The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare

Exit, pursued by a bear.

While The Winter's Tale hardly does justice to the brilliance of Shakespeare, it still bears the distinction of its playwright. I confess, I am more a fan of the tragedies with their seemingly endless profundities than the comedies which, in their lightheartedness, struck me as being shallow. This particular play combines some of both worlds, with unfortunate events leading to joyful circumstances, all spiced with the usual madcap whirl of disguises, mix-ups, ravishing beauties, lovelorn (and rather silly) boys, whimsical songs, and sadly-the-wiser men.

(Begin spoiling here...)
The plot recalled to mind Sophocles' Oedipus the King, beginning as it does with the tragic blindness and (rather like Chesterton's purely rational madman) small-minded logic of King Leontes of Sicilia. He accuses his pregnant wife Hermione of adultery, the other party being his dear friend King Polixenes of Bohemia. In his rage, he cannot bear even to look at the child when it is born, and condemns it to the Oedipal fate of being cast out in the wilderness to whatever terrors or delights the gods might have for it. Baby Perdita ends up with shepherds (again...), King Leontes' heir dies, and Hermione basically turns into a statue. The oracle at Delphi says Leontes can't expect an heir unless he reclaims his daughter, who has been completely lost. There you have the tragedy.

Comedy turned out to be shades of The Tempest, with lots of disgustingly sweet love language exchanged between Polixenes' son, Florizel (whose name predisposes him to his speech; "flor-" is the Latin root for "flower"), and the shepherdess maiden, Perdita. Of course they're crossed in their love because that makes the plot more interesting, and from that, drama ensues, leading to happily ever after for practically everyone. Not Antigonus though. He got eaten by a bear. But that eventually freed dearest Paulina to marry Camillo, so all's well that ends well.

This play was an interesting stretch for me because I have only ever read one other Shakespeare play without the handy definitions page opposite, but the more I read, the more understandable his English becomes. That's neither here nor there, although I do recommend trying it at least once for the sake of the experience.

In terms of Shakespeare, it's not the first play I would recommend to anyone who hasn't read any of his work. In fact, it's rather far down the list. That being said, it is still miles ahead of the work of most playwrights, so in relative terms, it still ends up near the top. And there's always the satisfaction of knowing that you've read one of his more obscure works, so you can impress people that you meet at dinner parties. If you're the sort of person who goes to those sorts of events and wants to impress that sort of people, of course.

The Complete Plays of Sophocles

OEDIPUS: Good son of Aegeus, gentle son,
only to the gods is it given not to age or die.
All else disrupts through all disposing time.
Earth ebbs in strength, the body ebbs in power.
Faith dies and faithlessness is born.
No constant friendship breathes
between man and man, or city and a city,
Soon or late, the sweet will sour,
the sour will sweet to love again.
Does fair weather hold between this Thebes and you?
Then one day shall ever teeming time
hatch nights on teeming days,
Wherein this pledge, this harmony, this hour
will break upon a spear,
slashed down for a useless word.

--Oedipus at Colonus


Though he lived well into his nineties, writing and producing plays from his twenties, only seven of Sophocles' 123 plays remain to us, a fact which seems appropriately tragic. In his time, Sophocles was regarded as the greatest that Greek tragedy had to offer, a dramatic Homer, and he won the first prize given to the best dramatist at the Athenian Dionysia twenty times. It is left to us to wonder whether the Greeks of Sophocles' time saw what we see in his plays--a persistent timelessness and depth of spirit--and whether it existed to the same degree in the 116 plays we have never seen.

Each of these seven is great in its own right: Ajax is the story of a warrior driven mad by jealousy, and mocked by the indifferent gods. Philoctetes is about a man who was abandoned by Odysseus on a desert en route to the Trojan War because his terrible snakebite made him irritating, but now Odysseus and Achilles' son Neoptolemus must return and convince Philoctetes to give them his bow, which never misses, so that they might use it to defeat the Trojans. The Woman of Trachis is about Deianeira, Heracles' wife, who struggles to love her husband in the face of his infidelity. Then there is Sophocles' take on Elektra, which to me is the least interesting of the seven, especially when placed next to Aeschylus' and Euripides' versions.

But the best plays here are the Oedipus plays, one of which I wrote about already (although Roche's translation improves on it significantly). It can't be said that Oedipus the King can't be understood without reading the other two in the "trilogy," because they were written at vastly different points of Sophocles' life and were never truly meant to create a unified whole, but I think they're vastly more interesting when read together

In Antigone, the first written, I think that you can see Sophocles' youth in Antigone's headstrongness and willingness to martyr herself. Antigone's brothers (Oedipus' sons) killed each other on the field of battle, one fighting for Thebes and the other against it, and her uncle Creon, the king, refuses to let the latter be buried properly. Knowing that it means she will be punished by death, Antigone buries him anyway, and commits suicide before Creon, having been enlightened by the prophet Teiresias, can come to pardon her.

On the other hand, Oedipus at Colonus was clearly written by a man reflecting upon his own age and mortality; it was one of the last plays that Sophocles wrote. It takes place between the events of Oedipus the King and Antigone, when Oedipus, having blinded himself, wanders with Antigone into the Athenian suburb of Colonus where they are welcomed by Theseus, the King. A prophecy has just told that whoever has Oedipus' favor will win the war for Thebes, and so King Creon and Oedipus' rebel son Polyneices have come to make amends, but Oedipus is too dignified to accede to their demands and for Theseus' warmth and kindness, Oedipus basically ensures Athens' dominance over Thebes in the decades to come.

Oedipus at Colonus is a pleasant reminder that Greek tragedy really isn't as rigid as Aristotle thought it should be, and that happy endings did exist. At the end of their lives, there is something appropriate about the way that Sophocles allows Oedipus--synonymous, for us and for Aristotle, with the spirit of tragedy--to be buried in dignity and love, and to be able to show the justice of a king in his final acts. Oedipus' words to Theseus, which I've copied above, affirm the inconstancy of the world, its chaos, entropy, and inevitable change, but without corrupting their basic truth, Oedipus is able to defy them as much as any human being is able. And though Sophocles could not have known this, the fact that Oedipus' story has survived for 2,500 years as an essential parable of downfall and redemption must temper his words as well.

Oedipus the King by Sophocles

The story of Oedipus is well-worn: Boy meets girl. Boy saves girl's city from riddle-obsessed monster. Boy discovers that he's actually girl's son, and that he killed his own dad years ago without knowing but it's too late because they've already boned. It's almost cliche.

To be more specific, Oedipus is the king of Thebes, a position he inherited when, wandering from his home in Corinth, he encountered the Sphinx, who was eating any Theban who could not answer his riddle. Oedipus answered it, and saved the city, and now has married its queen Jocasta, the former king being recently murdered. A plague has struck the city, and the oracle of Apollo says that it will only pass when the former king's murderer is put to justice. With the help of the prophet Teiresias, Oedipus discovers that he is the murderer, recalling a fight in which he killed an unknown man years ago, and that he is really Jocasta's son, expelled from Thebes as an infant because of a prophecy that said he would do exactly what he ends up doing.

But it is, of course, the essential work of ancient Greek tragedy. It is the most oft-used example Aristotle gives when he outlines tragedy for us in the Poetics, suggesting that shows remarkable purity of genre. All the elements are there: a hero is neither a great man nor a villain, but the bearer of a fatal flaw that eventually leads to his downfall. There is a startling revelation (peripeteia), a sudden reversal of fortune (anagnorisis), and an ending so bleak and ruinous that you might call it a catastrophe (catastrophe).

Of course, it is also the basis for Freud's theory of the Oedipal complex, making it one of the most essential texts in the development of Freudian criticism and literary criticism as a whole. In this way, its relevance spans a vast stretch of time, and it is an excellent illustration of the way that we regard literature differently than our predecessors.

Unlike The Odyssey, I find Oedipus the King wanting for emotional heft to complement its academic fecundity. All tragedies are meant to act as funhouse mirrors in which we see ourselves, but Oedipus' basic humanity is less apparent to me than Odysseus', whose longing for his home and his wife is truly affecting. One issue may be the translation, which I feel is a little banal. See the way that this translator, Benard Knox, renders Oedipus' opening address to the priests who are gathered in supplication to the gods:

My sons! Newest generation of this ancient city of Thebes! Why are you here? Why are you seated there at the altar, with these branches of supplication? The city is filled with the smoke of burning incense, with hymns to the healing god, with laments for the dead.

Contrast Sir George Young:

Children, you modern brood of Cadmus old,
What mean you, sitting in your sessions here,
High-coronalled with votive olive-boughs,
While the whole city teems with incense-smoke,
And paean hymns, and sounds of woe the while?

Knox's translation, besides committing the terrible sin of being in prose, is awfully clumsy and plain, isn't it? Not only that, but you get the impression a lot of the syntax is lost here--see how Oedipus' statement about the incnese is subordinated in Young's translation, suggesting that Oedipus is asking about that as well as the priests' presence, and in Knox's it is presented as a flat statement unconnected to anything. Stupid.

But whatever. One benefit of Oedipus is that it's literally one-tenth the size of The Odyssey, so in my class we can really pick it apart and deconstruct it. I wish it were made of better stuff, but what can you do?