At the Crossroads: Gendered Desire, Political Occasion, and Dryden and Lee's Oedipus

After the discovery, Oedipus vacillates between cursing Jocasta as "thou far worse than worst / Of damning Charmers" (5.1.174-74) and yearning toward her:

For her part, Jocasta alternates between deferring to Lajus's prohibitive ghost (226-32) and attempting to "fright" the Gods (265) and reclaim her husband (whom she alternately imagines as Oedipus and Lajus). Oedipus wishes for sight to see her "mouth the Heav'ns, and mate the Gods . . ." (280). Novak glosses "mouth" as "declaim against" and "mate" "in the sense of rival or vie with, especially presumed superiors" (493 n. 280). I would add that the phrase keeps intact Jocasta's defiance of Apollonian law and her voracious sexuality. And, if Dryden and Lee had contemplated writing a sequel, the suicides of Oedipus and Jocasta and the murders of the rest of the royal family would have made impossible an Antigone, in which the Apollonian laws are upheld by a woman.

IV

Novak and others have pointed out Dryden's making Oedipus "too good a man" may have stemmed from his acceptance of certain principles of Thomas Rymer:

We are to presume the greatest vertues, where we find the highest of rewards; and though it is not necessary that all Heroes should be Kings, yet undoubtedly all crown'd heads by Poetical right are Heroes. This Character is a flower, a prerogative, so certain, so inseparably annex'd to the Crown, as by no Poet, no Parliament of Poets, ever to be invaded, (qtd. in Novak, "Commentary to Oedipus"485-86 n. 363-65)

Hence, the problem Oedipus would pose for a Restoration playwright: Oedipus both kills a king and is a king; he commits parricide and incest but must be a "Heroe. " And it is a truism by now that political theory during the Restoration (and modern literary criticism-particularly New Historicism) exploits the analogies of state and family, of father and king. At the time Dryden and Lee were writing, moreover, contemporary political theory as well as the brute facts of government and power were in crisis. In relation to Absalom and Achitophel, Susan Greenfield explains,

[Political theorists] assume that discourses about the body and state overlap, and they recognize that any representation of conception is thus a political act. This sense of integration was obviously influenced by their own system of government, figured in the body of a ruler who passed his power through genetic descent. At the same time, though, recent historical events-most importantly the execution of Charles I-had proved that the royal succession could be broken. The classic seventeenth-century patriarchalism that linked monarchal and paternal creative power would not endure. (270-71)

Richard A. McCabe has discussed the relevance of incest to such embattled political theorizing in his Incest, Drama and Nature's Law: 1550-1700: "Perversions in the sexual politics of the family provide ready analogies for corruptions in the power politics of the state or the ideological politics of church and academy" (25). J. Douglas Canfield is more specific: