The composition of the Oedipus coloneus
Creators: name: Cahill, Judith Anne Jane
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2010

description: Although Sophocles, according to tradition, died before the Oedipus Coloneus, his last work, was performed, there is no reason to believe that his intention in composing the play was fundamentally different from his life-long practice, that is to create a drama to be presented before a contemporary audience, and to win the prize in the contest for tragic poets at the Festival of Dionysus in Athens. In Part I of this study I have attempted to describe the manner in which Sophocles constructed his drama. I have divided the play into twenty manageable sections and devoted a chapter to each. Within each chapter each line, group of lines and, finally, each section, has been examined with a view to determining how it contributes to the process of changing the situation at the beginning of the drama, where Oedipus, a tired and wretched beggar, arrives in Colonus, to the situation at its end, when his life is over. At every stage the requirements of the dramatic circumstances, the demands of the plot, the constraints of the medium and the artistic effects for which the playwright aimed have been examined. The discussion takes the form of a commentary in that each point, regardless of its nature, has been dealt with as it arises in the text of the play. The reader will find himself confronted in turn/ as Sophocles must have been, with considerations of the reactions of the audience, theatrical effects, plot progression and so forth. Textual difficulties have been discussed only when their resolution is crucial for determining the contribution of a certain passage to the construction of the play. From this discussion a view of the play as an experience shared by the playwright and his audience emerges. The original audience was able to appreciate this play without the aid of a commentary. Therefore, no interpretation of a line, passage or scene which could not have been readily understood during performance can be correct. Further, the original audience was treated to aural and visual effects of which our text, with its complete lack of stage directions, bears only indirect traces. I have tried to determine what these effects may have been. It is hoped that the resulting observations will enable the reader better to understand the play, as the first spectators must have done - not primarily as an abstract treatise with a significant message for our times, but as a crowd-pleasing performance, complete in itself. In Part II of this study I have examined the question of the distribution of the roles in the Oedipus Coloneus among the limited number of actors which the playwright was allowed. I have first reviewed various suggestions for the distribution of the roles among three speaking actors. Every known scheme, however, has serious drawbacks which would have marred the quality of the performance of the play. I have therefore proceeded to examine various schemes wherein the roles are distributed among four actors. None of these, however, fully accounts for the complex system of entrances and exits and the occasional awkward silences. These phenomena can be explained only if Sophocles knew, when he wrote his play, how many actors were to be allocated to him and who they were to be. I have shown that this is a reasonable possibility. According to the distribution of the roles here proposed, Sophocles wrote his play to suit the specific talents of four speaking actors, and also employed a mute. The idiosyncracies of the Oedipus Coloneus are thus adequately explained.