Short answers to common questions

¶ … chorus in "Oedipus Rex"

The chorus gives voice to the plight of the common people of Thebes -- how they begin the play by viewing the king in a positive fashion, even while ruing their suffering due to a plague, and then give voice to sorrow, fear, horror, and finally pity as his fate becomes revealed to the populace.

The role of the gods in "Oedipus Rex"

The role of the gods in Classical Greek tragedy is not to punish, it is simply to dispense fate. The gods are arbitrary in their allocation of a bad fate to a baby like Oedipus once was, and yet the gods are just in the sense that they are blind to the hierarchy of royalty, of all men's worldly status, blind to the fact Oedipus has become a king.

Tiresias the blind prophet in "Oedipus Rex"

One of the many ironies of the play is that the blind prophet of the play sees the truth of Oedipus' fate the best. Tiresias reveals to Oedipus the truth of the king's fate to murder his father and marry his mother -- and is rejected until he is proven incontrovertibly correct. Tiresias' own person also indicates the arbitrary nature of the gods, in his blindness and the fact he was once a woman and a man, and has thus experienced, due to divine caprice, both identities.

4) Oedipus' name in "Oedipus Rex"

The meaning of the king's name, that of "Swollen foot" reveals Oedipus original fate as an abandoned orphan on a hillside, hobbled at the ankles -- and should have been a physical clue to the king early on that his true parents were not the man and woman who raised him!

5) Incest in Hamlet

Hamlet accuses his mother Gertrude of incest because she has married her husband's brother, making Hamlet's uncle his new father.

PART II

For the following "QUOTATIONS," explain who said them, what play they're in, what is going on and what their importance is.

1) "The queen, his mother, lives almost by his looks; and for myself-my virtue or my plague, be it either which-She's so conjunctive to my life and soul, that as the star moves not but in his sphere, I could not but by her."

King Claudius says this about the title character of "Hamlet." He says this to Laertes, to explain why he has not physically punished Hamlet yet, for the killing of Laertes' father Polonius. Thus, the two must conspire to punish Hamlet via a duel with a poisoned sword, says Claudius, because he cannot offend the queen. This quote shows the king's lying nature, as the king cares less for Polonius than eliminating the son Hamlet, who knows how he came to the throne, and his fears of raising suspicions in the court about his complicity in old Hamlet's death.

2) "You-here? You have the gall to show your face before the palace gates? You, plotting to kill me, kill the king-I see it all, the marauding thief himself scheming to steal my crown and power!"

As his fate closes around him, the king of Thebes "Oedipus" raves in horror at the sight of the blind prophet Tiresias at the gate, whom he blames, temporarily and foolishly for his evil fate, attributing guilt to the fortuneteller by association with fate.

3) "Creon is not your downfall, you are your own!"

Tiresias says this to the title character of "Oedipus," stressing that hubris rather than men, and the god's will and the man's allocated fate by the gods, rather than political wrangling are what does the Greek king of Thebes in.