Oedipus The King

Oedipus The King http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/oedipus.html



For this text analysis assignment, “Oedipus The King” which is a play written by Sophocles. I was familiar with the “Oedipus Complex” created by Sigmund Freud which I learned about in a psychology course that I took last year. The complex states men secretly want to murder their fathers and have sex with their mothers because they men goes through a process of a “castration anxiety” As a result men marry women who resemble their mothers.

This play is based on this complex. During the time that Sophocles wrote this play, the people that watched it had prior knowledge of this. This year in my theatre class, I read the play as well. From a young age Oedipus and his parents Jocasta and Laius learned about the prophecy which states that Qedipus will kill his father in order to become king, and marry his mother and have children. Jocasta and Laius were determined to manipulate the prophecy; therefore they attempted to murder their son, but unfortunately the messenger did nott follow the instructions and gave the son Oedipus to another family. As a result, the prophecy is fulfilled. Jocasta commits suicide, and Oedipus goes into exile.

Sophocles wrote many of his plays between the period of 496-406 BC. During this period only men performed theatre, and would take the multiple roles of male and female characters. This challenges the idea of whether humans have free will or if there is a greater god which controls our destiny.

From the knowledge that I have gained from the text in the play, I have decided to perform a text analyses on this. Some of the basic information on this play include:

Play Title: Oedipus the King
Playwright: Sophocles
Language: English
Translation: F.Storr
Setting: Thebes
Character:s: Qedipus, Priest of Zeus, Jocasta, Creon, Tiresias, Chorus of Theban Elders, Messenger, Herd of Laius.
Media Type: Translated Text in English
Links: Home page, Search Tool, Browse and Commentary, Help Tool, and Purchasing of DVD’s and CD Roms.

On this page only part of the text is available, but there is a link to download the full text.

The basic function for this particular webpage is for people to read the play and obtain a better understanding whether it is for a class or personal interest. On the main page of the website, people are able to access different Greek and Roman literature. Each writing is translated into English. One can search for the author of a play or story as well as different themes to find one that pertains to one’s curiosity.

One form of analysis that I used was the Wordle. If an individual does not know about the text, the wordle can give a sense of of stories by looking at the pronouns, nouns, adjective, verbs, and adverbs. The wordle calculates the word usage and word frequency. The words in the largest font are the names of the characters within the play. The words surrounding the characters are the adjectives that describe the characters such as Oedipus being the king, the lord, fear from the prophecy, murderer from the Oedipus killing his own father, and the blood from Jocasta’s suicide. The verbs include seek, which refers to the prophecy, and speak from when the characters interact with one another. Many of the nouns include words such as thee, thou, art, ye, and thine. These words give a sense of how the translation is written in Old English, meaning that a person will obtain a time frame of when the play was written. I utilized the many either website and decided to create a word tree as well. Due to the fact that this play is a piece of literature, I felt that a word tree would be useful this calculates word frequency and connects the most commonly used with the use of different contexts that the words is used. Oedipus was the most commonly used word in the text; therefore most of the words are connected to what he says, does, or feels.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2610406/Oedipus_the_King

This is a link to my wordle. :)