Thesis (Ph.D.)--Villanova University, 2006. / Philosophy Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

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The thesis is an attempt to understand tragic guilt. My starting point is a comparison of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus with Shakespeare's Macbeth. The question of "guilt" is treated very differently in these two plays. Oedipus' guilt is a result of an action which is discovered, not chosen. He is the victim of a curse which lies upon his family and thus his own guilt is an ambiguous thing. He suffers against a background of a Law which demands punishment and a promise from a god that he shall be "saved". Oedipus at Colonus begins, as does Oedipus Rex, after the decisive act of murder and incest has been committed. But Macbeth begins before anything has been done; Macbeth is presented with a possibility and he chooses to believe that he can make it a reality. We are allowed to see the moment at which guilt appears in the individual. Macbeth becomes guilty before the very image of himself murdering Duncan. In Greek tragedy the guilt is often blood-guilt, a curse which descends from one member of a family to another and may devastate an entire house. But in Macbeth the guilt begins in the desires of one man. Macbeth is left with a personal despair which is different from the suffering that Oedipus undergoes. In the novels of Thomas Hardy, the perspective on guilt has shifted from the privacy that surrounds Macbeth at his death to the social world of nineteenth century England. Michael Henchard is perhaps closest to Macbeth in that he is destroyed more by the forces in his own personality than by the pressures of external society. But with Tess we have a heroine who is "pure", a woman who is defeated more as a result of the failings in a society than by any personal faults. There is little feeling of her having any particular "guilt". Jude Fawley's particular "tragedy" also must be seen in terms of the society that moves around him, its laws and conventions. The guilt is never entirely his own, nor is he simply an innocent victim. The presence of a definite society is hardly felt at all in the two novels of Conrad. Jim is a "romantic", a young man barely past adolescence who is obsessed with a concept of honour which he feels he has betrayed in a moment of cowardice. But he seems to become guilty in a deeper sense because of this obsession; he betrays others by choosing to live in an imaginary world of romantic achievement. Nostromo is also obsessed with a dream: to be a Man of the People. If Conrad's characters become guilty, it is because of their intense egoism, their inability to escape their passion for an idea. In Arthur Miller's The Crucible the guilt of an individual seems less important than the guilt present in a society. That guilt is an illusion based on a fear of not conforming to a rigorous law. We are left with the tragedy of a society which must find a victim to appease its own feeling of guilt. John Proctor is one of the chosen victims; a man who must die to save his integrity. But his death is the result of a web of guilt spread through an entire society. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Although Sophocles, according to tradition, died before the Oedipus Coloneus, his last work, was performed, there is no reason to believe that his intention in composing the play was fundamentally different from his life-long practice, that is to create a drama to be presented before a contemporary audience, and to win the prize in the contest for tragic poets at the Festival of Dionysus in Athens. In Part I of this study I have attempted to describe the manner in which Sophocles constructed his drama. I have divided the play into twenty manageable sections and devoted a chapter to each. Within each chapter each line, group of lines and, finally, each section, has been examined with a view to determining how it contributes to the process of changing the situation at the beginning of the drama, where Oedipus, a tired and wretched beggar, arrives in Colonus, to the situation at its end, when his life is over. At every stage the requirements of the dramatic circumstances, the demands of the plot, the constraints of the medium and the artistic effects for which the playwright aimed have been examined. The discussion takes the form of a commentary in that each point, regardless of its nature, has been dealt with as it arises in the text of the play. The reader will find himself confronted in turn/ as Sophocles must have been, with considerations of the reactions of the audience, theatrical effects, plot progression and so forth. Textual difficulties have been discussed only when their resolution is crucial for determining the contribution of a certain passage to the construction of the play. From this discussion a view of the play as an experience shared by the playwright and his audience emerges. The original audience was able to appreciate this play without the aid of a commentary. Therefore, no interpretation of a line, passage or scene which could not have been readily understood during performance can be correct. Further, the original audience was treated to aural and visual effects of which our text, with its complete lack of stage directions, bears only indirect traces. I have tried to determine what these effects may have been. It is hoped that the resulting observations will enable the reader better to understand the play, as the first spectators must have done - not primarily as an abstract treatise with a significant message for our times, but as a crowd-pleasing performance, complete in itself. In Part II of this study I have examined the question of the distribution of the roles in the Oedipus Coloneus among the limited number of actors which the playwright was allowed. I have first reviewed various suggestions for the distribution of the roles among three speaking actors. Every known scheme, however, has serious drawbacks which would have marred the quality of the performance of the play. I have therefore proceeded to examine various schemes wherein the roles are distributed among four actors. None of these, however, fully accounts for the complex system of entrances and exits and the occasional awkward silences. These phenomena can be explained only if Sophocles knew, when he wrote his play, how many actors were to be allocated to him and who they were to be. I have shown that this is a reasonable possibility. According to the distribution of the roles here proposed, Sophocles wrote his play to suit the specific talents of four speaking actors, and also employed a mute. The idiosyncracies of the Oedipus Coloneus are thus adequately explained. / Arts, Faculty of / Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of / Graduate

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1959 P57

This thesis examines the place, influence, and deployment of archaic Greek thought in Sophocles’ extant tragedies, paying close attention to the ethical and theological content of the plays as well as to their dramatic and literary fabric. I use archaic thought as an umbrella term for a constellation of ideas on the human condition and the gods which is first attested, in Greece, in Homeric epic, but has a long and variegated existence in other contexts and after the archaic period. The thesis consists of six chapters, divided in two parts. The first part provides a general conceptual framework, which is then applied in the detailed readings of Sophocles constituting the second part. The first chapter examines some of the main texts of archaic Greek thought, and offers an interpretation of it as a coherent nexus of ideas gravitating around the core notions of human vulnerability, short-sightedness, and the principle of alternation. Using the examples of Homer’s Iliad and Solon’s Elegy to the Muses, I argue that the narrative structure of archaic poetry can be used to formulate and “perform” archaic ideas. The second chapter formulates the principal argument of the thesis: that archaic thought is central to the ethical and religious content of tragedy as well as to its dramatic and literary fabric, that is, to the form of tragedy as a complex artefact designed to be performed on stage. I explore possible models for the interaction between archaic thought and literature and tragedy, from Aristotle’s Poetics to recent interpretations of tragedy as a hybrid of other literary and intellectual forms. I then examine the ways in which archaic ideas are deployed and performed in tragedy, both in passages that are explicitly archaic in content and diction, and in the complex interactions of dramatic form and intellectual content. This general discussion is illustrated with preliminary readings of four Sophoclean plays: Ajax, Oedipus Tyrannus, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. The third chapter contextualises the approach adopted in the thesis as a whole by exploring two interpretations of Sophocles in German Idealist thought: Solger’s reading of Ajax and Hölderlin’s reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. It argues that these analyses, albeit under anachronistic conceptual categories such as “the tragic”, seize on some of the fundamental questions of archaic and tragic ethics and theology: the relationship between the human and divine spheres, and the limits of language and human understanding. In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I offer detailed readings of Trachiniae, Antigone, and Electra, three plays chosen to reflect the diversity of contexts in which archaic ideas exist in Sophocles. I argue that archaic thought is central to the intellectual and dramatic fabric of all three plays, even though the deployment and emphasis of archaic patterns and ideas differs from one tragedy to the next.

Zugl.: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 2009

Most people place their sincerest hopes for emotional fulfillment on a rewarding family life. The "loved ones" that constitute our nuclear and extended familial worlds are the primary beneficiaries of our affections and of the fruits of our labors. In return for the primacy we accord our family members, we expect their behavior to demonstrate their loyalty to the clan. However, at a certain point obligations to the family can conflict with the needs of the individual. In this thesis I examine how filial duties influence the plights of the tragic heroines in Sophocles's Antigone and Shakespeare's King Lear. Both Antigone and Cordelia organize their lives around the virtue of family honor, and yet the strength of these commitments is not sufficient to spare them from their respective, calamitous ends. Their unwavering dedication to the sanctity of family bonds leaves them susceptible, as individuals, to great harm.

Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes can be read as allegories of warriors who experience war trauma. The ancient Greeks already knew of the effects of war trauma through prior literature, and the plays were produced during a period of great violence and upheaval. Ajax shows how a shame-inducing betrayal causes a warrior to go berserk, and consequently withdraw from his community and commit suicide. Philoctetes shows that a betrayal, combined with the loss of a comrade, can cause the warrior to become isolated and emotionally vulnerable. His only means of being reintegrated into society is through mutual understanding with members of that society, and closure with his dead comrade. These plays were produced for therapeutic benefit, as shown by the comparative evidence found in psychodrama, dramatherapy, and the Theater of War productions of the two plays. / Graduate / 0294 / 0621 / 0465 / jrbinus@aol.com

This thesis considered seven aspects of the relationship of the tragic hero with his world in the four major tragedies of Shakespear—Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear—and in four tragedies of Sophocles—Oedipus, Antigone, Ajax and Women of Trachis. All the plays with the exception of Women of Trachis, were found depicting a hero who represented his society and had freedom of choice and action, but whose mistaken view of himself and his role in life led to conflict with the cosmos, to rebellion and a trial by suffering which resulted in a kind of insanity, and finally to self-recognition through submission and purgation.The thesis also discussed Sophocles’ and Shakespeare’s concern with justice as reflected in their use of trial imagery, and Shakespear’s indebtedness to the classic chain of being concept and to the Platonic emphasis on reason and courage in a hero, or leader.