TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN • Oedipus the King around 430 B.C., The play was written and produced in Athens, Greece.
DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION • The plays probably circulated in manu****** in fifth-century B.C. Athens and have come down to modern editors through the scribal and editorial efforts of scholars in ancient Greece, ancient Alexandria, and medieval Europe.
PUBLISHER • There is no known publisher of original or early editions. The most important modern edition of the Greek ****s, prepared by A. C. Pearson, was published by Oxford University Press in 1924 and reprinted with corrections in 1928.
TONE • Tragic
TENSE • Present
SETTING (TIME) • in the mythical past of ancient Greece.
SETTING (PLACE) • Oedipus the King are set in Thebes,
PROTAGONIST • Oedipus is the protagonist of both Oedipus the King
MAJOR CONFLICT • The major conflict of Oedipus the King arises when Tiresias tells Oedipus that Oedipus is responsible for the plague, and Oedipus refuses to believe him.
RISING ACTION • The rising action of Oedipus the King occurs when Creon returns from the oracle with the news that the plague in Thebes will end when the murderer of Laius, the king before Oedipus, is discovered and driven out.
CLIMAX • The climax of Oedipus the King occurs when Oedipus learns, quite contrary to his expectations, that he is the man responsible for the plague that has stricken Thebes—he is the man who killed his father and slept with his mother.
FALLING ACTION • In Oedipus the King, the consequences of Oedipus’s learning of his identity as the man who killed his father and slept with his mother are the falling action. This discovery drives Jocasta to hang herself, Oedipus to poke out his own eyes, and Creon to banish Oedipus from Thebes.
THEMES • The power of unwritten law, the willingness to ignore the truth, the limits of free will
MOTIFS • Suicide, sight and blindness, graves and tombs
SYMBOLS • Oedipus’s swollen foot, the three-way crossroads.
FORESHADOWING • Oedipus’s ****, which literally means “swollen foot,” foreshadows his discovery of his own identity. Tiresias, the blind prophet, appears in Oedipus the King and announces what will happen to Oedipus and to Creon—only to be completely ignored by both. The truth that comes from Tiresias’s blindness foreshadows the revelation that inspires Oedipus to blind himself