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Metatheatre and Metaphysics

in Two Late Greek Tragedies


Francis M. Dunn
Abstract
Euripidess Bacchae and Sophocless Oedipus at Colonus illustrate how
metatheatre may be radical (involving the basic building-blocks of performance), pervasive and progressive (developing from beginning to end
of a drama), and referential (not merely self-referential, but pointing to
a transcendent, metaphysical meaning ).

This essay may run the risk of confirming certain stereotypes about classical scholarship, since it is chiefly devoted to that old-fashioned academic exercise, the reading of a canonical text or, in this case, two such texts: the Bacchae
of Euripides and Sophocless Oedipus at Colonus and since I read these texts
through the lens of metatheatre, an interpretive approach that is now a good
twenty years out of date. Yet my readings will be of interest to the community
of drama scholars in two ways. First, I argue that these tragedies achieve their
effects by returning to the most basic building-blocks of performance; as theatre, they are radically elementary. Second, they are self-reflexive in a way that
forces us to look at metatheatre with new eyes and consider its constructive possibilities.
To explain this second point requires a digression on metatheatrical criticism. Although it began as a New-Critical project, led by Robert Nelson (1958),
Anne Righter Barton (1962), and Lionel Abel (1963), exploring reflexive aspects
of what Righter Barton calls the self-contained world of the play (63), scholarship on metadrama had its heyday in the 1980s with the arrival of poststructuralism. In this period, critics such as Charles Segal (1982), Richard Hornby
(1986), and Judd Hubert (1991) saw metatheatre as one aspect of the prison-house
of language in which, in Hornbys words, any effective play is really about drama,
not about life (24), and metatheatre allows drama to shatter its own illusions
and destabilize its own meaning. I call this the first wave of metatheatrical criticism.
A second wave followed about fifteen years later, primarily in classics. This
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is not because classicists were slow to catch on; Segals book on Euripides, after
all, appeared in 1982. The reason for the delay is that classicists work with different material. By this I mean that ancient drama is different enough from
Shakespeare or Beckett to require a different approach. Lionel Abel has claimed
as much by arguing that after Shakespeare tragedy was no longer possible and
designating the new dramatic form as metatheatre (5961), but the widespread
rejection of his sweeping historical vision has obscured the fact that one cannot
speak of metadrama in ancient literature, at least not in the same way, as one
can speak of it in later periods of literature.1 As a rule, metatheatre in Greek and
Roman drama tends to be implicit rather than explicit as when a prologue
speaker plays a part analogous to a playwright, but remains a god or human
within the plot and it tends to involve dramatic technique rather than language drawing attention to stage properties, perhaps, but not describing the
world as a stage. Scholars of classical drama such as Timothy Moore (1998),
Mark Ringer (1998), and Gregory Dobrov (2001) are therefore concerned with
how ancient dramatists test the boundaries between actor and character, between
performers and spectators. The second wave thus extends the study of metatheatre to earlier periods and coincides as well with the rise of performance studies.
In the first and second waves, self-reference is generally closed; that is to
say, the two sets of critics consider theatre unable to refer beyond itself, being
confined to the prison-houses of language and performance respectively. In my
own readings, by contrast, self-reference is open: metatheatre does indeed allow
drama to reflect on how it creates meaning, and in the process it also refers to
an independent realm outside itself. So perhaps a third wave of metatheatre, if
it ever emerges, will coincide with the New Realism.
To clarify some of these points, I turn to an example from the contemporary theatre. The Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro has devoted much of
her work to portraying the military dictatorship and the insidious methods it
used to maintain power and refuse accountability for its victims, the disappeared. A staging of her adaptation of Shakespeare, La Seora Macbeth, brought
a musical accompanist onstage, used chairs to suggest the presence of an audience, and more generally used metatheatrical devices to let the spectators know
that this was theatre about theatre. Yet the result, as Sharon Magnarelli notes in
an article on this production, was awareness of the theatrics of the real world
as well as the theatrical world (376), awareness of the invisible presence of powers that perform and control. The self-conscious and self-reflexive tropes of
metatheatre thus also refer to a world outside the theatre where power likewise
effaces its own operations, and where passive observers in the so-called Dirty
Wars may unwittingly find that they are active performers. Metatheatre in this
production is therefore open or referential, as in the Greek examples I shall turn
to, but not radical.2 Rather, metatheatrical tropes are only a small part of the
overall effect of La Seora Macbeth; most striking is the absence of Lord Mac-

1. Metatheatre and Metaphysics in Two Late Greek Tragedies (Dunn)

beth and Shakespeares other male characters that leaves the spotlight on Lady
Macbeth and the witches and allows Gambaro, in Magnarellis words, to portray the female protagonist as not only blinded by her love for Macbeth, but
also a deluded puppet at the mercy of his manipulations and whims (370). By
contrast, in the Greek examples I shall consider, the metatheatrical trope is the
heart of the tragedy. More specifically, the trope in each play is not only constructive or referential, in that it refers beyond the prison house of theatre, but
it is also sustained and progressive, acquiring greater and greater meaning as the
action proceeds, and additionally, it is radical, concentrating upon a single building block of theatrical performance.
To illustrate this last point, I offer one more typology. Hornby has identified six different types of self-reference in drama: the play-within-a-play,
ceremonies-within-a-play, role-playing-within-a-role, and references to self,
other, and perception (32). In Greek tragedy, by contrast, metatheatre can be
grouped under two broad headings: authorial and theatrical. The first, authorial type comments on the role of the playwright or director in creating the plot;
for example, as Pat Easterling notes (1997:16971), in the prologue of Sophocless Philoctetes, Odysseus plays the part of author telling Neoptolemus what
to say and do in order to deceive Philoctetes and confiscate his bow and then
proceeds to take on the role of stage manager as well, saying that if there is any
trouble, he will disguise an attendant as a sailor and send him onstage with further instructions. An example that is not from Greek tragedy, namely Shakespeares Mousetrap, will help to illustrate this first type further. Within the
larger drama, Hamlet stages a play and tells the players to act out the poisoning
of a king. He further instructs them to suit the action to the word, the word to
the action, and then dilates on the art of acting itself, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is to hold as twere the mirror up to nature (3.2.1617,
1920;3 see Nelson 2130). Thus like the character of Odysseus in Sophocless
Philoctetes, Hamlet plays the roles of both author and stage manager.
The second type of metatheatre involves theatrical objects such as costumes,
props, and acting space, which spectators recognize as distinct from the meaning these concrete things acquire within the drama. Perhaps the most famous
example is the urn in Sophocless Electra (see Ringer 185199). When Orestes
returns to Mycenae in disguise, he brings a funeral urn as proof of his own
death and so provokes his sisters famous lament over the empty urn. The pathos
of the scene arises from the ironic gap between her grief at her brothers death
and the spectators knowledge that Orestes is still alive a gap accentuated by
reminders that the urn is merely a stage property. You whom I grasp in my hands
are now nothing (1129), she says to the urn, adding Here you are, a tiny bulk
in a tiny shell (1142), and she concludes by asking her brother to let her join
him in the urn, Take me now into this house of yours I, nothing, into it,
nothing (11651166). The words express Electras pain at the same time that they
register the discrepancy between her emotional commitment and the urns lack

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of any deeper significance. Once again an example from Shakespeare helps. The
early modern playwright uses the same type of metatheatre to convey the madness of King Lear when he wants to try his faithless daughters Gonoril and Regan.
Where in his delusion the King thinks he sees robed men of justice, the spectators see only his companions Edgar, Kent, and the Fool, and where he thinks
he sees Gonoril, they see only a stool. The Fool playing along, says, Come
hither, mistress. Is your name Gonoril? and when Lear interjects, She cannot
deny it, the Fool adds ironically, Cry you mercy, I took you for a join-stool
(3.6.4244). Thus where the King sees a daughter who ruined him entirely, the
Fool and the audience see only the prop (Calderwood 12, Egan 4243). As in
Electra, there is a discrepancy between the emptiness of the props and the emotional reaction they provoke.
Examples under my second heading, theatrical metatheatre, thus deal
directly with the semiotics of the stage, inviting us to reflect on how an empty
sign comes, as the performance unfolds, to signify something else. Each of the
tragedies I shall now discuss thematizes one aspect of stage semiotics from beginning to end: the Bacchae explores how mask and costume are endowed with a
dramatic persona, while Oedipus at Colonus explores how the physical stage space
takes on dramatic significance.
Euripidess Bacchae has been associated with metatheatre ever since the publication of Segals Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides Bacchae (1982), but his is strictly
first-wave criticism. Segal argues that the play breaks down the oppositions
between illusion and reality, self and other, stage and representation, leading us
to the unsurprising conclusion that in deconstructing these oppositions Euripidess Bacchae presents us with a drama about drama or, in Segals words, a play
that reflects on the theatricality and illusion-inducing power of [Euripidess]
own work (216). I intend to show that Euripidess play is on the contrary more
constructive and referential than this and at the same time more radical.
Imagine an empty stage. From the side enters a young man who announces
to the audience that he is not what he seems he is in fact the god Dionysus,
newly-arrived in Thebes to assert his divinity and punish those who would deny
it. His disguise as a mortal, he reminds us, will let him put both believers and
non-believers to the test: and that is why, he says, I have changed to mortal
form and altered my shape to manly nature (5354).4 Typically an actor comes
onstage wearing mask and costume and begins by projecting a persona persuading us (by what used to be called the willing suspension of disbelief ) that
he, this actor in this costume, is, in fact, Hermes, or Oedipus, or Gloucester. In
this case, however, the actor projects the persona of someone projecting a persona, thereby inviting us to accept one illusion (this is a dramatic character, not
an actor) but not another (this is not the young man, but a god). The prologue
thus makes us aware of the separate levels of meaning that must be confused in
order to create dramatic character.5
The prologue is mirrored by an epilogue in which the same actor, most

1. Metatheatre and Metaphysics in Two Late Greek Tragedies (Dunn)

likely wearing the same mask and different clothes, makes a startling entrance
above the acting area, announcing to the audience and to the characters below
that he is not the young man he seems to be, but the god Dionysus. In this new
role as vengeful god, he takes credit for the death of Pentheus, whose body parts
lie scattered onstage, for the madness of Agave and her sisters, who tore her son
apart, limb from limb, and for the undeserved suffering of Cadmus, whose house
has been destroyed and who must now himself go into exile. As in the prologue,
here at the end an actor projects the persona of some one projecting a persona,
although in this case we have a god asserting that he was hidden all along in the
young man. Thus both prologue and epilogue draw attention to the paradoxical relation between actor and persona, and both imply, only in different ways,
that the mask represents a deeper, more potent meaning.
The scenes in-between progressively develop this established concern with
dramatic persona. When the impetuous young king Pentheus first confronts the
stranger, he mocks this follower of a foreign god, is outmaneuvered by the other
ones replies, and finally threatens him with violence:
STRANGER: Tell me the punishment. What will you do to me?
PENTHEUS: First, Ill cut off your dainty curls!
STRANGER: My hair is holy, I grow it for the god.
PENTHEUS: And hand over that thyrsus in your hands!
STRANGER: You take it; what I hold belongs to Dionysus [492496].

The irony underscores Pentheuss arrogance since he does not know, as the spectators do, that the stranger is Dionysus in disguise: those are quite literally
the curls and staff of the god. And in this case the irony is metatheatrical, since
what things Pentheus takes as belonging to this infuriating foreigner, the spectator knows are merely part of a costume concealing the god Dionysus and constituting the secondary persona of the actor.
The unwitting Pentheus claps the stranger into jail, at which point miracles start to occur: the palace shakes, the stranger escapes, and Pentheus finds
himself chasing a phantom (576646). Their next confrontation frames a messenger speech describing other supernatural phenomena out in the countryside.
As Pentheus frets at his adversarys escape, the stranger interrupts him saying,
But first listen to that man and heed what he says here he is, bringing you
news from the mountain. I shall stay here, dont worry, I wont run away
(657659). While Pentheus hears the young man report the arrival of a messenger, the spectator also perceives the god manipulating the actions of other
characters and thus summoning on stage a warning of the gods power. The messenger is a cowherd who reports having stumbled across a group of maenads
Agave and other Theban women possessed by the god and tells how some
suckled wild animals and others caused wine and honey to gush from the ground.
But when one of the herdsmen proposes capturing the maenads to please King
Pentheus, the womens supernatural powers turn violent : the men narrowly

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escape, but the maenads nevertheless manage to tear their cattle to pieces and
then to go on to destroy villages and defeat men armed with spears. The lesson
for Pentheus should be obvious; as the messenger concludes, So master, whoever this divinity is, welcome him to Thebes (769770). The point is driven
home by another instance of metatheatre: when Pentheus insists on disregarding the cowherds advice to accept the god, the stranger warns him not to heed
the messenger, but to obey him, the one who brought the messenger here :
Although you hear my words, you pay them no heed, Pentheus! (787788).
Again, the spectator, unlike Pentheus, understands that the strangers disguise
conceals a god and the arrival of a messenger with remarkable news demonstrates
the gods power.
The stranger then lures Pentheus to his punishment by persuading him to
join the maenads. In two brief scenes he first describes the costume Pentheus
must wear, then congratulates the king on the effectiveness of his disguise. When
Pentheus asks for particulars, the stranger says, I shall deck your head with flowing hair (831), adding, with skirts down to your feet, a hair-band on your
head (833), and finally, a thyrsus for your hand, and a dappled deerskin (835).
This closely mirrors the earlier scene when Pentheus threatened to remove the
strangers hair and thyrsus, only the roles of the two characters are now reversed,
and the stranger demonstrates his power by promising to dress Pentheus for an
entirely new role. When the king re-enters wearing his new costume, the stranger
helps him to arrange his flowing curls (928933), gird up his dangling robe (935
938), and carry his staff properly. Should I take the thyrsus in my right hand,
or like this, to look most like a bacchante? (941942), he asks, to which the
stranger replies, In your right hand, and lift it as you lift your right foot (943
944). This detailed metatheatrical business, whereby the stranger not only outfits Pentheus with the mask and robes of a maenad but also teaches him the required
choreography, underscores the superhuman powers of this god in disguise.6
The next confrontation occurs offstage, when the stranger, performing no
mortal deed (1069), places Pentheus atop a towering tree and then disappears,
at which point a voice like that of Dionysus tells the maenads to punish Pentheus
for mocking his rituals (10791081). The preternatural moment is described by
the messenger in these memorable lines: While he gave these instructions a
blaze/of holy fire shot toward heaven and earth./The sky fell silent, the wooded
glens stilled their leaves/in silence, you could hear no cry of wild creatures
(10821085).
Here, for the first time, Pentheus and the stranger confront one another as
mortal and immortal or, rather, they almost do, since the strangers epiphany
as Dionysus is elided: the stranger is no longer seen (1077) and then a voice
like that of Dionysus (10781079) is heard; before, the stranger himself mounts
Pentheus in a high fir tree and after, the maenads, not Dionysus, tear him apart.
Thus though the true power of the god is revealed, the disclosure is only secondhand.

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The epilogue, in which Dionysus appears in his full divinity and Pentheuss
body is displayed in all its abject mortality, is thus the necessary culmination of
the encounters between the two. And the power of this final scene is registered,
above all, through the plays metatheatrical effects. From the prologue, where
the stranger proclaims that he is not who he seems, to the epilogue, where the
god demonstrates his overwhelming power, the action steadily and progressively
unmasks a concealed identity. The power of drama to conceal and reveal, and
more specifically its ability to make present what otherwise remains unseen, is
exploited in this play to the fullest. It is in this sense that the metatheatrical trope
has a constructive role in Euripidess Bacchae, since it allows the drama to stage
the process of unmasking.
Yet at the same time, these metatheatrical effects draw attention to a paradox in the semiotics of theatre. Mask and costume can represent a man or god,
but the representation and the represented are never identical: the theatrical sign
(what an actor wears) can never be the signified (who the actor represents:
Pentheus or Dionysus), yet its capacity to suggest otherwise is a fundamental
resource of theatre. In the prologue, the actor who projects the persona of a
man, who projects the persona of a god, makes us aware of the gap between sign
and signified, and successive scenes in which we see, but do not see, the supernatural powers of that divinity, keep the gap in view. Finally, in the epilogue,
the god himself appears or, rather, the actor who played Dionysus playing the
stranger now avowedly plays the part of Dionysus, relying on a location above
the acting area and presumably impressive delivery and appearance to suggest
the epiphany of a god. The theatrical or semiotic gap represents the ontological
as well as moral divide between humans and gods. Cadmus, surveying the
destruction of innocent and guilty alike, cries out, You go too far! ... Gods
should not be like humans in their anger (13461348), to which Dionysus
replies, Zeus my father long ago gave his consent (1349). Moral revulsion thus
meets with sublime indifference. The Bacchae tells a powerful story, but the central aim of this drama is not so much to tell a story about Dionysus as simply to
enact who and what he is. This it does through a gradual process of both revealing meaning and exposing how that meaning is created in other words, through
a use of metatheatre that is neither playful (as in the first wave of criticism) nor
self-involved. On the contrary, the use of metatheatre here is constructive in that
it helps to propel the action forward, and referential in that it describes something outside the drama.
In this sense, Euripidess Bacchae is a metaphysical drama: it represents a
being or presence which transcends the human sphere. The Greeks generally
thought of gods and humans as belonging to the same realm; unlike a monotheistic deity, Greek gods have the same origin as humans (from the same source
have come to be both gods and mortal humans, Hesiod, Works and Days 108),
and hence share with them the same appearance, the same passions and appetites,
the same material composition, with the crucial difference that gods are more

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powerful, unaging, and immortal. Gods and humans mate with one another,
and the products of these unions are usually mortal but may be divine, as in the
case of Dionysus himself. The Dionysus of Bacchae, however, is gradually revealed
to inhabit a realm apart from humans. This is not just a matter of emotional
detachment or indifference, although he is supremely indifferent to the suffering he causes; nor is it simply a question of perception, although the entire drama
does hinge on the motif of a god disguising himself in order to test mortals.
Beyond both of those issues, the Dionysus of this play is categorically remote
not just from Pentheus but also, as I have shown, from members of the audience.
Both the protagonist and the spectators gradually come to see that the gods
presence is signaled by that of the young stranger from Lydia, but is nevertheless remote and out of reach. It is the disembodied voice of a god, the son of
Semele, son of Zeus (581), that announces the earthquake and lightning which
destroy the house of Pentheus in a manner visible only to the chorus. It is the
disembodied voice of the god Dionysus (10781079, 1089) that invites the maenads to punish Pentheus a voice accompanied by holy fire shooting toward
heaven and earth (10821083). Above all, at the end of the play the voice of a
god speaks through the actor portraying him. Normally, a divine epiphany
embodies on stage a larger-than-human being such as Artemis in Hippolytus or
Castor in Helen; only in Bacchae does the epiphany both conceal and reveal. As
John Jones observed, the mask of Dionysus is here a modern mask which conceals a further reality lying behind it and thus declares Euripidess huge originality (270 and note 45). Equally original is the god in Bacchae, who exists on
a categorically different plane from mortals and in this sense inhabits a metaphysical realm; he has therefore rightly been seen as looking forward to the transcendent, monotheistic gods who start to appear in the Greek world in this and
subsequent centuries, mostly from Egypt and the Near East gods such as Isis,
Cybele, and the god of Christianity (Nock 184189, Dodds xxiiixxv, Seaford
5875 and 120130). The metaphysical drama succeeds so well because of its
metatheatrics. As spectators, we are constantly made aware of the gap between
two levels, the dramatic sign and the being it represents; we are reminded that
what we see onstage can never truly be confused with what it represents; and
our own experience is therefore correlative or equivalent to that of the characters onstage who struggle to make sense of an awesome, transcendent Dionysus.7
A skeptic might here point out that Euripides was not a typical playwright,
and that the Bacchae is in some ways an exceptional play, so perhaps what I have
described was a single, unusual experiment in ancient Greek drama. But it so
happens that Sophocles, who does not have the same reputation as an innovator, made similar use of metatheatre in Oedipus at Colonus, a play describing the
aftermath of Oedipuss blinding and exile that he composed late in life.
Imagine again an empty stage. From the side two characters enter uncer-

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tainly, an old, blind man and a young woman; they are, as we soon learn, Oedipus and his daughter Antigone on the road after years of exile. Right away the
blind man asks, What place have we come to, or which mens city? (12), but
the answer is slow to arrive. Sophocles usually sets the scene swiftly and early
(Dunn 2006:185), but in this case we must wait twenty-four lines before learning that the pair are in Attica, until line 42 that they are on ground sacred to
the Eumenides, and another seventeen lines before finding out that they are in
the deme of Colonus.8 In the process, Sophocles plays a two-fold game with his
spectators, generating irony at their expense while heightening the suspense they
feel. Colonus was not otherwise connected with the story of Oedipus (Gantz
501502, Dunn 1996:60 and note 34), so even when, after sixty-one lines, the
setting has been given a name, the spectators will not have any insight into what
this means. Why is it significant, they will ask, that we begin with Oedipus and
his daughter in this particular place? Yet as we shall see, Oedipus grasps the significance of the setting long before the spectators do; the original ironies of Oedipus the King are thus reversed in this play: it is the blind man who sees what
this place means, and the audience that remains in the dark.
Second, by disclosing information so gradually, the playwright creates a
theatrical correlative to the blindness of Oedipus: as the blind man literally
gropes forward, wondering where he is, the spectators metaphorically struggle
to understand where they are (Dunn 1992:17). In fact, we could more accurately say that Sophocles creates a metatheatrical correlative to Oedipuss blindness, since in the old mans ignorance of where he stands the audience can
recognize its own ignorance of what the acting area means. The protagonist
within the drama who does not know where he is, what place he has come to,
mirrors the external audience and its attempt at the beginning of the drama to
understand what the setting represents. Thus as Euripides exploited the gap
between mask and persona, Sophocles exploits the gap between stage space and
its dramatic meaning.
Let us rejoin Oedipus in the search to understand where he is. When in
line 42 the old man is told that the area is sacred to the Eumenides, he is overjoyed and says he will never leave; when asked why, he alludes only to the contract of my fortune (46). Whatever he may know, this riddling expression gives
the audience little to work with. After learning that the neighborhood is called
Colonus, Oedipus hints that his arrival brings advantages for the citys ruler, but
again, he uses a cryptic phrase, by assisting a little he [the ruler] will profit a
lot (72). What benefit can there be from a man who cant see? (73), a townsman asks, to which he replies, even less helpfully, Every word I speak will have
eyes to see (74). Finally, after the townsman has gone and Oedipus is alone with
Antigone, he explains a bit more clearly: Apollo, he says, foretold that he would
end both his travels and his life at a sanctuary of these goddesses, and he would
thus provide benefit to those who receive him, and ruin to those who drove him
out (8993). The sign of all this, he adds, will be an earthquake, or thunder, or

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lightning (95). Yet we must wait more than fifteen hundred lines for the sign to
appear or rather, to be reported when a messenger at the end of the play
tells of an underground noise (1606), the voice of a god (1626), and a fearful
force witnessed only by King Theseus (16581660).
Between recognition by Oedipus in the prologue and the sign of confirmation in the epilogue, we learn nothing more about the place itself. Instead,
we learn of its importance indirectly, through the actions of others. After the
townsman agrees to ask the authorities whether Oedipus can stay, a chorus of
elderly citizens arrives and tries to drive him off the sacred ground; only an emotional plea by the blind man persuades them to wait until the king arrives. Next
Ismene, the sister of Antigone and daughter of Oedipus, appears. She brings news
from Thebes: her brothers Eteocles and Polyneices are preparing to wage war for
the throne; an oracle has foretold that if Oedipus is buried outside Thebes, that
place will be the death of any Theban invaders; and finally, for this reason Creon
is determined to bring Oedipus back to Thebes. After Ismene, Theseus the king
of Athens arrives; he accepts the blind mans offer of a powerful grave, and
promises to protect him against any who might try to take him away. No sooner
does Theseus leave than Creon appears and, failing to persuade Oedipus to return
with him to Thebes, takes Ismene hostage. He then seizes Antigone and is about
to carry her off when he is interrupted by the chorus. The old Athenians hamper Creon long enough for Theseus to return, face down the regent, and demand
he give back the two sisters. The Theban king departs, hurling threats, and before
long Polyneices himself arrives and, after much debate, is allowed to plead his
case, both for attacking Thebes in order to regain the throne, and for bringing
Oedipus back to be buried outside the walls of the city. Oedipus, in a fiery
speech, denounces the treachery and hypocrisy of his sons and repeats his curse
that Polyneices and Eteocles will die by one anothers hands. As the melodramatic action swirls around Oedipus and the ground he stands on, the dramatic
space gains increasing significance through its connection to the fratricidal expedition of the Seven against Thebes and to Athens immunity from Theban attack.
The prologue explores, metatheatrically, how stage space comes to signify
something else, and the remainder of the drama carries this notion further by
indirectly elaborating upon its meaning. Yet just as there is a fundamental difference between the mask and the character it represents, so too, theatrical space
is essentially different from the place it represents within a play. A metatheatrical awareness of the semiotic gap between these levels (physical space versus dramatic meaning) can be sustained in various ways. Generally speaking, theatrical
space acquires meaning through performance by being acted in. On the one
hand, this is especially true of Oedipus at Colonus, where the particular spot
which the stage represents only gains significance and power with Oedipuss
arrival. We might even say that the trajectory of this drama, despite all the violence and threatened violence over the blind king and his daughters, is not so
much the linear movement of a plot as a filling-in of meaning. Yet on the other

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hand, Oedipus fills the empty space with meaning, not by doing anything (we
might think here how murder and treachery define the house of Agamemnon or
that of Hamlet), but simply by dying or, more accurately, by choosing where
to die.
When at the end of the play we come to the death of Oedipus the one
event that truly gives the stage space meaning we find a widening gap between
the sign and the signified. His death is reported by a messenger who, however
eloquent or reliable, can offer us no more than a second-hand account. What
can he relate about Oedipuss death? Unfortunately, he did not see it himself,
but he did observe Theseus as he watched Oedipuss final moments in other
words, a third-hand account. And what did Theseus see? According to the messenger, we saw the king himself shading his eyes with his hand before his face,
as if some awful terror had appeared that could not be looked upon (16501652).
Theseus, in other words, was too terrified to look. So what we have does not
even amount to a fourth-hand account. As if that were not enough, the account
the messenger conveys is a peculiarly negative one of what Theseus did not see.
We would like to learn where Oedipus stood when he died, since that is the special spot that will protect Athens from Theban invaders. Instead, all the messenger can describe is, first, what did not kill the exiled king: it was no blazing
lightning bolt from god that destroyed him, nor a water-spout racing from the
sea (16581660), and second, the direction in which he may have gone: either
some escort from the gods, or the gaping, dark foundation of the underworld
(16611662). What Theseus fails to observe, in other words, is whether Oedipus
was whisked away to the world above or the world below.
Furthermore, the spot that the messenger did not see, on which Oedipus
never took a stand, can never be known because it is forever a secret, as we learn
soon afterward, when Antigone and Ismene beg permission to visit their fathers
grave. Theseus then replies to the sisters, Children, [your father] told me/no
mortal may approach/that spot or address/the holy place that holds him./If I do
what he requires, this place/will always be free from harm (17601765). Thus
no one within the dramatic action knows the spot, but neither does any spectator outside the action, since for Athenians the world of Theseus belonged to
the distant past, and in their own day no grave of Oedipus existed at Colonus.
My point here is not to suggest that Sophocles is deconstructing theatrical
space and showing that space and its meaning are always already problematic.
Generations of readers have found the final scenes of this play absolutely thrilling,
and for good reason. Just as Euripidess Bacchae builds to the epiphany of Dionysus, Sophocless Oedipus at Colonus builds to a kind of spatial epiphany, as the
supernatural power of this otherwise ordinary place is revealed. Sophocles even
seems to imitate Euripides (Bacchae 10821085, qtd. above) when he describes
an ineffable sense of divine presence (Dodds 212): No cry arose,/there was
silence, and suddenly some-ones voice/rushed out, and everyones hair at once/
stood on end, trembling in fear (16221625). Sophocles maintains a metathe-

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atrical awareness of the gap between space and its meaning throughout Oedipus
at Colonus because he is pushing theatre to its limits. He is not trying to convey the meaning of a real place, as Aeschylus did in Eumenides by capturing the
democratic significance of the Athenian law-court; he is trying instead to evoke
recognition of a transcendent meaning that cannot be contained by the theatrical space.
In this sense, Oedipus at Colonus is, like Bacchae, a metaphysical drama: it
represents a being or presence that lies beyond the familiar world. Generally, the
Greeks thought of sacred and secular space as continuous with one another; they
are not different in kind, being distinguished instead by a boundary separating
a temenos or sanctuary from the land outside it (Burkert 86). The cult statue of
a god may give a sanctuary special status, or it may be the grave of a hero that
does so, and the latter custom contributes to the description of Oedipuss end
in the final scenes of the play ( Jebb xxviiixxx, Markantonatos 140156). Yet
Sophocles goes far beyond this, gradually creating an otherworldly space categorically removed from the familiar arena of the heron or hero sanctuary. Already
at the beginning of the drama, although the blind Oedipus cannot see the boundary of the temenos of the Eumenides, he can somehow sense the groves special
meaning. At the plays end, the disembodied voice of a god calls out (1623, 1626),
summoning Oedipus to that undescribed and indescribable spot the messenger
spoke of. As we glimpse, through his report of the old mans departure, an ineffable being-in-absence, we have an intimation of an awesome, transcendent
world outside the topography of secular and sacred space.
Oedipus at Colonus has often been praised for the pious and religious tone
of its epilogue yet is, as I have noted, inconsistent with what we know of Greek
religion. The metatheatrical and metaphysical impulse of this play, like that of
Euripidess Bacchae, does not look back with nostalgia to an old-time religion,
but instead looks forward to a new age and in particular to Platos attempt to
chart in detail the landscape of a world more beautiful and more powerful than
that which mortals inhabit. The works I have discussed were both staged posthumously, Bacchae after the death of Euripides in 406 BC and Oedipus at Colonus
after Sophocless death the following year, and so both fall, coincidentally, at the
very point where our body of surviving plays breaks off. It is therefore tempting to impose a narrative on the composition of two unusual tragedies at the
apparent end of Greek tragedy. One such story connects the plays to the ends
of the poets lives as swan songs a death-bed conversion to traditional religion
by Euripides (rejected by Dodds xl) and the culmination of ninety years of spiritual struggle in Sophocless inspired play (Whitman 217). A second narrative
sees the tragedies as the last gasp of their genre, the final innovations in a form
that had exhausted itself and was now eclipsed by philosophy and rhetoric
(Ehrenberg 349354). A third story would connect the plays to their rapidly
changing times as self-conscious and theatrical fin-de-sicle experiments (Foley
107108). I prefer instead to recognize, on the one hand, that this was not the

1. Metatheatre and Metaphysics in Two Late Greek Tragedies (Dunn)

17

end of tragedy, which continued as a lively genre for nearly a hundred years after
the production of these plays (Xanthakis-Karamanos, Easterling 1993), and to
acknowledge, on the other hand, their radical use of metatheatre in a constructive way not just within the drama, to express a transcendent, metaphysical
meaning, but outside the theatre, to help inaugurate new ways of understanding the world and human experience.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

Notes
1. Rosenmeyer provides an overview of what I am calling the second wave of metatheatrical
criticism, but unfortunately drives a dubious premise, that Abel gives the best account of metatheatre (Rosenmeyer dubs all critics interested in metadrama Abelians), to the suspect conclusion
that proponents of the second wave sow confusion, not enlightenment.
2. Slater likewise argues that metatheatre directs the viewers attention to the theatrical antics
of Athenian politicians.
3. Quotations of Shakespeare are from the text of Greenblatt et al. (2008).
4. Quotations of Euripides and Sophocles are my own translation of the Greek texts printed
by Diggle (1994) and Lloyd-Jones and Wilson (1990) respectively.
5. Foley rejects this modern effect except, perhaps, in the gods closing epiphany (1323).
Her concern instead is with Pentheus as spectator and victim of a drama-within-the-drama staged
by Dionysus.
6. In this scene the stranger plays the part of choregos or chorus-trainer for Pentheus, so that
here and elsewhere (especially in the prologue) we have authorial as well as theatrical metatheatre.
7. It follows that I would not accept Marylin Arthurs assertion that in the Bacchae Euripides reverted to a more archaic, more conventional, more Aeschylean type of drama (145).
8. Compare Sad on frustrated expectations in another late play, Euripidess Phoenician Women.

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