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    A Study Guide for Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex (aka Oedipus the King)"
    A Study Guide for Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex (aka Oedipus the King)"
    A Study Guide for Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex (aka Oedipus the King)"
    Ebook47 pages39 minutes

    A Study Guide for Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex (aka Oedipus the King)"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex (aka Oedipus the King)," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535829878
    A Study Guide for Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex (aka Oedipus the King)"

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      A Study Guide for Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex (aka Oedipus the King)" - Gale

      3

      Oedipus Rex

      Sophocles

      c. 430, B.C.

      Introduction

      Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is probably the most famous tragedy ever written. It is known by a variety of title (the most common being Oedipus Rex), including Oedipus the King and Oedipus Tyrannus. Sophocles, first produced the play in Athens around 430 B.C. at the Great Dionysia, a religious and cultural festival held in honor of the god Dionysus, where it won second prize. In the play Oedipus, King of Thebes, upon hearing that his city is being ravaged by fire and plague, sends his brother-in-law Creon to find a remedy from the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. When Creon returns Oedipus begins investigating the death of his predecessor, Laius, and discovers through various means that he himself was the one who had unknowingly killed Laius and then married his own mother, Jocasta. Jocasta commits suicide, Oedipus blinds himself, takes leave of his children, and is led away. Aristotle praises the play in his Poetics for having an exemplary, well-constructed plot, one which is capable of inspiring fear and pity not only in its audience but especially in those who have merely heard of the story. Following Aristotle’s appraisal, many prominent authors including Voltaire, Frederich Nietzsche, and Sidmund Freud reacted at length to the play’s themes of incest and patricide. In the twentieth century, the most influential of these thinkers, Freud, showed that Oedipus’s fate is that of every man; the Oedipus Complex is the definitive parent-child relationship. Throughout history, writers have drawn upon the myth of Oedipus, and dramatists, composers, and poets, including Pierre Corneille, Fredrich von Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Igor Stravinsky, and Jean Cocteau, have both written on, translated, and staged the tragedy; contemporary filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Woody Allen have directed self-consciously autobiographical versions of Oedipus Rex.

      Author Biography

      Sophocles was born in Colonus, Greece, c. 496 B.C. and died in Athens c. 406 B.C. The son of an armor manufacturer, he was a member of a family of considerable rank, was well-educated, and held a number of significant political positions in addition to being one of the best dramatists in his age—an age in which his dramatic peers included the famed playwrights Euripides and Aeschylus. Sophocles studied under the musician Lampras and under Aeschylus, later becoming his rival. He lived and wrote during an era known as the Golden Age of Athens (480-406 B.C.); in 480 and 479 B.C. the city had won the battles of Salamis and Plataea against Persian invaders, thereby inaugurating what would become a definitive period in the history of Western literature and society, famed for its flourishing political and cultural life. The Golden Age lasted until Athens’s humiliating defeat to Sparta in 404 B.C., after 27 years of war between the two city-states (commonly referred to as the Peloponnesian War).

      In many ways, the dramatic arts stood at the center of the

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