Oedipus at Kolonus continually is raising the ghosts of previous performances (more ghosts than we now can locate, with so many plays lost for all time) and in this, his final offering to his audience and his city, Sophokles resurrects his most transgressive and provocative hero for a dazzling display of his art.

Oedipus at Colonus

Sophocles is credited with introducing the third actor in Greek tragedy and thus shifting the focus of the drama from the chorus to the interplay of characters. Accounts of classical theater, e.g. Margarete Bieber's ‘The History of Greek and Roman Theater’, allot some space to the three-actor rule.1 However, it rarely is taken into account as a major interpretive tool even when, as with A. Pickard-Cambridge, the author shows a thorough awareness of the existence of the rule.2 . Oliver Taplin gives the subject barely a paragraph in ‘Greek Tragedy in Action’ 3 believing there is no greater significance to the rule than a shortage of first-class actors during the Dionysian festival.

Leo Aylen’s account of the Greek theater does see that the rule, which led to the practice of very creative doubling, had symbolic significance; nevertheless he devotes only two pages to the topic and insists that four actors must have performed ‘Oedipus and Colonus’ otherwise we would have the "ridiculous" situation of the role of Theseus being played by more than one actor.4 This misses one of the great subtleties of the three-actor rule in Sophocles' hands and especially in ‘Oedipus at Colonus’. David Seale, examining Sophocles’ stagecraft, gives the rule no mention at all whereas he shows fine sensitivity to other aspects of the physical presentation of the plays.5

This usually is how the three-actor rule is treated by scholars of Greek drama: they either ignore the rule or note it in passing but do not consider it essential to the actual interpretation of the plays. Yet the plays were not written as literary texts but as performative texts, and the use by Sophocles and Euripides especially, of such a striking effect as having an actor change mask, voice and style of gesture, crossing classes, genders and ages (for example, the Antigone actor also plays Tiresias and the Messenger) must have been calculated as essential to their meanings.

Mark Damon, in an article in Theatre Journal, (October 1989) closely examines the three actor rule in its many manifestations, especially as employed by Euripides. His essay is an informative account of the symbolic possibilities that emerge from some of the astonishing doublings that occur. As I am convinced the 'meaning' of a Greek drama is the experience of its performance, I believe the subject of Damon's insights should be central, not peripheral, to interpretation. What is required, I believe, is the placing of this feature at the heart of our interpretation of the plays.

Consider two startling but not unusual examples of such doubling that Damon mentions: the Orestes-actor, in Sophocles ‘Electra’ also plays Clytemnestra. This entails the Orestes actor confronting his sister both as menace and as rescuer in alternative scenes. At one point, Damon observes, the actor, entering the palace to kill his 'mother' becomes two persons,6 giving out his mother's death scream. To see the actor shift from the positive role of Orestes in the Prologue to the negative role of Clytemnestra tormenting her daughter and praying for Orestes' death and then, to the inexpressible joy of Electra (and, surely, to the theatre audience), returning to the rescuing Orestes-role surely discourages readings that try to 'see' this Orestes identity in negative terms. This is to read Sophocles' play in terms of Euripides' very different version where the Orestes actor undergoes no such startling change.

The non-naturalistic art of changing voice, mask, costume, identity and dramatic function should prevent the psychological or moralistic judgments one still encounters. David Seale, for example, complains that Orestes is "a secret schemer...unheroic... ...unemotional...[who] spends most of the play 'behind the scenes', and his one momentous act is virtually appropriated by his sister."7 But this idea of Orestes is contradicted by the Prologue which reveals an Orestes determined, clever, not taking his orders from Apollo, merely consulting the oracle on "how" to kill his mother and Aegisthus. It also is contradicted by the famous "chariot race" speech of the Paidagogus which establishes a heroic identity for Orestes even as the Orestes-actor is now onstage as Clytemnestra, reacting to the report of his previous role's death - a performative irony if ever there was one! It was surely further contradicted by the reaction of the original Athenian audience which would have anticipated the actor's reversion to the Orestes-role after this moment of Clytemnestra's triumph and Electra's collapse. It would have anticipated the role-reversion as a miracle in the making. The audience would not fret that Orestes lurks "behind the scenes": the reality confronting the unknowing Electra, but known to the theater audience, in the doubled role of Orestes-Clytemnestra is wonderfully, ironically dual. Far from embarrassedly disguising the doubling, Sophocles focuses on it, exploiting this performative irony of the dramatic situation.

Though the audience accepts the necessity of "believing in" the Clytemnestra character, it cannot help but be aware of the other, Orestes-presence within the actor, waiting to be resumed. It is as if the ghost of the previous Orestes-impersonation now haunts the Clytemnestra figure, waiting to annihilate it by resuming the Orestes role. It shows the awesome presence of justice even at the moment of the seeming triumph of injustice. Modern productions blind to Sophoclean irony and wanting, instead, the simpler dramatic effect of undistracted sympathy for Electra's despair, such as John Barton's version in ‘The Greeks’, omit the Prologue which assures us of Orestes' powerful presence. And, by distributing the roles to role-specific actors another important Sophoclean dimension to the play is lost.

Sophocles is after a larger meaning than audience empathy for his heroine: he surrounds Electra's despair and her resolve to undertake a suicidal attack upon her mother and Aegisthus with an Homeric assurance to the audience that her desperate mission is right, that she will be rewarded, that her stubborn emotions, seemingly self-destructive, are at one with a larger dikë or justice visibly present onstage. Both the Prologue and the actor's doubled role as Orestes-Clytemnestra adds this dimension of irony to the situation. The same actor is both Electra's curse and her blessing, her trial and her reward in both of his impersonations: two extreme and opposite aspects of her fate, testing the Electra-role to the limit of endurance so that it will 'earn' the miraculous deliverance.

The doubling puts the audience in a godlike position of joyful expectancy even as the Electra-actor must exhibit the greatest despair and grief. The play is about the truth and rightness of Electra's seemingly disastrous constancy; and so the Electra role is not doubled. Electra, like a harassed saint, is surrounded by tempting (Chrysothemis) menacing (Clytemnestra and Aegisthus) and wonderful (Paidogogus and Orestes) forces taken on by the other two actors. We are made to see this whole powerful play, as performance, in a much more complicated - and much less 'psychological' - way than most interpretations allow.

Another,equally startling example mentioned by Damon, is when the Pentheus actor, in ‘The Bacchae’ also plays his own mother and killer, Agave. When Agave enters carrying Pentheus’ head, most likely the actor is carrying the bloodied mask of his previous impersonation. To the spectator of the play, the Pentheus-actor, toughly impersonating the leader of an all-male armed camp, (the women have fled the city) and confronting a effeminate seeming Dionysos, followed by bacchantes, becomes increasingly feminized before our eyes, in contrast to Dionysos's increasing potency, until the Pentheus-actor exits, dressed as a bacchante/maenad, to become the most dangerous of maenads, his crazed mother.

What we experience, here, is the shifting of identities into their opposites that only the doubling supplied by the three actors and the masks could supply. Damon mentions other symbolic doubling and tripling in this play (Dionysos-Tiresias; Cadmus-Servant-Messenger) and others. He does not draw my conclusions for he is pursuing different aspects of the three-actor rule; nevertheless his article is an indispensable introduction to the richness of this subject. I do not think it is good sense to separate the interpretation of Greek plays from the visual experience of them; the Greek for theatre meant a place for seeing.

The rule is more than the display of author-actor virtuosity, though many of the displays are stunning enough. It was why Greek drama never felt inclined to change the rule because it allows dazzling examples of skill both by actors and playwrights that one cannot imagine either wanting to relinquish. It sets up tremendous difficulties for both; but difficulty is what the best art always sets itself. It helps explain the high esteem with which Menander was held. A play like the ‘Dyskolos’ becomes immensely more impressive when one realizes its whole world of genders, classes, ages, types (rural and urban) has been brought into being by the astonishingly adroit deployment of thethree actors and their stock of masks. It suggests a philosophic vision where all human reality is nothing more than such a whirling succession of personae.8

It also means the doubling was meant to be recognized by the audience not only as part of the actors' great skills but also of the play's meaning. As actors also competed for first prize they obviously intended their virtuosity to be appreciated, not impenetrably concealed. The three-actor rule was not likely to have been a necessary inconvenience of the festival competition but far more likely a deliberate aesthetic convention, an intrinsic part of the competition and thereby a means by which an audience could objectively assess a dramatist's skills and intentions. To have added extra speaking actors (mutes and 'spear-carriers' were used) would no more have improved the art-form than adding extra instruments to a string quartet It also suggests what I long have thought; that a Greek play was not a finished script waiting for rehearsal, but the incremental result of rehearsal in the theater. Thus the meaning is inseparable from the performance, from the worked out disposition of the roles and actors as tried out in the physical space of the theater by the playwright-director-choreographer-etc - himself quite an impressive switcher of roles.

The skill with which the same actor, in ‘The Women of Trachis’ could play two such intrinsically opposite roles as the feminine, domestic, gentle Deianeira, and, after the death of this role, play the immensely 'macho' Heracles must have been impressive enough in terms of performance skills: but, as Leo Aylen shows, this astonishing doubling also conveys the meaning of the play:

‘The Women of Trachis’ is about how love destroys both Deianeira and her
husband Heracles. The leading actor plays first the weak and helpless woman,
and then the tough warrior,now wracked with the poison from which he is dying.
Both people are in a sense one victim of one action. The convention helps
Sophocles to point his meaning.9

Aylen further notes that this also "makes sense"10 of the 'diptych' form of the play which had struck some critics as being 'broken-backed' and thus defective. Again, attention to the performance situation is an indispensable guide to its meaning.

‘Oedipus at Colonus’ might be unique in tragedy where single roles (Theseus, Antigone) are played by more than one actor. (Ismene also goes from speaking to mute then back to speaking parts). In comedy, this was to become a staple of the genre. Menander stretches the convention, one imagines, to its limits.

The occasion of the performance of Oedipus at Colonus, in 401, the last great tragedy to appear at the festival, following the death of Sophocles and the defeat of Athens by Sparta but after Athens had begun to regain its democratic independence, must be unrivalled in the history of the theater. Even before his death, as Sophocles prepared for the performance he would not see, he must have looked upon the space of the amphitheatre much as a famous bullfighter looks upon the ring where he had spent his entire victorious career. This was the space of Sophocles’ unrivalled series of victories in the dramatic contests.

The sense of that space being haunted by the ghosts not only of Sophocles' own plays but those also of his rivals, has struck many commentators. The presence of these ghosts: of the ‘Oresteia’, ‘The Seven Against Thebe, ‘The Phoenician Women’, ‘Antigone’, ‘Philoctetes’ and, above all, ‘Oedipus tyrannos’, is recognized by critics. I will simply look at how Sophocles deploys the physical space of the theatre and especially how he employs the three-actor convention to convey the 'miraculous' event that the play finally depicts.

I will emphasize different aspects of this staging than does David Seale but my account owes much to his chapter on this play in ‘Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles’.11 I share with him and others an idea of the play as an almost point-by-point reversal of the dramaturgy of ‘Oedipus tyrannos’, the later play looking at the earlier as if in a mirror where all the earlier terms are reversed: a drama of gaining semi-divine status vs. a drama of losing it; of establishing the right to occupy a sacred space despite the chorus's initial horror vs. a drama of being ejected in horror from a kingly space despite the chorus's initial sympathy; a drama of beginning as blind outcast and ending as accepted as a visionary insider vs. a drama of beginning as royal insider to ending as blind outsider, and so on. The two plays counterpoint each other, drawing into this counterpoint the themes of other plays that appeared in this theater space for over more than half a century. This ingenious counterpointing reveals that the old Sophocles was consummately in control of his medium; that very few, if any, of his 'effects' are likely to be accidental: i.e. that he is not 'nodding' and unprecedentedly requiring a fourth actor.

Sophocles employs more powerfully than before three areas of the theater's physical space, making each tremendously momentous: the parodoi, left and right, the orchestra, and the skene – though the similar model of the ‘Oedipus tyrannos’ is ever-present. Especially significant is the contrast of the left parodos with that of the right. The left represents the direction from Thebes. From it comes menace, deceit and danger in the person of Creon. It is Oedipus's past. Towards it Oedipus directs his tremendous curses. In Creon, Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene, all of whom enter from this side, we see Thebes' past, its 'current' victims and its tragic future.12 The right represents Athens, always, in Athenian drama, a non-tragic space, a refuge from tragedy as Froma Zeitlin reminds us.13 From this side will come acceptance by the chorus and rescue by the king. Towards this direction Oedipus directs his blessings for the future. Thus he performs the role of the Eumenides, whose sacred grove he occupies, of both cursing and blessing, especially, (as in Aeschylus' ‘Eumenides’, of blessing Athens. The two parodoi, therefore, physically enact or stage much of the play's meaning and much of the theater's memory.

The skene's emphatic separation from the orchestra emphasizes the sacred aspect of the setting and the momentous impact of Oedipus's presence there. It establishes, as Seale notes, a 'barrier' between the sacred and the profane realms of existence, the 'bronze threshold'.14 It also will be the scene of a theatric 'miracle' at the conclusion when one actor, the protagonist, in swift succession undergoes three changes of identity, and this astonishing succession will itself embody Oedipus's final blessing and the concluding meaning of the whole play. It is a 'miracle' that is apparent only in the theatric performance.

This symbolic division of the theatric space sets the scene for a highly significant deployment of the three-actor convention. By this time in the careers of Sophokles and Euripides, competing with each other and other tragic dramatists, dramatic plotting, the deployment of all the elements of the physical theater, and the evocation of the audience’s memory of previous performance in that same theatrical space, has reached an extremely high degree of sophistication. ‘Oedipus at Kolonus’ continually is raising the ghosts of previous performances (more ghosts than we now can locate, with so many plays lost for all time) and in this, his final offering to his audience and his city, Sophokles resurrects his transgressive and provocative hero for a dazzling display of theatric art.

If we look at the disposition of actors and roles and the doubling necessitated by the plot we find the following roles taken up by the three actors in succession: (To help the reader I have given the appropriate page numbers from the Robert Fagles translation in the recent Penguin edition. In the breakdown of the text into Episodes, Choral Odes and Choral Dialogues (the structure of the play is itself unusually complex) I have followed the structure usefully set out by Paul Roche in his 'Mentor' translation.15 The disposition of actors to roles is an extraordinary feat of both contrapuntal plotting by Sophokles and of extreme versatility by the actors.



OEDIPUS AT KOLONOS
Protagonist
(1): Oedipus-Messenger-Theseus

Deuteragonist (2):
Antigone-Theseus-Polyneikes-Theseus-Antigone

Tritagonist (3):
Citizen-Ismene-Theseus-Creon-Antigone-Ismene

These roles are distributed throughout the plot in the following way: (Entering roles are capitalized and appear on the second line of each section except for the 5th Episode. I have printed the Theseus role in brackets so that the reader more easily can see the adoption of this role by the three actors.).
Distribution of Episodes and Actors:

Prologue:
1. Oedipus. 2. Antigone(enter left) 283-290
3. Citizen (enter right parodos)
{Exit {3) Citizen to become Ismene}

Parodos; Choral dialogue: Chorus, Oedipus, Antigone 290-301
(Chorus enter right parodos)

1st Episode
1. Oedipus 2. Antigone 301-313
3 ISMENE (enter left parodos)
{Exit (3) Ismene right to become Theseus)

Choral Dialogue: Chorus, Oedipus, Antigone, 314-317
1. Oedipus 2. Antigone 318-325
3. {THESEUS} (enter right parodos)
Exit {3} Theseus to become Creon}

1st Choral Ode: : Chorus, Oedipus, Antigone 326-327

2nd Episode
1. Oedipus 2. Antigone 328-336
3. CREON (enter left parodos)
{Exit {2} Antigone left to become Theseus}

Choral Dialogue 337-339

1. Oedipus 3. Creon 340-347
2 {THESEUS} (enter right parodos)
{Exit {2} Theseus and {3} Creon to become Antigone

2nd. Choral Ode Chorus, Oedipus 348-349

3rd Episode
1. Oedipus
2. {THESEUS} 3. Antigone. Mute Ismene (enter left
parodos)
{Exit {2} Theseus to become Polyneikes}

3rd Choral Ode
Chorus, Oedipus, Antigone Mute Ismene 358-359

4th Episode
1. Oedipus, 3. Antigone, Mute Ismene 359-370
2. POLYNEIKES (enter right parodos)
{Exit {2} Polyneikes to become Theseus}

Choral Dialogue
Chorus, Oedipus, Antigone, Mute Ismene 370-73
(Thunder begins)

1. Oedipus 3. Antigone . Mute Ismene 373-377
2. {THESEUS}
{Exeunt omnes: right skene}
Oedipus actor (1) becomes Messenger}

4th Choral Ode 377-

5th.Episode:(Exodos)
1. MESSENGER (enter right skene) 378-381
2 ANTIGONE 3. ISMENE(enter right skene) 382
{Exit {1} Messenger to become Theseus}
Choral dialogue Chorus-Antigone-Ismene 382-387

1 {THESEUS} (enter right skene)
2. Antigone, 3. Ismene 387-388


The strongest argument against a fourth actor, unique to this play, is that in that case this elaborate structure of entrances and exits would be unnecessary. There would be no need for a mute Ismene, or for Theseus to have to exit at the conclusion of the Second Episode, leaving Oedipus in danger, prior to the entrance of Creon, played by this same third actor. Instead, the plot’s exigencies can fully be accounted for from the standpoint of the three-actor rule, whereas, if a fourth actor were available, a different (and far less suggestive) pattern would have emerged The three-actor rule allowed Sophocles to discover, as in the past, the opportunities for profound symbolic patterning.

Theseus does not make his appearance until the family unity of Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene is completed and the play ends with the re-assertion of this unity, this time with Theseus taking the place of Oedipus. The action of the play is the defeat and expulsion from the scene of the forces that threaten this unity: Creon (3) and Polyneikes (2), both 'antagonist' roles that will be played by actors who also play Theseus. The 'Theseus actors', 3 and 2, therefore, between them 'travel through' the whole family history of Oedipus, also taking on the 'sympathetic' roles of Ismene, and Antigone. The Oedipus actor alone does not change - until the last moments of the play when he will change miraculously.

The Theseus role gradually increases in mimetic dignity as it is taken up, in succession, by the third, second and finally the first (Oedipus) actor. This increasing dignity of the role matches the increase of Theseus' authority until the role 'earns the right' to be performed by the Oedipus actor. Theseus has become the closest to Oedipus, underscored by the fact that he alone, not Antigone nor Ismene, is privileged to witness Oedipus' wonderful death.

This approaching closeness is subtly manifested in a number of ways. At the beginning of the play Oedipus and Antigone are the closest. Ismene, though 'sympathetic', is a little more distant, not like her sister, sharing Oedipus' exile but entering from Thebes and bearing news of its menace, - band also of the pronouncement by the oracles of Oedipus' divine power. It is now that the Chorus implores Oedipus to offer a libation to the Eumenides. Oedipus agrees and gives this task to Ismene. It has been asked why it is not Oedipus, or at least Antigone, who should be given this urgent holy task. The obvious performative reason is that one of the three actors onstage must become Theseus. And Theseus is not 'ready' just yet (has not established his commanding significance) to be performed by the Antigone actor. We (the audience) have not yet seen him deserve this closeness to the Oedipus figure.

When actor 3 enters as Theseus, however, he exhibits that mixture of chivalry and pity before the monstrous figure that Neoptolemus showed to Philoctetes. He accepts Oedipus as a guest, promises to defend him, and is not horrified by the family history that so appalled the Chorus. As a character, we can say, he is beginning to emerge from the other Athenians as conspicuously noble. His 'role' promises a lot, and the promise will be fulfilled. When he exits, therefore, at the close of the First Episode, he will not again be played by the third actor.

Actor 3, in fact, exits to become Creon, the worst and 'lowest' of Oedipus' opponents. (Ismene, -actor 3 - has been conveniently kidnapped by Creon's men - a melodramatic plot-element fitting for Creon who cannot rise to the dignity of tragic contest). When actor 3 enters he offers first deceit, and then violence - Odysseus' tactics in Philoctetes, another figure who tries to possess a power he cannot reverence, - getting his men to drag Antigone from the scene. Creon remains onstage, engaged long enough in recrimination with Oedipus for the Antigone actor 2 to change into the rescuing Theseus. The speeches and behavior of Theseus in the following episode fully justify his histrionic elevation. This elevation is at the expense of the Antigone-role, (now actor 3 ) and the Ismene role, now a mute actor. Theseus, 2, in fact, already is closest to Oedipus, 1.

As Oedipus is now out of danger, Theseus plausibly can exit, temporarily, so that the actor (2) can become Polyneikes. In contrast with Creon, Polyneikes is not only the closest of Oedipus' antagonists - his son - but he also is a tragic, not a melodramatic, figure. There is no large fall of stature then, for actor 2 to transform to Polyneikes, who carries with him in Athenian theatrical memory a greater tragic identity than Creon. Polyneikes' dialogue with his father is truly tragic. His reaction to the sight of Oedipus exhibits genuine grief and sense of guilt. He displays reverence towards Poseidon, and, unlike Creon, is honest about his mission.

His roll-call of his allies and their six leaders, is a deliberate recollection of ‘The Seven Against Thebes’, and gives to Polyneikes the tragic dignity - and destiny - of Eteocles in Aeschylus' play. Both the Chorus and Antigone are sympathetic towards him and the tremendous blood-curdling curse that Oedipus now utters upon him and his brother reveals the tragic futility of his human contrition before the daimonic power he has offended. His departure has dignity, touched with the love clearly displayed between himself and his sisters - a clear ‘recollective anticipation’ of the Antigone.

After this episode, through the agon with the Polyneikes figure,the play is elevated to full tragedy. Sophocles now takes it beyond tragedy to a form of mystery play, just as Aeschylus took the ‘Oresteia’ beyond tragedy to divine comedy in the ‘Eumenides’. Thunder, as implacable as Oedipus' curse, now summons the old hero. This is how Oedipus understands it. The Chorus is terrified, and calls upon Theseus to come from his holy sacrifices, where he is priest-king, and to join with Oedipus. Again, Theseus shows himself fully able to respond to Oedipus' nature, this time to his holy, not his monstrous, identity. In this way he has 'displaced' Antigone and thus 'earned' the second actor status. Oedipus cannot utter the "great mysteries" to anyone but Theseus and he promises these will be tremendous blessings - as tremendous as the curse on his sons and on Thebes.

The action of the play moves into the miraculous. The blind old hero who had to be led, can suddenly 'see' and lead the others. The hideous pariah has become a revered demigod. As all the characters exit, following Oedipus, (into the interior of the skene) the Chorus offers up a hymn to Oedipus, and a prayer for his acceptance by the world of the dead. The pattern both of Oedipus's whole life and of this play, has come full circle. The pharmakos expelled from Thebes and viewed with horror by the citizens of Athens, has become a demigod, reverenced by the community.

What happened inside the mysterious space of the Grove is now told by the Messenger who must relate holy things and must speak with the mysterious divine voices that called upon Oedipus, and speak with the voice of Oedipus himself. It is arguably the greatest speech in the play, perhaps in Greek tragedy, presumably chanted and sung. And there is only one actor capable of its tremendous range and power - the Oedipus actor,1. This is confirmed when Antigone and Ismene (actors 2 and 3) appear immediately at the speech's conclusion. Theseus must appear later, for he went furthest into the Grove with Oedipus, and the Messenger describes him engaged in an ecstatic ritual of kissing the ground, raising his arms to the skies and saluting the gods of Olympus and of the Underworld.

Oedipus the pariah, through three agons (with the Citizen and Chorus, with Creon and with Polyneikes) has at last 'purged' himself from his tragic past, preparatory to his death and apotheosis, and in a sense, both theatrically and symbolically, Theseus has been at his side throughout the process, himself embodying aspects of each of its stages.

But though Oedipus has transcended tragedy, his children have not. Antigone wishes first to do the forbidden, and seek out the place of Oedipus' death, against Ismene's protest, then to return to Thebes. Any movement in this direction, to the 'Theban' parodos, is subject to Oedipus' terrible curse. This little scene is like a musical tremolo from the ‘Antigone’. And it gives the first actor time to exit and change costume and mask from the Messenger role to the Theseus role; another instance where Sophocles converts a performative requirement into a symbolic meaning. It is now that Theseus appears, speaking with the authority of Oedipus and of the powers that took Oedipus to them.

The Messenger is the link between Oedipus and Theseus so that all three are played by the same actor in swift succession - with whatever subtle modulations of voice and gesture the actor used to convey mystical similarity within difference. When Theseus appears, the miracle and the blessing are complete: the Oedipus voice (spirit) speaks through the Theseus mask: the spirit of Oedipus has entered Athens as a blessing, through its representative hero. Theseus himself has been transfigured by the process which is marvelously conveyed through the profound use of the three-actor rule. The metamorphoses of the Theseus role from third to second to first actor is a process of the growth in power and stature of the character that would have been manifest in the performance. It is the theatrical manifestation of Oedipus' and Sophokles’ gift to Athens.

In this account I have ignored much of what I value in the play: the passionate and transcendent poetry, the depiction of Oedipus as the last in the extraordinary succession of 'sacred monsters' of Sophocles, beginning with Ajax. But I think 'seeing' the performative terms of the plays helps us to understand what Aristotle meant when he elevated 'plot' to the supreme dramatic virtue, over character and poetry. We can only imagine what an original performance, with its speech, song, dance, gestures, music, costumes, etc. would have been like, or how much consciousness of the process of doubling was a fundamental part of the audience's appreciation. I believe that, with such a discriminating audience, at a contest, it must have been acute. The analysis of the three actor rule can take us only some way in the direction of recovering an idea of the nature of the festival of Dionysos. Whether consciousness of this rule can influence modern performances of these great plays remains to be seen. In my view, it does restore some idea of their performative brilliance and depth.

Notes
1. Margarete Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theatre (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971) 80-81
2. A. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Pres 1968) 135 ff.
3. Oliver Taplin Greek Tragedy in Action (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978) 13.
4. Leo Aylen, The Greek Theater (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses 1985) 95
5. David Seale, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1982)
6. Mark Damon 'Actor and Character in Greek Tragedy' Theatre Journal October 1989 pp. 316-40
7. Seale, p. 79
8. Taplin, p. 13 for example, dismisses the idea that such doubling represents "some metaphysical notion of the fluidity of personal identity." But why should this idea be dismissed out of hand when it might add an enriching interpretive dimension to our experience of Greek drama and culture? It is not such a tremendous step from Sophoclean drama to Platonic philosophy and its concept of a realm of "Ideas" enduring above the fluidity and flux of material and human life.
9. Aylen, 96
10 ibid.
11 pp. 113-143
12 To simplify references to entrances and exits I have designated them thus as left and right: reversing this into its opposite in no way alters the argument. I am also seeing the scene directions from the audience's point of view and remembering the layout of the theatre of Dionysos in Athens. Polyneikes, as villain-victim, symbolically should enter from this 'left' parodos: but he is an exile from Thebes and has been praying at the nearby altar of Poseidon. He will exit this left (tragic) direction after receiving Oedipus's curse. Thus the entry from the right parados would make his presence dramatically 'ambiguous' until his dismissal.
13. Froma Zeitlin, 'Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama', John Winkler and Froma Zeitlin. eds Nothing To Do With Dionysos? (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1990) 130-167
14. Seale, 116
15. Paul Roche, The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles, (New York: New American Library 1958), which sets out the text's divisions into Prologue, Choral Dialogue (kommos) First Episode, Second Choral Dialogue, Second Episode, etc. and divides the Choral Odes into Strophes and Antistrophes. This is of immense help to both teachers and students of Greek drama, particularly with Oedipus at Colonus which is so innovative in its structure. It would be good if Roche's example were followed by other editions of Greek drama. It makes more manifest to the student the nature of the formal terms of the performance.




Bibliography:
Leo Aylen The Greek Theater (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses 1985)
*A Pickard-Cambridge: The Dramatic Festivals of Athens 2nd. ed. Oxford 1968
*Mark Damon 'Actor and Character in Greek Drama' Theatre Journal October 1989
Oliver Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977)
*Oliver Taplin Greek Tragedy in Action (Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press 1978)
David Seale, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982)
Mary Whitlock Blundell Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989)
John J. Winkler and Froma I Zeitlin, Editors. Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal Naquet Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Bo0ks 1988)
**Z. Pavlovskis,"The Voice of the Actor in Greek Tragedy" Classical World 71 1977:113-23