Class Handouts:
Internet Resources:
- The best guide to this play on the Internet is "Enjoying Oedipus the King," written by Ed Friedlander, MD. "Warning: This is not a 'family' site. Oedipus is not 'family entertainment'... If you want something nice, please leave now." It can be hard going--about free will and Fate and God and Destiny--but it's also entertainingly written.
- The Classics Pages not only re-tell the story of Oedipus, with lots of good pictures and a map, but you can also play "The Oedipus Game", which takes you back to the time of Sophocles on a day when the play is being performed. Also, check out their page with the article showing that Oedipus was never king of Thebes, and the Sphinx page, and the picture of "the place where three roads meet" as it looks today.
- The SparkNotes guide to the play includes all three Theban plays, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. The Classic Notes version is shorter, but still longer than the entire play itself. The NovelGuide version is even shorter, and STILL longer than the entire play itself. The BookRags summary of the play is even shorter, and STILL it's longer than the entire play itself. Why not just read the darned play?
- What's this about an "Oedipus complex," and Sigmund Freud? There's a short summary of the idea at the About.com page on Oedipus called "The King Misbehaves". Another look comes from dad Matthew Westra, writing for FatherMag.com: "One evening as I was leaving to teach a night class, I kissed my three-year-old son, Ben, goodbye as he played on the living room floor. I went to the couch and kissed my wife, Cheryl. As I reached the front door, Ben sprang from the floor, climbed onto the couch next to Cheryl, wiped the kiss from her lips with broad strokes of his open palm, turned to face me with a challenging, chest-out posture, pointed his finger accusingly, and declared, 'You don't kiss her. She's MY wife!'" The article is called "Encounters With Oedipus Rex".
- What about this "tragic flaw"? What was Oedipus's tragic flaw? Was he too determined? too smart? too...what? Well, personally, I feel that while Oedipus is stubborn, and accuses Creon and Tiresius quickly and defensively of plotting against him, in general terms he did exactly the right thing. The result of his actions, what he discovers, is bizarre and ironic and unexpected, but is it really his fault? It is an intriguing combination of actions--call it coincidence, call it Fate, call it what you will--but in the play, Oedipus only does what he is supposed to do: Escape from the Delphic warnings at one point in his life, and find the cause of his society's problems at another. Andrew, from The Classics Pages, has a good answer to those hunting for a tragic flaw in Oedipus: "The whole business of 'tragic flaws' is something that English and Drama teachers have got hold of from some book they read when they were students--no one these days who has actually studied Greek tragedy believes there is any such thing." Read his answer to a reader letter on The Classics Pages.
- Robin Mitchell-Boyask has put together an Oedipus Study Guide for her students at Temple University, with some good thinking questions for each section of the play.
- Just to show you what kinds of odd things writers can get up to, how about a re-telling of the story of Oedipus entirely using personalized license plates from the state of California: "ONCEPON ATIME LONGAGO IN THEBES IMKING. OEDIPUS DAKING. LVMYMRS. LVMYKIDS. THEBENS THINK OEDDY ISCOOL. NOPROBS..." Daniel Nussbaum did it, in an article called "Oedipus, King of the Road," and the result can be found here.
- A good, quick summary of the play and its ideas, presented by The Myth Man.
- There are no really good translations of the play online, but a common one is the 1912 Storr translation, which I suppose you could use in an emergency. Here it is at the Internet Classics Archive, where you can read it on the screen or download it to your own computer.
- If you are a fan of learning about words, and word origins, as well as learning some of the little interesting things about Greek drama, an excellent, short introduction to some such things has been prepared by William A. Johnson, for his classes at Bucknell University. Click on the Oedipus link.
- For those people who really, really like to go the extra mile and do some extra work, try reading Oedipus in the original ancient Greek, at the Perseus Project. Use the blue arrows to navigate. (Notice that you can read the words either spelled out phonetically, or set your browser to see the words in the original Greek letters.)
- Didaskalia is trying to re-create the ancient Greek theatre of Dionysus online. "This page focuses on the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens, supplementing the simple drawings on the Greek Stagecraft page with images created with state-of-the-art computer graphics software."
