Oedipus Rex

Thebes is dying. A plague has settled over the city like a judgment, rotting the crops, killing the livestock, filling the streets with the sick and the grieving. The people gather at the palace steps and beg their king for help. The king is Oedipus, and he has already sent his brother-in-law Creon to the oracle at Delphi for answers, because that is the kind of king he is — decisive, devoted, always a step ahead.

Creon returns with the oracle’s verdict. The plague is a punishment. The city is harbouring the murderer of its previous king, Laius, and until that murderer is found and expelled, Thebes will not recover. Oedipus receives this information and immediately declares a public curse on the killer, vowing to hunt him down with the full force of his authority. He does not yet know that he is cursing himself.

He sends for Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo, the man who sees what ordinary eyes cannot. Tiresias arrives reluctantly and refuses to speak. He knows the truth and wants no part of delivering it. Oedipus presses him, accuses him of withholding information, grows angry, and finally Tiresias breaks. He tells Oedipus plainly: you are the man you are looking for. You are the pollution. You killed Laius. Oedipus is furious. He accuses Tiresias and Creon of conspiring together to remove him from power, dismisses everything Tiresias has said as politically motivated slander, and sends them both away. The investigation continues.

Jocasta, Oedipus’s wife and queen, tries to calm him. She tells him not to worry about prophecies, that oracles cannot be trusted, that she has proof of this herself. When Laius was king, she says, an oracle told him he would be killed by his own son. But Laius was killed by strangers at a crossroads, and their son died as an infant, left on a mountainside with his feet bound together. The prophecy never came true. Oedipus listens to this and goes very still.

He asks her to describe the crossroads. He asks her to describe Laius. The description matches the stranger he killed on the road years ago, before he ever came to Thebes. He had been travelling from Corinth, fleeing his own prophecy — that he would kill his father and marry his mother — and at a crossroads he quarrelled with a group of travellers and killed them. He had assumed it was a meaningless roadside altercation. He begins to understand that it may not have been. He asks Jocasta to send for the one surviving witness of Laius’s murder, a shepherd who escaped and asked to be sent to the furthest edges of the kingdom when Oedipus became king. He does not yet understand why the shepherd asked to leave. He is beginning to.

Before the shepherd arrives, a messenger comes from Corinth with news that at first seems like relief. The king of Corinth has died and the people want Oedipus to return and rule them. Oedipus cannot go back to Corinth, he explains, because of the prophecy that says he will kill his father and marry his mother. The messenger tells him not to worry. Oedipus was adopted. The king of Corinth was not his real father. The messenger himself brought the infant Oedipus to Corinth years ago, received from a shepherd on a Theban mountainside, the baby’s feet bound and pierced. He thought he was delivering good news.

Jocasta understands everything now. She begs Oedipus to stop asking questions, to let it go, to come inside. She calls him by every name she has for him and her voice is breaking and he does not stop. He thinks she is ashamed that he might turn out to be of low birth. He tells her he will find the truth regardless of what it costs him. She goes inside without another word. It is the last time he sees her alive.

The shepherd arrives. He is old and frightened and does not want to speak. He was there the night Laius was killed. He was also, it emerges under Oedipus’s relentless questioning, the shepherd who was given the infant Oedipus by Jocasta and told to leave him on the mountain to die, and who instead, out of pity, gave the child to the Corinthian messenger. He confirms everything. The child who was supposed to die became the man standing in front of him. Oedipus, king of Thebes, is the son of Laius and Jocasta. He killed his father at the crossroads. He married his mother and had four children with her. The prophecy he spent his entire life running from had been fulfilled before he ever arrived in Thebes.

He goes inside. He finds Jocasta hanging from a rope in her room. He takes the pins from her dress and drives them into his own eyes, again and again, because he does not want to see the world he is in anymore, does not want to look at the children he has fathered or the city he rules or the face of anyone who has known him. He comes back out to the steps of the palace, blind and bleeding, and faces his people.

He asks Creon, who now takes charge of Thebes, to send him into exile. He had declared exile the punishment for Laius’s killer before he knew who that killer was, and he will not unsay it now. He asks to be allowed to say goodbye to his daughters, the two youngest of his children, and holds them briefly before letting them go. Then he is led away from the city, out into the world beyond the gates, toward whatever comes next for a man who has lost everything and is still, even now, walking forward.

The chorus watches him go and speaks the play’s final words to the audience: look at Oedipus, they say. He solved the Sphinx’s riddle. He was the greatest king Thebes ever had. And look what became of him. Call no man happy until he has reached the end of his life without suffering. Until then, he is not happy. He is only lucky. And luck, as Thebes has just learned, is not the same thing as fate.