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Oedipus The King

Examining the complexities of response that tragic art elicits.

Date : 03/10/2011

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Imogen Cambridge

Uploaded by : Imogen Cambridge
Uploaded on : 03/10/2011
Subject : Drama

Act four, scene six is a powerful and moving scene which unites the outcast Cordelia with her desperate and despairing father, King Lear. Upon entering the stage together, Cordelia asks "Had you not been their father, these white flakes/ Did challenge pity of them. Was this a face/ To be opposed against the jarring winds?" (33-35) The question directs the audience to immediately cast their attention towards the character of the King, to observe "these white flakes", and more specifically the face "opposed against the jarring winds". The lines suggest that this is a face withered with age and one which wears the gravest and most distraught emotion. We are, of course, lead to expect this descri ptive response towards the King, given the trials his character is put through, and the madness which overhangs this character's experiences. But where a simple reading of these lines might allow us to skirt over this subtle exposition of character, performance directs us to scrutinize the character's face for "white flakes", for signs of crippling infirmity, and later on in the scene for "tears [that]/ Do scald like molten lead." (48) . These lines draw attention to the physicality of the characters as represented on stage, and the developing and actual physical effects that their emotions draw from them. The face is particularly emotive, since it communicates so obviously basic and universally recognised emotional responses, and in this scene it is pointed to freely and copiously. "O look upon me, sir..." (59) , asks Cordelia, "Let's see"(56) , urges King Lear. It is in this scene, as in many others, in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Lear, that pathos, the crux of tragic engagement, is evoked not simply though the evocation of emotion in dialogue, but also through the active direction towards its physical representation on stage.

Hegel's interesting analysis of modern tragic character gives us an intriguing starting point from which to consider this noticeable shift in emotive representation on the Shakespearean stage. He argues in his Aesthetics that "...neither the various descri ptions of the human heart and personal character nor particular complications and intrigues can find their place completely in Greek drama...", since in Greek drama "sympathy is claimed above all not for these particular and personal matters but simply for the battle between the essential powers that rule human life and between the gods that dominate the human heart..." Hegel's point is one which belongs to a convincing argument for the broadening subjectivity of figures in tragic drama, and as a result Shakespearean tragedy begins to deal with characters that accurately simulate human perspective, rather than the representations of aspects or elements of human character, that he argues are to be found in Greek tragedy. Inevitably with a developing interest in subjectivity and the desire to accurately explore it on stage in order to evoke tragic response, must come a greater focus on the grey-scale shades of emotion, across the full spectrum of responses.

To illustrate, we might choose to focus on a particularly climactic scene in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, during which a messenger enters on stage to tell of the events that have taken place within the palace. Breathlessly he recounts Jocasta's suicide, and Oedipus' gruesome response as he takes the gold pins that held her robes and, with them, stabbed out his eyes. The messenger continues to recall how Oedipus then continues to rake the pins down his eyes, crying that he can no longer bear to see the world since he has learned the full truth of his actions with respect to both his mother and his father. Masterfully stalling his entrance back on stage, Sophocles eventually presents both Chorus, characters, and audience with "the terror", the visual manifestation of Oedipus post punishment as he "burst in, screaming" (1383). It is the Chorus who precisely pin and word our response at this point in the play:

"CHORUS: O the terror- The suffering, for all the world to see, The worst terror that ever met my eyes.../ I pity you but I can't bear to look. I've much to ask, so much to learn, So much fascinates my eyes, But you...I shudder at the sight." (1432-1442)

But what seems to engage our responses most of all, is a gripping horror at the physical manifestation of the wounds that Oedipus has caused himself. Horror, gruesome intrigue, disgust, and dread perhaps, but these emotional responses are hardly of the calibre or complexity of those evoked in that heart-breaking scene between father and daughter in King Lear. These responses in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex are temporary, base, and transitory, and do not carry the same tragic dimension as do the 'burning tears' of King Lear, for example. Furthermore, an audience can only focus on the dialogue (rather than the face, as in King Lear) at this point, since the wounds are merely described by the messenger, and even when Oedipus makes an appearance on stage the horror detracts from a deeper emotional engagement with the events themselves. Furthermore, even if the audience find themselves responding on a deeper dimension, the Chorus are quick to direct their response towards "pity", communicating in those lines above, and phrasing exactly how we should feel. There is simply no liberty to form your own response to the scenes in stage beyond basic reactions and that which the Chorus dictates. This is contrary to Shakespeare's stage where often the audience is invited to "look" for themselves, and to respond on a much more complex level. Here, perhaps, Hegel is right with respect to Greek tragedy since the tragic response lies not in the subtle emotions of Shakespeare's subjective characters for example, but rather on the events themselves as consequences of shifting fates and clashing narratives.

"Be your tears wet? Yes, faith, I pray, weep not."( 62) asks Lear of Cordelia in that moving scene, where a character's subjective allows for greater freedom of response. This in turn is magnified by the continued focus on the physical effects of such emotions, as represented on stage. John Bayley perhaps takes Hegel's assessment of character a stage further, arguing that Shakespeare's characters and their subjective are developed to the point that there is an element of "unexpectedness" in their lines and actions, which further heightens tragic response.

As the dialogue between Lear and Cordelia sees Lear determining for fact the identity of his daughter, it is in what was a fluid interchange between the two characters as Lear questions her identity that his attention suddenly and urgently switches towards asking "Be your tears wet?" He answers his own question in a quiet and touching manner. In such a simple line, we see a character who reflects a sudden and passionate response to his daughter, one which is so human in its sudden care and concern. It is almost as if the question which he has been wondering against the back drop of his conscious and open conversation with Cordelia, bursts out of its own accord against the playwright's immediate intentions. That the King answers so simply his own question perhaps also alludes to the threatening lunacy that haunts another dimension of his character. The line becomes a brief and passing monologue, a comment spoken aloud. It reveals a consciousness working behind the immediate communications on stage. It is sudden and unexpected, conveys an immediate impression to the audience, then vanishes into the uniformity of conversation and general tone of the scene.

This is a line which appeals to a "metanarrative", as Bayley puts it. "Like everything else in art this unexpectedness of impression, these sensations unconfined to and undifferentiated form by form and genre ...do not seem to lead back to the author as a text...but to a new aspect of the text as world." In other words, Hegel's subjective in Bayley's interpretation here becomes so free and dynamic that a character's language moves beyond evoking what the play requires, to suggesting outside contexts or worlds that the characters also occupy (such as the passing quiet thoughts of Lear, against the demands of the scene as one which determines Cordelia's identity). These associations or sudden references to another mental space occupied by the character, or even another narrative which has its own emotional demands that the character is also involved in, work to form an intense weave of dialogue references, which trigger a variety of emotional response, and fundamentally reveals a character that is more three dimensional than any other in Greek tragedy, for example. In such lines as those explored, Shakepeare's characters reach out to different contexts and worlds, deepening their character and their character's implied experience, so enhancing the basis of their emotions, and more fundamentally the extent to which these characters hold the potential to move audiences. They are more real, and therefore they trigger a much more real, and by extension, a much more engaged response to tragedy, than ever before.

However, I would like to take Bayley's observations that bit further and suggest that these sudden lines, which belong to the developing and varying subjective of Shakespeare's characters, refer not only to other worlds and contexts that the character's inhabit within the construction of their fictive lives. I would suggest that these lines reach out to our world because often they force active and particular attention on the happenings of the stage itself. At the beginning of this essay I began with a basic comparison between Greek tragic responses and Shakespearean tragic responses, through a particular focus on reference to the physical manifestation of emotion. "Be your tears wet" certainly recalls Bayley's complex worlds of the subjective, but it also calls into consideration the world of the stage as inhabited by the actors themselves, since the line calls for tears to be recognised by the audience, and even before that, tears must be produced in the face of the actor. "Let's see: I feel this pin prick..." (54) says Lear earlier in the play. These lines call for action and manifestation of emotion to be seen on stage. If successfully proffered, if the audience can be convinced that the actor really is crying, or that he really feels the pain of the "pin prick", then Shakespeare's lines achieve a subtle elision of two worlds, the fictive inheritance of the characters, and the real world of the actors and audience. With emotion brought so powerfully and directly into focus, the lines prompt another level of emotional response to the tragedy, achieving a much more complex level of emotional engagement.

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