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Oedipus Rex is widely regarded as one of the greatest plays, stories, and tragedies ever written. [21] [22] In 2015, when The Guardian ' s theatre critic Michael Billington, selected what he thinks are the 101 greatest plays ever written, Oedipus Rex was placed second, just after The Persians. [23]
Two such plays are Oedipus Rex, where the oracle's information that Oedipus has killed his father and married his mother brings about his mother's death and his own blindness and exile, and Iphigenia in Tauris, where Iphigenia realizes that the strangers she is to sacrifice are her brother and his friend, resulting in all three of them escaping ...
Oedipus (UK: / ˈ iː d ɪ p ə s /, also US: / ˈ ɛ d ə-/; Ancient Greek: Οἰδίπους "swollen foot") was a mythical Greek king of Thebes.A tragic hero in Greek mythology, Oedipus fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother, thereby bringing disaster to his city and family.
Oedipus the King, the most famous of the three, was written around 429 BC at the midpoint of Sophocles's career. [Notes 1] Oedipus at Colonus, the second of the three plays chronologically, was actually Sophocles's last play and was performed in 401 BC, after Sophocles's death. [36] There are nineteen surviving plays attributed to Euripides.
The origin of the word tragedy has been a matter of discussion from ancient times. The primary source of knowledge on the question is the Poetics of Aristotle.Aristotle was able to gather first-hand documentation from theater performance in Attica, which is inaccessible to scholars today.
They explored the psychology of the mind through monologues, focusing on one's inner thoughts, the central causes of their emotional conflicts, dramatizing emotion in a way that became central to Roman tragedy. Besides Seneca's works, a single example of fabula praetexta (tragedy based on Roman subjects) survives. [21] [22] [23] [24]
Examples include the final section (lines 908–1077) of Aeschylus' The Persians (472 BCE) in which Xerxes laments the defeat of his Persian army, the final appearance of Antigone in Sophocles' Antigone (c.442 BCE), the interaction between the chorus and Oedipus when he returns having blinded himself in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (c.429 BCE), and ...
When comparing Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to Seneca's Oedipus, both follow the story arc of Oedipus' journey, but Oedipus Rex — the original play – unravels the events slowly, building suspense and revealing Oedipus' true identity with dramatic irony. [4]