen, “Actor and Character in Greek Tragedy,” p. 322.

9. Seale writes of the closing moments, “All that remains is the tableau of corpses, Teiresias' prediction made good and the culmination of the whole process, concrete visualization.” Vision and Stagecraft, pp. 108-9.

10. For the self-reflexive aspects of Dionysian allusion within this and other tragedies, see Bierl, “Was hat die Tragödie mit Dionysos zu tun? Rolle und Function des Dionysos am Beispiel der ‘Antigone’ des Sophokles,” pp. 43-58, and Dionysos und die griechische Tragödie: Politische und ‘metatheatralische’ Aspekte im Text. On choral self-reference in Sophocles, see also Heikkilä, “‘Now I have a Mind to Dance,’” and Henrichs, “Why Should I Dance?”

11. Antigone 162-210 (ed. Jebb).

12. See also Segal, “Time, Theatre, and Knowledge,” p. 465.

13. Reinhardt, Sophocles, pp. 98, 116.

14. Seale, Vision and Stagecraft, p. 218.

15. A similar drawing of the theater audience into the stage action occurs on Creon's second entrance when he speaks to the members of the Chorus and, over their heads, to the theater audience (… 513). The idea of the theater audience standing in for the Theban population is further reinforced by Jocasta's first lines, warning Oedipus and Creon not to quarrel publicly before the “house” (634-38). Segal detects a theatrical self-consciousness in operation throughout the play, particularly in Sophocles' “visual” language, the way characters and situations are described as spectatorial objects—or, as in the death of Jocasta or Oedipus' blinding, objects that must not or cannot “be seen.” “Time, Theatre, and Knowledge,” pp. 459-89.

16. Reinhardt, Sophocles, p. 130.

17. The hidden similarity between Oedipus and Teiresias is the subject of an interesting article by Lattimore, “Oedipus and Teiresias,” pp. 105-11. The 1984 Greek National Theatre production directed by Minos Volanakis closed the play with Oedipus' ceremonial acceptance of a walking staff similar to the one used by Teiresias, allowing the audience to “see” Oedipus “become” Teiresias. For the comparison of Oedipus to the Sphinx, see Segal, “Time, Theatre, and Knowledge,” p. 466.

18. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, p. 247. Taplin has analyzed the frustrating, thwarted closure of the play. He describes Oedipus' futile plea to leave Thebes and his ignominious final exit into the skene as a deliberate disappointment of audience expectation and a subtle means of making the play continue unresolved within the spectator's consciousness (Taplin, “Sophocles in His Theatre,” p. 174). …

19. … To Segal, the questions posed by the Chorus find no comforting answers in the protagonist's downfall. … Segal views the second stasimon as a self-conscious “ritual-within-ritual,” a passage that is “parallel and homologous with the larger, enframing ritual structure of the festival in which the play itself has its own ceremonial function” (Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, p. 235). See also Henrichs, “Why Should I Dance?,” pp. 65-73.

20. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, p. 47. Knox has elsewhere referred to the passage as “a sort of Sophoclean Verfremdungseffekt” (“Oedipus Rex,” in Essays Ancient and Modern, p. 139).

21. Beckett, Endgame, p. 58.

22. For the idea of Oedipus as a character self-consciously “standing in” for others, see also Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity.

23. Aeschylus' Eumenides shifts its scene midway through its action from the temple at Delphi to the Areopagus in Athens. Euripides' Children of Heracles is set in Marathon, a district near to and ruled by Athens.

24. Herodotus (6.21) relates the famous… [story] concerning Aeschylus' rival, Phrynichus, who was fined a thousand drachmas for reminding his audience of the recent fall of Miletus in his tragedy, The Capture of Miletus. The play was banned due to its unpleasant emotional effect on its audience. Phrynichus seems to have destroyed the aesthetic distance necessary for the calamities of tragedy to bring pleasure instead of pain. Lesky, however, notes that the incident may have been a political ruse aimed at humiliating the archon, Themistocles. Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry, p. 34.

25. Seale, Vision and Stagecraft, p. 113.

26. See also Oedipus at Colonus (ed. Blundell), p. 20 n. 4.

27. Birge, “The Grove of the Eumenides: Refuge and Hero Shrine in Oedipus at Colonus,” pp. 12-13.

28. Kirkwood, “From Melos to Colonus …,” p. 103.

29. Johnston, “The Metamorphoses of Theseus in Oedipus at Colonus,” pp. 280, 283. See also Edmunds, Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, pp. 69-70.

30. One is reminded of Bruno Gentili's definition of metatheater as any play that is “constructed from previously existing plays.” Theatrical Performances in the Ancient World, p. 15.

31. Gellie, Sophocles, p. 293 n. 4.

32. Seale, Vision and Stagecraft, p. 113.

33. Burian, “Suppliant and Savior: Oedipus at Colonus,” pp. 408-29.

34. Seale, Vision and Stagecraft, p. 113.

35. Reinhardt, Sophocles, pp. 202, 200-201.

36. Ibid., p. 204.

37. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, pp. 407, 406.

38. Plutarch, Moralia 785. See also Oedipus at Colonus (ed. Jebb), p. xl.

39. See also Reinhardt, Sophocles, pp. 220, 222.