Edipo dopo Shakespeare: mito e tragedia nel dramma di Dryden e Lee

Abstract

By locating John Dryden’s and Nathaniel Lee’s 1679 Oedipus within an intertextual net of references to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s tragic models, the essay inaugurates a reading of the play under the sign of a tragic conflict between the erotic and the rational drives of the three main characters. Moving from a reconsideration of the tragic inherent in the hero’s relation to time and (self)determination, the essay questions the limits and potential of reason within the context of evil-doing and subjective responsibility. Through a fresh triangulation between Oedipus, Jocasta, and Creon, the play explores the hero’s awareness of his own guilt by diffracting it into the other two characters’ own awareness and self-interrogation: on the one hand, Jocasta’s revelation of her incestuos desire, here deployed as a narcissistic thrust towards self-desire; on the other, Creon’s self-confident wish for power as a male-chauvinist form of payback and self-assertion. In an intricate interplay between Sophoclean and Shakespearean hypotexts, this Restoration tragedy provides one of the most significant re-elaborations of the Oedipus myth beyond and besides its most apparent political overtones.