Jocasta having delved into her past, Oedipus exhumes his own as the play's longest single speech recounts his reaction years ago upon receiving his oracle, this time the full complex of parricide and incest.
25) In opposition to the prologue of Seven against Thebes, which is fully concerned with the imminent danger, in the prologue of Phoenician Women,
Jocasta traces the genealogical line and the adventures or mishaps of Cadmus' descendants, while also mapping out the process by which personal names have been bestowed upon their bearers by others--either family or community members.
To solve this riddle of the massacre--including the conundrum that, according to both
Jocasta and Creon, there was also a survivor of the attack Sir Richard Jebb, in his well-known commentary on the play, reconciles the king's and queen's conflicting accounts.
Unsure of his ability to solve his mysterious problems on his own,
Jocasta decides that she must pray on his behalf, a role that the Hebrew Bible ordinarily accords to mothers like Yocheved and Hannah.
The American bass-baritone, Monte Pederson, who died in 2001 at the age of 43, is an imposing Oedipus; the remarkable Slovenian mezzo Marjana Lipovcek does an admirable job as both
Jocasta and the Sphinx; while Lithuanian bass Egils Silins excels as the blind seer, Tiresias.
Whereas Euripides'
Jocasta "presents a tragedy of intellect" in which the power of the logos dominates, changes in conception, rhetoric, character, and action turn the Phoenissae into a sentimental tragedy: as complex Greek philosophical thought is reduced to commonplaces, stress falls on "family values, common sense and motherhood" (41-43).
Her previous titles are: DEATH BY THE REVIERSIDE, DEATHS OF
JOCASTA, and LOST DAUGHTER.
As
Jocasta, however, when she finally connects the dots - realizing that Oedipus ``spent himself in the womb from which he was delivered, in the house of his father, the father he murdered in his dreams and in the waking world'' - her shock and anguish barely project beyond the edge of the stage.
First, more than their predecessor versions by Sophocles, Seneca, and Corneille, the Restoration playwrights emphasize the erotic nature of the incestuous relationship between Oedipus and
Jocasta.
Yup, it's our old friend the school run, taking little
Jocasta or Jeremy to school in a huge 4X4 in case they have to rub shoulders with the wee'uns on school buses.
Richard MacCormac (the architect of the splendid Ruskin Museum in Lancaster AR June 1998) has designed a beautifully lit and poetically coloured (by
Jocasta Innes) maze of spaces, which lead you through the mind of the great man from the luminous brilliance of his youth to the dark and terrible days of his madness.
In the private horror of the Greek story Oedipus, by his incest and parricide, loses the power to make meaning when he loses his power to name
Jocasta, their children, even himself in his relationship to them:
