Although Sophocles (496--406 B.C.) died more than twenty-four centuries ago,
he continues to live today in his plays as one of history's greatest writers.
Only seven of his one hundred twenty-three dramas survive intact, but they are
enough to prompt his admirers to regard him as the equal of Shakespeare, or
nearly so. One can only wonder how Sophocles would rank if all of his plays had
survived.
His themes–justice, pride, obstinacy, flawed humanity, and
the struggle between destiny and free will–are as timely today as they were in
his own time. Aristotle lauded Sophocles as the supreme dramatist, maintaining
that Oedipus the King was a model for all playwrights to imitate.
Sophocles was born a mile northwest of Athens in the deme
(township) of Colonus between 497 and 495 B.C. Because his father, Sophillus,
shared in the profits of a successful family weapons and armor manufactory,
Sophocles was a child of advantage, enjoying the comforts of the privileged and
receiving an education that undergirded his natural talents. He studied poetry,
dance, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, law, athletics, and military
tactics. He also studied music and became accomplished at playing the cithara,
a stringed instrument resembling the lyre of the harp family.
In spite of his aristocratic background and entitlements,
Sophocles was a man of the people: kindly, generous, popular. Fellow Athenians
esteemed him highly throughout his life. That he was quite handsome may have
helped bolster his popularity.
Sophocles earned his entry into the Athenian literary world
with a play entitled Triptolemus, which does not survive. He used it in 468 to
defeat another outstanding dramatist, Aeschylus, in a writing competition.
Competing plays were performed in a theater dedicated to Dionysus, the god of
wine and revelry. Sophocles went on to win about two dozen more drama awards
against Aeschylus and other extraordinary writers. It is said that he sometimes
acted in plays. On one occasion, he reportedly presented a juggling act that
dazzled the audience.
Sophocles' Innovations
Until Sophocles' time, dramatists wrote tragedies three at a
time. The second play continued the action of the first, and the third play
continued the action of the second. The entire three-play series of tragedies
was called a trilogy. Sophocles broke with tradition by writing single plays
that stood alone as dramatic units. Ajax is an example of a stand-alone
Sophocles play. The Oedipus series of plays (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at
Colonus and Antigone) is not technically a trilogy (although sometimes referred
to as one) because the plays were written years apart as single units.
Sophocles also emphasized people more than his predecessors,
taking characters in well-known plots from mythology and dressing them up as
real human beings with noble but complex personalities vulnerable to pride and
flawed judgment. Audiences in ancient Athens did not go to a Sophocles play to
be entertained by a plot with a surprise ending. They already knew the ending.
They went to a Sophocles play to see how the characters reacted to the forces
working for or against them--mostly against. Thus, Sophocles' plays required
superb writing and characterization to hold the interest of the audience.
In portraying his characters, Sophocles raised irony to high
art, making the characters unwitting victims of fate or their own shortcomings.
The irony was both verbal (with characters speaking words laden with meaning
uknown to them) and dramatic (with characters ensnaring themselves in
predicaments charged with danger that they do not recognize but that the
audience well knows will lead to disaster). The audience knew, for example,
what Oedipus did not know (until the end of Oedipus the King): that the man he
killed and the woman he married were his father and mother. This type of
dramatic irony occurs often in Sophocles' plays, allowing the audience to
become engrossed with a character's response to a situation rather than the
eventual outcome of the situation.
Another of Sophocles' innovations was an increase in the
number of actors in plays from two to three, presenting more opportunities to
contrast characters and create foils. He also introduced painted scenery,
enhanced costuming, and fixed the number of persons in the chorus at 15. The
chorus also diminished in importance; it was the actors who mattered.
"The key to his work was provided by Matthew Arnold in
the phrase to the effect that Sophocles possessed an 'even-balanced soul,'
" drama critic John Gassner wrote in Masters of the Drama (New York: Random
House, 1954, Page 42). "He comprehended both the joy and grief of living,
its beauty and ugliness, its moments of peace and its basic uncertainty so
concisely expressed by his line 'Human life, even in its utmost splendor and
struggle, hangs on the edge of an abyss.' "
Sophocles' handling of human tragedy was influenced, in part, by the tragedies of war. During his lifetime he had witnessed the devastating Persian and Peloponnesian wars and even participated in a war when he served as a general with Pericles to quell rebellion on Samos, an Aegean island.
Besides military duty, Sophocles served as a city treasurer,
helping to control the money of the Delian Confederacy of states. He also
served as member of a governing council and as a priest in the service of
Asclepius, the god of medicine, to whom he was especially devoted. Well into
old age, he remained productive in civic activities and writing. He wrote
Oedipus at Colonus, for example, when he was over 90. It was that play which
saved him from a charge of mental incompetency brought by his sons. According
to ancient accounts by Cicero and Plutarch, when Sophocles appeared in court,
he read from Oedipus at Colonus, which he was working on at that time. So
impressed were the members of the jury that they acquitted him, apparently
realizing that only a man fully in charge of his faculties could write such
beautiful words. Sophocles died about 405. He and his wife, Nicostrate, had a
son, Iophon, who was also a tragedian. Sophocles and his mistress, Theoris of
Sicyon, had a child named Agathon. Agathon was the father of Sophocles the
Younger, also a writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment