SOURCE: “The Two Oedipuses: Sophocles, Anguillara, and the Renaissance Treatment of Myth,” in MLN, Vol. 110, No. 1, January, 1995, pp. 178-91.

[In the following essay, Fabrizio examines how Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara, a Renaissance writer, dealt with what he deemed inconsistencies of characterization in his adaptation of Sophocles's text.]

To discuss so minor a writer as Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara (ca. 1517-1571) seems like an exercise in willful obscurantism or personal enthusiasm for what is better dead and buried. Of course, it could be claimed with Ernst Robert Curtius and Aby Warburg that “God lurks in detail,” that only by a minute exploration of even the minor figures of a period can we achieve any synthesis and understanding of literary history. We are all aware from experience how often a second or even third rate writer illuminates more clearly than a master the mentality of a period. But a more tangible justification exists for conjuring up the name of Anguillara from the dusty tomes of the past. His Edippo tragedia was both the first performed and first printed vernacular version of the Oedipus story in the Renaissance. Called “among the most famous tragedies” by one of those eighteenth-century collectors of details, Crescimbeni (I. iv. 309), the Edippo was printed twice in 1565,¹ once in Padua and once in Venice. It was also performed twice, first in Padua in 1556 (Pelaez 77) or 1560 (Lorini 88) on a permanent stage designed by Falconetto for the home of Alvise Cornaro (Fiocco 142; “Idea” 219) and, I believe, a second time in Vicenza in 1561 on a temporary wooden stage designed by Palladio for the Olympic Academy. Both productions were done with a splendor and pomp befitting the famous story and befitting a text that would return the story of Oedipus to the stage after more than a thousand year hiatus.

While the stage history of the 1585 production of Sophocles' Oedipus for the inauguration of Palladio's Teatro Olimpico has been told repeatedly, both in its own time (Ingegneri) and after (Gallo, Puppi, Schrade), the tale of Anguillara's play is hardly known. And it probably will never be told, lacking as it does early MS or printed evidence and depending on contradictory reports in those ponderous but charming biographical and bibliographical texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth century: Castellini, Temanza, Mazzuchelli, Tiraboschi, Fontanini, Angiolgabriello, and others. That the Edippo has been confined to the dust bins of literature by an unfortunate loss of evidence is ironic, for Anguillara repeatedly complained, often with a broad smile, against his fate. In one poem, he said that while “Fortune” showed “Her smiling face” to his patron, he only saw “Her behind” (“culo”: “Capitolo: Nella Sedia” 115). Yet according to our standards, he was quite fortunate: a poet of many witty poems in the style of Berni; a translator who even recently was called a star (Melczer 246-265); a letterato called upon by the Olympic Academy to write the preface for the first Italian performance of the first Italian tragedy, Trissino's Sofonisba (Corrigan 199); a writer who served at the court of King Henry II and Catherine de' Medici; and last but not least, an aspiring inventor (“Lettera alla Signoria”).

And yet his reputation has become as small and misshaped as his body; he was, in fact, a dwarfish hunchback. Though he laughed at his deformity, calling his body a mess of mountains and valleys (“Capitolo al Cardinale di Trento” 301-302), he—I think—would have cried at his historical neglect, and especially at the neglect of his Edippo, which as his preface shows, he hoped would bring fame by association with the noble tragic genre. Not fame, but infamy came to it instead. His Edippo was damned by both contemporaries and by nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics, and by all for the same reason: its additions to Sophocles' text. A Latin letter by the priest Girolamo Negri mentions its first performance, complaining that its four hour production was “undecipherable” (tota … est etrusca; 120). De Nores, in his 1588 Poetica, called these added episodes that ran so counter to Aristotle's prescriptions little less than vicious. Later critics were no less kind, castigating Anguillara on the same basis: those dreaded episodes (D' Ovidio 277; Pelaez 79; Bosisio 83-84; Symonds II 244). But these additions are at the heart of Anguillara's vision. While all translation involves a degree of exegesis, particularly in the Renaissance (Norton 179), Anguillara literally recreated the figure of Oedipus. His Edippo is close to those types of imitations recognized by modern criticism, imitations that have a “dialectical relation” to their subtexts (Greene 39-40), works that retain the terms of their sources but “mean them in another sense” (Bloom 14). But the Edippo is really unique in what it attempts. Other Renaissance writers did one of two things: they translated Sophocles' text and left it as is;² or they mimicked its structures, as defined by Aristotle, in newly conceived plots and characters. No one else in the period completely redefined Oedipus.

Both Anguillara and his contemporaries start from the same point: the riddles embedded in Sophocles' text. Not what is understood there but what is incomprehensible forms the basis of the Renaissance Oedipus. While his contemporaries shun the textual riddles, Anguillara faces them head on. He accepts Sophocles' plot and modifies Oedipus' behavior. Into his second and third acts, Anguillara confines the whole of Sophocles' plot, interjecting into it new allusions that redefine its characters. In the rest of the text, Anguillara does the opposite: he expands the plot by inventing new material and by drawing bits and pieces from Euripides, Seneca, and Statius, and then interjects back into it material from Sophocles. At the same time, Anguillara maintains a link with the Middle Ages and the medieval Oedipus romans: their concern for pathos in particular. No wonder critics were dumbfounded and distraught. Nevertheless there is a sense to the whole, a reason for using such a variety of sources and motifs. Anguillara tried to solve a problem, a problem that he and his contemporaries noticed in Sophocles' Oedipus and its Aristotelian interpretation: Oedipus did not act consistently. Anguillara's object is to bring consistency to Edippo's life, to reconcile what I call the paradox of the two Oedipuses. With an almost Freudian fervor, Anguillara transforms his Edippo into a study of desire within the family, geometrically plotting its course from compassion and love to rivalry and incest. So what follows is not the story of the resuscitation of a dead body as much as an attempt to expose how a Renaissance writer understood or misunderstood the classic mind. And this story is very much the story of the two Oedipuses.

Oedipus is famous for his intelligence. To Sophocles (8) and Euripides (1506), he is glorious and wise for his ability to decipher a riddle. But in Sophocles' Oedipus, Oedipus is also obtuse. He is unable to put together elementary facts of his past with his present—facts of time, of place, of number, and of geneology. Every student has been perplexed and stimulated by this paradox, the paradox of the two Oedipuses. Elaborate theories have been devised to explain away the paradox of the two Oedipuses. In one theory Oedipus may be in fact neither parricide nor incestuous (Goodhardt; Ahl); he is guilty rather of misreading his past, his parentage, of blindly behaving as if the oracle must be his fate (Ahl). In another theory, Oedipus has always been sure of his past, of his patricide and incest; when the plague comes, he engages in a performance of ignorance in order to allow his people to ritually expiate themselves in the unravelling of his guilt (Vellacott). And of course, the most famous theory of our time, Freud's, explains away the paradox of the two Oedipuses by a dichotomy of the mind, a division between unconscious desire and conscious action, between suppression and anxiety. In each of these theories, the Oedipuses are reconciled, denying either that Oedipus commits a crime or accepting the crime and explaining it away. Whichever theory we accept, we realize that Sophocles' language is rich in paradox.

Against a backdrop of Aristotelian theory, Renaissance writers and critics also struggled to repair the split in the two Oedipuses. Some recognized that Aristotle's theory of character transformation rationalized the dichotomy, the theory of peripeteia—a reversal of fortune that forces one to face the past—and the theory of anagnorisis—a recognition of the meaning of one's past in terms of the present. Aristotle's rationalization provided little practical help. Oedipus' past was filled with so many inconsistencies that writers avoided the text and instead used its motifs. For example, in the tragedy Alidoro (1568) a baby is cast out of its royal home because of a dire oracle; later he returns and unknowingly commits incest with his sister (Neri 173-174). Gabriele Bombace, who probably wrote this tragedy, explains its creative methodology in his description of the play's first performance. He pinpoints the connections between Sophocles' text and Aristotle's theory: “There are no lack of literati who, comparing diligently the anagnorisis and peripeteia of Oedipus with that of Alidoro, dare for several reasons to affirm that this is better than that: and among other reasons because it is beyond belief that Oedipus … with so many signs of correspondence between place and time … had never thought that he was the murderer of Laius, the which error was sustained and defended by Aristotle the best he could as something outside the scenic action of the play itself. It is nevertheless very important and very far from the verisimilitude found in Alidoro” (Tragedia II 1004). There are three key elements here: 1) the reference to the passage in Aristotle that concerns a play's inner action and prior events (Poetics. XV. 1454b. 10d); 2) the intimation that Aristotle's theory of tragedy rationalizes the inconsistencies in Oedipus; and 3) the appeal to verisimilitude—fidelity to real life—as the standard that constitutes rationality.

Anguillara is unique in his use of the plot of Sophocles' Oedipus to solve what such writers saw as the irrationalities of the text. Most eliminated the plot of Oedipus and either imitated its handling of peripeteia and anagnorisis or competed with its horror by exploiting the shock of incest. Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (1590) imitates not the life of Oedipus but the way Oedipus came to recognize the meaning of his acts through reversals of fortune. Guarini so complicates and multiplies the reversals in plot that they outdo those in Oedipus. Each new twist foils the characters; they are blind to its meaning. But all finally becomes clear, for the world is rational once the secret design of Fate is revealed (Perella 257-259). Although concentrating on these reversals, Guarini retains certain elements of the plot of Oedipus: a child lost to its true parents, a dark fate for the state, an oracle that predicts a cure. Tasso's Torrismondo (1573) also manipulates and “renews” the story of Oedipus (Neri 147), while forsaking its plot. It retains a dire prediction, a child purposely separated from its parents, and incest. But here too the episodes are constructed so as to complicate the plot and thus rival the way its classical source, Oedipus, used peripeteia and anagnorisis. And again the hero, perfectly rational, is victimized by the irrationality of the daily world in which he lives (Dainard 45).

Rather than its complex structure, most Renaissance writers tried to imitate Oedipus' horror. Dramatists noticed that Aristotle modeled his cathartic theory on Oedipus; therefore, they began to locate the catharsis of pity and fear in the attraction and repulsion for incest. Cesare della Porta, in his Delpha (1586), says that his subject is so terrible that “it will overwhelm (involva) Oedipus in perpetual silence” (Neri 157). Muzio Manfredi's Semiramis (ca. 1583; Herrick 206-209) was long praised for its exploitation of the “ferocious” passions (Neri 140). But it was Speroni's Canace (1542) that most exploited the incest theme. In fact, Speroni theorized that incest may not be an evil (Speroni 215); but even if it is, an evil hero may evoke a catharsis (Speroni 229). In the critical battle over the Canace, one thing is clear: incest is justified as a legitimate way to arouse pity and fear (Cf. Weinberg II. 925, 948-952). Canace was, nevertheless, castigated for its lasciviousness (Cinzio 139) and, like the Edippo, for its use of disparate episodes from a variety of sources (Cinzio 107-109; Roaf I-LI). Constructed according to those laws of Aristotle that explain Oedipus (Roaf XLVIII, n. 43), the Canace pays homage to Sophocles' but refuses to imitate its plot.

Anguillara does both. He takes on the great text; he takes on the problem of the two Oedipuses who act inconsistently. He does everything with the object of eliminating the contradictions in Sophocles' text and in Oedipus' character. Bombace, as already mentioned, pointed out not only the inconsistencies in Oedipus, but also the way in which Aristotle tried to justify them as material “outside the scenic action of the play” (Tragedia II 1004). Apparently alluding to the same passage in Aristotle, De Nores (Poetica, 1588) takes the opposite position. He attacks Anguillara based on a justification of Aristotle's theory. Aristotle says: “The irrational (alogon) must not be in the episodes/incidents (pragmata). If this can't be done, [the irrational must be kept] outside the tragedy” (alogon de méden einai en tois pragmasin, ei de mē exso tēs tragoidias; XV. 1454b. 10d). Aristotle, thus, distinguishes a double structure in every play: a structure of words referring to the past and a structure of acts performed in the present. The irrational (alogon) may exist in the verbal allusions to the past; so it is justifiable that in all his time in Thebes prior to the play's opening Oedipus had never mentioned Laius (see Poetics, p. 57, note d). To explain such prior matters would require material to be added to the play. De Nores, in his criticism of Anguillara, points out that verisimilitude demands that the episodes (pragmata) in a play be “few” and “necessary.” Like “too many feet,” too many episodes impede rather than improve movement (18 verso). According to De Nores, the episodes Anguillara added to Sophocles' Oedipus are “beside the point,” violate “decorum,” are “unnecessary” and “superfluous” (18 verso-19 recto).

For example, Anguillara reconciles events prior to the play's opening with each other and with those in the play. Polibo, whose wife is barren, prepares in advance for a foundling to be accepted as legitimate by having his wife feign pregnancy. Thus Edippo leaves Corinth not because he is accused of bastardy and doubts his parentage but because he wishes to know his future. Motivated by doubt, Sophocles' Oedipus goes to Delphi not to learn his future but to recover his past. Leaving Delphi still in doubt, Sophocles' Oedipus nevertheless acts as if he is sure of the identity of his parents by shunning Corinth. Edippo acts logically. After hearing the oracle, he refuses to return to Corinth because he is sure of his parentage, sure that he can control his future, sure that he will subvert the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother.

The way Anguillara repairs what he must have thought as the illogic of Sophocles' text is apparent in the handling of Edippo's knowledge of his past as a prelude to his investigation of Laio's death. In spite of all his years in Thebes, Sophocles' Oedipus is strangely ignorant of the facts of Laius' death until he begins his relentless inquiry. Edippo knows everything; he talked many times about it. He knows when and how Laio was killed. Only one detail he does not know: where the murder took place, a detail that we may forgive anyone for overlooking. But at the end of every correction a new error pops up. Knowing the facts, why had Edippo never done anything? Every age seems to negotiate a path between tolerable and intolerable irrationalities.

Anguillara, like commentators today (Goodhardt; Ahl), noticed that the case Oedipus builds against himself is not reasonably strong. Therefore, Anguillara piles up so many clues to prove that Edippo killed Laio that all doubt vanishes. Not only are all the numbers correct: time, place, and witnesses, but new details are added. Edippo accepts that he has killed Laio only because the Theban shepherd, Forbante, proves he is a reliable witness by even more physical evidence, a distinctive wound on his head and distinctive words at the scene of the killing that Edippo recognizes. But it is a final clue that confirms his belief: at the time of the killing, Laio wore “a red cloak all adorned in gold and embroidery” (un manto rosso / Tutto guarnito d'oro, e di ricami; Act III, Sc. 2, 29 verso-30 recto). Discovery (anagnorisis) is a matter of purely physical evidence. Guilt is detached from a personal judgment of responsibility. Investigatory objectivity and expository balance are deemed the essence of rationality.

Irrational unbalance is an expository technique in Sophocles. While the murder investigation is in the foreground, incest floats in the background. As the one investigation turns into the other, many details of the first are left unanswered and of the second unasked. In Anguillara, the murder and the incest run along parallel but separate tracts. First, he establishes a history of familial love and simultaneously a mechanism to prevent its eruption into its opposite—incest and rivalry. Next he arranges a curse on incest to preface the curse on regicide. To introduce the incest, he carefully builds a family structure marked by compassion and love. Edippo flees Corinth when he is close to twenty. This allows Anguillara to stress Edippo's loving relationship to his supposed parents as well as the age difference between him and his wife, who is sixty when the play begins. Edippo has been loved by his Corinthian parents, has had a full childhood, has felt safe and sound in Corinth. As he has been loved, Edippo loves his own children, who when the play opens are old enough to rule and to marry, old enough to have a history of his guiding and protecting them. Anguillara was surely influenced in the matter of age by Euripides' Phoenissae and Statius' Thebaid and the medieval Oedipus romans. Sophocles hardly mentions age at all. When Oedipus talks about parents and family, he speaks about them in terms of unfulfilled desire. The “sweetest” (hēdiston) sight of all must be to see “the faces” (ommata) of one's parents (999), he conjectures.

Surely one of the episodes De Nores found “superfluous” is what may be called “the contracts scene” (Act I, Sc. 2): a scene that demonstrates Edippo's deep love for his children and his apprehension of the danger of familial love. Assuming that he controls two kingdoms, one that he will inherit (Corinth) and one that he has conquered (Thebes), Edippo draws up an elaborate contract in which one city is given to Polinice and the other to Eteocle. He then assures the future of his daughters, contracting each to a noble marriage. To a great extent any rivalry or jealousy within the family is prevented by these contracts before it begins. But is the attempt to block out such future conflicts a mark of their strength? Incest and civic rebellion, Edippo tells his children, are tied together, a connection found in every work on Oedipus from Statius' Thebaid to Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, from Silvestrius (76) to the works of the Medieval mythographers (Anderson 121-125). And thus, within this civic context, Edippo issues his first curse: “May God send his anger and vengeance / Against anyone who with his own flesh / Tries to vent his lasciviousness; / Let him live in misery, a beggar. / Deprived of light, and suffer / Every anguish, either in prison or in exile” (Act I, Sc. 2, 7 recto). Incest becomes a part of the foreground of Anguillara's play; it is tied not only to the prediction given to Laio and Edippo but paralleled to the later oracle about the cause of the plague (Act II, Sc. 3).

Thus Anguillara's Edippo issues a double curse, one against incest that balances the one against the murderer. Sophocles' curse is directed only against the murderer. Nor is incest, apparently, introduced as the cause of the plague in Sophocles, while in Anguillara the cause is linked both to murder and to incest. Nowhere is Sophocles' use of misdirection that leads to misinterpretation better seen than in the wording of the oracle about the plague's cause. To understand the Apollonian oracle in Sophocles, one is forced to devise a theory to put its clues together. Indeed, it is not very clear which words belong to the god and which to Creon (Bollack II. 59; Ahl 59). In a rather off-hand manner, Creon says:

I'd like to say what I heard from the god.
Phoibos, the king, clearly (emphanōs) commands us
To drive out (elaunein) the miasma nourishing the
          land,
And not to nourish the incurable.

(95-98)

Does the word “clearly” (emphanōs) refer to the manner of the command or to its content? Does it mean that Apollo commands openly or “unambiguously” (Kamerbeek 48)? The cause of the plague is not named. What or who should be driven out is not named. Are the words that follow Apollo's or Creon's interpretation of them?

Driving out the man (andrēlatountas), or
          for blood spilled paying back with spilled blood,
For it is blood that has turned the city into a wintry
          place.

(100-101)

The words “driving out the man” (andrēlatountas) are syntactically connected to Phoibos' commands in Creon's earlier report of the oracle (Kamerbeek 48). But are they logically connected? Creon's “driving out the man” is an exact parallel to Apollo's words “driving out … the miasma” (elaunein). Has Creon substituted his word “man” for the god's word “miasma”? Nowhere is the incest explicitly mentioned, for it is unclear whether miasma, which is almost always associated with a dead body (Parker 128-132), may ever be connected with incest (Parker 97; Oudemans 48, 50-51, 128).

All this is changed in Anguillara. His oracle is perfectly clear:

These are Apollo's own remarks:
An infamous foreigner (peregrino) inhabits Thebes,
Who is not a foreigner, in fact he's Theban,
But believes he's a foreigner, and all believe the
          same of him.
He's already killed Laius, King of Thebes,
To whom he's closely tied by blood;
And he does now, and has done even greater evil.

(Act II. Sc. 3, 14 recto)

One person committed the crime; that person is a Theban who thinks he is a stranger; he is a relative of the dead king; he has committed an even greater evil than regicide: clearly incest.

Incest, incorporated into a family structure filled with love, provokes constant talk of rivalry and jealousy. Edippo labels his Corinthian father “rival.” He did not go back to Corinth “because the oracle had already predicted / That I must be … / … adulterer and rival to my father” (… perché già l'oracol mi predisse, / Ch'io … dovea … / di mio padre farmi / Adultero, e rival …”; Act III, Sc. 4, 35 recto). The accusation of adultery and rivalry is repeated over and over again in the text (e.g., Act 5, Sc. 2, 58 recto). In fact, all along Giocasta and Edippo have lived aware that their relationship is symbolically incestuous. After the discovery that Edippo has killed Laio, but before the discovery of the incest, Giocasta calls Edippo “son.” To his question about why she calls him son rather than husband, Giocasta says: “Edippo, because I am much older than you / I may still call you son” (Edippo, per l'età c'haggio maggiore, / Di voi, posso figliuol chiamarvi anchora; Act III, Sc. 4, 36 recto). Edippo responds: “Out of the same kind of respect I have always / Treated you with the reverence I would have for a mother” (Per lo stesso rispetto anch'io v'ho sempre / Portato riverentia come a madre; 36 recto).

Creating a close family structure for Edippo forced Anguillara to psychologize its internal mechanism. Every family member's action dovetails with an appropriate motivation. And motives conform to rules of verisimilitude and decorum: fidelity to ordinary reality and popular manners. The blinding scene demonstrates this. In Sophocles, blinding is epistemological, tied to the question of how we know; in Anguillara, it is psychological, tied to the question of why we feel.

Anguillara, following Euripides, Seneca, and Statius, times Edippo's blinding prior to Giocasta's suicide. Sophocles alone orders the blinding after it, transforming it from an act of simple self-punishment to a stage in the discovery of truth. Knowing is a function of memory and so is action. If our memories are fantasies, how can we act intelligently? There are indeed two Oedipuses: the fictitious character created by circumstance and coincidence, and the real person created by “mis-memory” and misunderstanding. Oedipus acts foolishly because he thinks he is someone other than who he is. With eyes dependent on fiction, he failed to recognize a distinction most fundamental to self-knowledge: the meaning of his origin. But without eyes, and with memory re-formed, he sees in a new way. Does he now see the “real” Oedipus? His words at the scene of the blinding force us to consider the question of knowing:

Because they [his eyes] did not see either
the things (outh') I suffered or the evil
things (outh') I did, but in darkness the
remaining time, seeing the things (ous)
that I wished not to see and seeing the
things (ous) I wished to see but did not know.

(1271-1274)

To what does he refer by the paralleled set of four unidentified “things”? Do the first two refer to his past? Do the things he suffered refer to his exposition as a baby and the evil oracle he was given? Do the things he did refer to his patricide and incest? Does the third thing, the thing he wished not to see, refer to the future of his incestuous children? And finally does the fourth thing refer to his present, to his desire to have seen and to have known as a child his biological parents? Perhaps these “things,” the particles (outh' … outh', ous … ous), ought not to be taken as literally as they are here (Parry 269) or as Bassi does in his edition of the Greek text (129, note to II. 1271-1273). We are misled by such traps and almost cannot prevent ourselves from falling into them. But to misunderstand is to enter the world of Oedipus and into the possibility of discovering error and therefore of realizing truth.

Anguillara avoids the traps. He concentrates on the psychological impact of the blinding, on the shock of learning that his loving Corinthian parents were not his real parents, on the guilt of discovering that the wife with whom he lived as if she were a mother and who treated him like a son was indeed his mother. Finding Giocasta screaming in their bedroom, he says to her: “Mother, wife, turn to me / Your eyes, and look at your son and husband / And you will see what penalty (pena) he has chosen / To punish himself (punirsi) for his sin” (Act IV, Sc. 1, 44 recto). Horror and passion dominate the description of the scene. Oedipus displays bloodied eyes to Giocasta. Timing his blinding before her suicide gives him the opportunity to act as if he were a child asking for approval or at least for acknowledgment that what he has done is right. The Edippo who closes the play is the same Edippo who opened it, except that he is in possession of a few more facts—however pertinent. His emotional and instinctual ties to Giocasta are as powerful as before he knew the truth. He still loves her. Everything in the scene highlights the deep-rooted ties of love that exist among family members. Edippo kisses Antigone and bloodies her face. Ismene runs for bandages to bind Edippo's bloodied eyes. Blood, tears, and screams replace the contracts at the beginning of the play that were meant to bring about calm and to achieve peaceful social and familial relationships. Edippo's reasonable concern and love for his children is mirrored in the logic of such legal devices. But the more Edippo tries to construct a logical world, the more Anguillara tries to find fitting reasons for action, the more reason fails and the unruly passions are released. The Edippo reflects the logic of Freud's version of the family drama more than anything we find in Sophocles.

What is really a minor play, rather melodramatic and unpoetic, pinpoints a Renaissance tendency: in spite of its reverence for the ancients, the Renaissance destroyed their myths in trying to understand them.

Notes

1. I believe that the earlier printed editions mentioned in the literature are all in error: 1556 (Mazzuchelli, Vol. I, Pt. 2, 789-790; Paitoni IV 60; Ginguené; Mutini); 1554 (Bárberi-Squarotti, who in a letter to me disavows this date); 1560 (Bosisio 80).

2. For example, see Alessandro Pazzi de' Medici, Edipo principe, 1526, existing only in MS (Neri 51, note 2, and 189; Inventari IV 225, No. 372; Quadrio IV 103); Guido Guidi, Oedipus, 1532 (Bolgar 525, listed without date); Bernardo Segni (d. 1559), Edipo principe (Quadrio IV 103), not printed until 1778 (Neri 96, note 1); Pietro Angelii Bargeo, Edipo tiranno, printed in 1589 (Quadrio IV 103; Schaaber 481).

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