Tragic Dramas of Oedipus Rex and Antigone - Essay Example

Tragic Dramas of Oedipus Rex and Antigone In the days of ancient Greece and Rome, people didn't have such easy access to entertainment as we do now. For these ancient people, one of the highlights of the year was the ability to go to the theatre where they would be able to watch live dramas acted out on stage. Since tickets were free to every registered citizen, plays had to be written to appeal to a wide variety of social classes and often with more than one simple purpose. More than just providing an afternoon of entertainment, many of these plays also contained within them lessons regarding proper moral, social, and political behavior. It was up to the playwrights to teach the people how to behave and the rules of society within the metropolis. While many of the plays were comedies, demonstrating the more ridiculous consequences that could be experienced if individuals did not abide by the established codes of conduct, others were dramas, revealing much more serious potentialities that could affect more than just the average citizen. As they were presented, these dramas demonstrated the degree to which the entire culture could be disrupted if someone in power chose to break the rules. Some of these dramas have survived into the modern day because they had such a profound effect on their audiences and told stories about mythological or legendary characters and events. Dramas such as Oedipus Rex and Antigone are good examples of this kind of tragic drama. To qualify as a tragic drama, Aristotle identified three main factors that were present in every tragic drama and which were essential to the plot development. These factors were referred to as hamartia, anagnorisis and peripeteia. The term hamartia commonly refers the idea of a tragic flaw (Aristotle, 1282). It is the concept that a noble person will fail due to some inherent flawed portion of his character which causes him to engage in a specific behavior pattern or make an error in judgment rather than due to the manipulations of a vengeful god or as a result of violating the gods' laws. Although the audience might see it, even they are not necessarily supposed to recognize the hero's mistake or misbehavior at the time he commits it, but it will eventually become clear through the action of the play that without this mistake, the tragedy would not have happened. This eventual realization of the initial mistake on the part of the character is what is referred to as anagnorisis (Aristotle, 1283). In Aristotelian terms, this word essentially means recognition. In most cases, this realization occurs suddenly for the character in a kind of epiphany moment when the hero finally understands that they brought this fate on themselves. This epiphany can also shed light on the true nature of all the characters within the play, sometimes something much different than what was expected or assumed. The anagnorisis leads naturally into the third element, that of peripeteia. This term refers to a sudden reversal in action or position based upon logic and intellect (Aristotle, 1283). In tragic drama, it refers to the reversal of the character's fortunes - everything they had is lost. This reversal of fortunes flows naturally as a part of the story, but it usually takes the audience, and the character, by surprise. Although this idea can be traced as a part of the hero’s character, it was more typically used to refer to the external circumstances surrounding the event and the character. Understanding these key elements of a tragic drama helps modern day students characterize these plays simply by looking to see if they adhere to the concepts. In Oedipus the King, for example, the action opens as Oedipus addresses his people, who have come to him hoping he will cure their city of a plague. Rather than encourage them to pray to the gods, Oedipus ridicules them for their prayers and tells them they should have come to him first: “What means this reek of incense everywhere, / From others, and am hither come, myself, / I Oedipus, your world-renowned king” (4-8). This statement reveals the pride he takes in himself, his abilities and his position as their king. Throughout the play, Oedipus continues to demonstrate excessive pride in himself and a determination to force things to go his way, such as when he left his homeland to avoid the prediction of his fate, answering the riddle of the Sphinx, and replacing the missing king of a neighboring kingdom, something no one else had been capable of doing. Even when others are trying to warn him that perhaps he shouldn't be so adamantly harsh in pronouncing the fate of the unknown murderer of old King Laius, Oedipus is unable to heed the warnings because he is too busy listening to his own inner counsel and too full of his own authority. Oedipus' mistake happens, of course, when he publicly promises to find the murderer who has caused the plague and bring him to harsh justice. When the blind prophet Teresias, a highly respected counselor, is finally forced to reveal that Oedipus was the murderer of King Laius and Oedipus’ true father, pride again steps in the way, preventing Oedipus from believing the possibility of the truth and causing him to continue to press the investigation that will bring about his doom. When he is finally able to realize the truth, it delivers a shock that drives him mad and his wife/mother Jocasta to kill herself. In the space of moments he loses his wife, his crown, his home, his confidence, his eyesight, and his family. Thus the play starts with the hero showing excessive pride in himself and his own abilities, but this pride leads him to make decisions that bring about his own doom. When he realizes his mistake, it is sudden and catastrophic, plunging both the character and the city into immediate chaos as it loses both its king and its queen and throwing doubt onto the fates of the children produced by the marriage. Antigone is the continuation of Oedipus' story as it reveals how the lives of those children play out in the aftermath of their parents' destruction. Like Oedipus, Antigone is noble at the start of the play, still a princess of Thebes following the death of her father and the subsequent deaths of her brothers who killed each other fighting over the throne they were to share (194-95). Being ordered not to bury the brother who brought war to the gates of Thebes by the new king and her uncle Creon, Antigone decides to risk the king’s wrath in favor of honoring the will of the gods. “Not through fear / Of any man’s resolve was I prepared / Before the Gods to bear the penalty / Of sinning against these” (501-04) she tells the king upon her capture. Her defiance of the king's orders, in spite of the warnings given her by her sister Ismene, demonstrates the type of pride she likely inherited from her father. She deems her own interpretation of the gods' wishes to be stronger or more correct than the dictates of the new king who must somehow assert his authority in all this chaos. Antigone's pure stubborn refusal to listen to counsel against her sense of right is the mistake she makes that leads to her downfall. After she finishes deliberately antagonizing the king in her righteous indignation, she finally realizes she should have taken a more temperate, and private, approach. The Chorus makes the observation that “The maiden’s stubborn will, of stubborn sire / The offspring shows itself. She knows not yet / To yield to evils.” (517-19). Without being able to at least temper her speech to the king, she has no hope of escaping the fatal punishment he has planned. Antigone's pride and sense of herself is so great that she doesn't even try to conceal her illegal actions from the king. Instead, she walks right up to her brother's body in full daylight in front of the guards to perform the rites that have been forbidden. The guard, in telling the king what happened, indicates that they ran “her down, in nothing terrified. / And then we charged her with the former deed, / As well as this. And nothing she denied” (473-75). The king is quick to recognize this behavior as blatant disregard for his own authority over his people and he feels forced to make an example of her: “Wanton outrage then / She learnt when first these laws of mine she crossed, / But, having done it, this is yet again / A second outrage over it to boast, / And laugh at having done it” (527-31). Her own stubborn nature and high opinion of herself don’t even allow Antigone to make efforts at reasoning with the king in an effort to save her own life, instead tossing contemptuous words in his direction. Unlike Oedipus, she seems to be fully aware that what she is doing will lead to her downfall, but is unwilling or constitutionally unable to change her course of action. The peripeteia of the story is when Creon appears at the tomb to release her and she is already dead from her own hand, like her father losing everything. While both of these plays fit Aristotle's criteria for a tragic drama, it is clear that Oedipus Rex defines the role much more clearly and straight-forwardly than Antigone. However, in both cases, it is possible to see how a noble individual, driven by pride in their own abilities, makes a dangerous mistake that they erroneously cling to and which eventually leads to their own downfall. Not only this, but their downfall leads to the downfall of a number of other individuals who are mostly innocent in the proceedings. Ismene is reduced to being the orphaned sole survivor of a full and growing ruling family while the city reels through catastrophe after catastrophe trying to make sense of who is leading them and what to believe. Works Cited Sophocles. Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra. Oxford World’s Classics. Ed. Edith Hall. Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. Read More