family? Of the human psyche? If this is the ultimate tragedy, how should we define
tragedy
?
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Though fascinating in themselves, such debates also have a practical theatrical bearing. How we resolve them will affect how we imagine the play in performance. Accordingly, rather than simply interpret the play's meaning, I will try to visualize some important moments of the action in the light of that interpretation. There is much that no modern production can give us, especially the irrecoverable elements of the Athenian Festival of Dionysos, a holy occasion attended by priests and protected by gods, where the story the play told was part of a living religious tradition. The performance itself combined music, dancing, and acting with an authority and in a style now lost. But a good modern production may still clarify much that is distinctly Greek and Sophoclean. The Sophoclean idea I wish to explore, because it is likely to be strange to a modern audience, is that of the daimon
*, the divinity who commands the shape and outcome of an individual life.
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The first question a reader of
Oedipus The King
will ask and ponder is the question of Fate. Can it be true, as the events of his life strongly suggest, that Oedipus' actions have been shaped by a malign divinity? Though it is possible, by using a good deal of wanton ingenuity, to claim Oedipus' will has been free as his choices led him unaware into catastrophe, it seems to me that our first and overwhelming impression is correct, that the gods
have
willed Oedipus to do what he did. Not only do Oedipus and all the other characters come to this conclusion, but the design and verbal texture of the play confirm it. We may be convinced by analysis that the events of Oedipus' life must be fated, but in the theater it is the constant allusion to a daimonic shaping force that makes this fatedness vivid and powerful. Oedipus' story (and though a modern audience is likely to know its bare outlines, an ancient one would know it fully and familiarly from other plays and mythical sources) goes briefly as follows:
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 | | Laius, the King of Thebes, has learned from an oracle that he will be killed by his own son. When his wife, Jocasta, bears a son, Laius entrusts it to one of his shepherds with orders that he kill it by exposing it with its ankles pierced and bound on Mt. Cithairon. Instead, out of pity, the shepherd gives the child to his friend, a shepherd from Corinth, who returns with the child to Corinth and presents it to Polybos the king, who raises the child (whose swollen ankles cause him to be named Oedipus), as his son and heir. When Oedipus is a young man, a drunken guest at a feast tells him he is not Polybos' real son. Upset, Oedipus questions his parents about his birth, but they
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