Oedipus The King Research Paper

The story of Oedipus by the Greek playwright Sophocles is an important and influential aspect of Greek theatre due to the fact he was one of Greece’s most celebrated playwrights at the time. In this essay I will outline the basic use of dramatic style, choruses, masks and festivity, these aspects are all very typical of Greek theatre, whilst using references to Oedipus.
For almost 50 years, Sophocles was the most famous playwright that took part in the dramatic competitions of Athens . These dramatic competitions took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia . Oedipus the King, also known by its Latin title Oedipus Rex, is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed about 429 BC. Oedipus was the second

Masks were used as an aid to differentiate between certain character as most actors had to multi role . They enabled an actor to appear and reappear in several different roles, thus preventing the audience from identifying the actor to one specific character. This allowed it to be less confusing for the audience. Masks were also used to portray to the audience the character’s gender, age, social status, emotion and personality. For example, in the story of Oedipus, due to Oedipus and Jocasta being nobility, their masks would most likely have had a crown or some similarity to one on them to represent their status and authority. Not only for appearances sake but masks were also used as projection aids, to help the actor’s voice travel to the furthest seats in the theatre. In terms of the relation between the mask and the actor, it can be argued that the mask helps the performer's body function as a unity which enables him to increase the volume of his voice. This would have been necessary due to the fact that Athenian theatres were extremely large. Masks used for Oedipus would most likely not have portrayed cheerful facial emotions due to the serious and intense themes of the play. In a large open-air theatre, like the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, the classical masks were able to create a sense of dread in the audience creating large scale panic, especially since they had intensely exaggerated facial features and

Sophocles uses this group of Thebans to comment on the play's action and to foreshadow future events and to be used as a response to unseen events. He also uses it to comment on the larger impact of the characters' actions and to explain the play's central themes. The Chorus, who were almost always an anonymous collective, in many cases were representatives of the citizens of the city where the action takes place. The chorus acted as an intermediary between the actors and the audience, they were both spectator the action, like the audience, but were also affected by the action. In Oedipus, Sophocles wrote choral odes on everything, from tyranny to the dangers of blasphemy . Sophocles also uses the Chorus at the beginning of most plays to help tell the audience the given circumstances of the play. At the time Oedipus was staged in Athens in 427BC, the city was recovering from a plague that year. Sophocles uses these real life events in his works and uses the chorus to explain and allow the audience to hear all about the terrible havoc that the plague is wreaking on Thebes. Unlike Euripides, his contemporary, Sophocles was known to merge his choruses into the action of the play. In Oedipus we see the Chorus constantly questioning and advising him to remain calm in his time of distress and rage:
“Why has the Queen, sir, left us in such deep