Here, again, are links to the text of Oedipus the King (translated by Francis Storr), to an audio recording of it, and to the 1957 film (from a W. B. Yeats translation). Here is the W. B. Yeats translation/script as well, which should line up with the 1957 film very closely.
(I) Literary Terms
(from J. A. Cuddon's Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th ed., 1999, and from M. H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed., 1999.)
genre: A French term for a kind, a literary type or class. The major Classical genres were epic, tragedy, lyric, comedy and satire, to which would now be added novel and short story. From the Renaissance and until well into the eighteenth century the genres were carefully distinguished, and writers were expected to follow the rules proscribed for them. (Cuddon)
tragedy: The term is broadly applied to literary, and especially to dramatic, representations of serious actions which culminate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist. [...] Aristotle wrote [in thePoetics] that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both; and also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is "better than we are," in the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth. Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia -- his "error of judgement," or, as it is often though less literally translated, his tragic flaw. (One common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies was hubris, that "pride" or overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard divine warning or to violate an important moral law.) The tragic hero, like Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, moves us to pity because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves. (Abrams)
protagonist: (Gk "first combatant") The first actor in a play; thence the principal actor or character. In Greek tragedy, the playwright was limited to the protagonist (first actor), deuteragonist (second actor) and tritagonist (third actor). It is probable that in the first place Greek drama consisted of a Chorus and the leader of the Chorus. Thespis (6yh C. BC) is believed to have added the first actor to give greater variety to the dialogue and action. The second and third were added by Aeschylus and Sophocles respectively. The protagonist has come to be the equivalent of the hero. (Cuddon)
Chorus: (Gk "dance") Originally the Chorus was a group of performers at a religious festival, especially fertility rites. By some process of grafting or symbiosis Greek tragedy acquired (or grew out of) these choral rites. At any rate, the Chorus became an essential and integral part of Greek tragic drama. In the works of Aeschylus the Chorus often took part in the action; in Sophocles it served as a commentator on the action; and in Euripides it provided a lyric element. The Romans copied the idea of a Chorus from the Greeks, and Elizabethan dramatists took it over from the Romans. However a full scale Chorus has seldom been used in English drama, or indeed European drama. (Cuddon)
irony: In Greek comedy the character called the eiron was a dissembler, who characteristically spoke in understatement and deliberately pretended to be less intelligent than he was, yet triumphed over the alazon, the self-deceiving and stupid braggart. In most of the modern critical uses of the term "irony," there remains the root sense of dissembling or hiding what is actually the case; not, however, in order to deceive, but to achieve special rhetorical or artistic effects.Verbal irony [...] is a statement in which the meaning that a speaker implies differs sharply from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed. The ironic statement usually involves the explicit expression of one attitude of evaluation, but with indications that the overall speech-situation that the speaker intends a very different, and often opposite, attitude or evaluation. [...] Some literary works exhibit structural irony; that is, the author, instead of using an occasional verbal irony,introduces a structural feature that serves to sustain a duplex meaning and evaluation throughout the work. [...] Dramatic irony involves a situation in a play or a narrative in which the audience or reader share with the author knowledge of present or future circumstances of which a character is ignorant; in that situation, the character unknowingly acts in a way we recognize to be grossly inappropriate to the actual circumstances, or expects the opposite of what we know that fate holds in store, or says something that anticipates the actual outcome, but not at all in the way the character intends. Writers of Greek tragedy, who based their plots on legends whose outcome was already known to their audience, made frequent use of this device. Sophocles' Oedipus, for example, is a very complex instance of tragic irony [...]. (Abrams)
metaphor: (Gk "carrying from one place to another") A figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another. The basic figure in poetry. A comparison is usually implicit; whereas in simile it is made explicit ["like" or "as"]. (Cuddon)
blank verse: [...] consists of unrhymed five-stress lines; properly, iambic pentameters. [...] It has become the most widely used of English verse forms and is the one closest to the rhythms of everyday English speech. This is one of the reasons why it has been particularly favoured by dramatists. (Cuddon)
(II) Modern Contexts
(i) Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, on Oedipus The King in 1895:
“Oedipus Rex is what is known as a tragedy of destiny. Its tragic effect is said to lie in the contrast between the supreme will of the gods and the vain attempts of mankind to escape the evil that threatens them. The lesson which, it is said, the deeply moved spectator should learn from the tragedy is submission to the divine will and realization of his own impotence. Modern dramatists have accordingly tried to achieve a similar tragic effect by weaving the same contrast into a plot invented by themselves. But the spectators have looked on unmoved while a curse or an oracle was fulfilled in spite of all the efforts of some innocent man: later tragedies of destiny have failed in their effort.
"If Oedipus Rex moves the modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified. There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling forces of destiny in the Oedipus, while we can dismiss as merely arbitrary such dispositions as are laid down in [. . .] other modern tragedies of destiny. And a factor of this kind is in fact involved in the story of King Oedipus. His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours – because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.”
Click here to see this subject addressed in a scene from Weeds.
(ii) The Matrix -- Red Pill/Blue Pill
Watch the clip here.
(iii) Writer and Producer David Simon on The Wire and Greek tragedy
From an interview in The Believer by novelist Nick Hornby:
David Simon: "Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood — two shows that I do admire — offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct — the Greeks — lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind — particularly those of us in the West — finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.
"But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.
"[...] while we hope the show is entertaining enough, none of us think of ourselves as providing entertainment. The impulse is, again, either journalistic or literary. Hope this helps and doesn’t sound as wrought and pompous as I think it does. Forgive us for actually thinking about this shit; we know it’s television, but we can’t help ourselves."
A powerful scene from the first season of The Wire that speaks to these interests can be seen here.
(iv) Game of Thrones
What David Simon says of The Wire -- that it is "Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak" -- we might also say of another HBO series, Game of Thrones. Consider the example of Eddard Stark, whose season-long story arc has been edited into this thirty-minute Youtube video.
