Oedipus the King

There are no one of the performances of Sophocles which exhibit more strikingly than the two which bear the title of Oedipus that sombre irony which the genius of a modern scholar has detected in the frame-work of this poet's tragedies. This irony comprises in the compare which the spectator, well acquainted with the famous cornerstone of the tragedy, is enabled to draw between the genuine state of the case and the conceptions supposed to be amused by the individual represented on the stage. It is this contrast, considered from different points of view, which makes the two plays ...