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

AEGEAN: Your Royal Mother Merope, as if She had no Soul since you forsook the Land, Waves all the neighboring Princes that adore her.

OEDIPUS: Waves all the Princes! Poor heart! For what? O speak.

AEGEAN: She, tho' in full-blown flower of glorious beauty, Grows cold, even in the Summer of her Age: And, for your sake, has sworn to dye unmerry.

OEDIPUS: How! For my sake, dye, and not marry! O My fit returns.

AEGEAN: This Diamond, with a thousand kisses blest, With thousand sighs and wishes for your safety, She charged me give you, with the general homage Of our Corinthian Lords.

OEDIPUS: There's Magic in it, take it from my sight; There's not a beam it darts, but carried Hell, hot flashing lust, and Necromantick Incest: Take it from these sick eyes, Oh hide it from me. (4.1.263-279)

As we recognize, and as Oedipus is informed, Merope is not his mother and thus not guilty of "Necromantick Incest," but the emphasis on her languishing, on her desirability, on her "thousand kisses" all make the charge of "hot lust" at least momentarily plausible and add to the play's depiction of the insatiability and transgressiveness of female sexuality. We also hear that Merope has "had no Soul," which leads us to consider the play's handling of the laws of Heaven versus the appetites of Earth, or, in another formulation, the Apollonian versus the Dionysian, the latter term of both formulations being identified as female. In Tiresias's oracular terms, Heaven "sees" while Earth births: "Then hear me Heaven, / For blushing thou hast seen it: hear me Earth, /Whose hollow womb cou'd not contain this murder [...] " (3.1.421-22). Accordingly, the ceremony in the grove that brings Oedipus's guilt to light is earthbound, performed in a trench, rather than at an altar; the sacrifice involves a "barren Heyfer," who, when opened in Seneca "proves [. . .] to contain a fetus even though it is unmated [. . .] allegorically representing the incestuous issue of Oedipus and Jocasta" (Novak, "Commentary to Oedipus"483 n. 274); the grove is dedicated to the furies, violent female deities transformed and demoted by the Olympian Apollo in TheEunpides. Oedipus, one might say, seeks to ally himself with law and with heaven against these feminized forces, to deny them in himself. In Act I, considering the plague and the murder of Lajus, he rails at the Corinthian crowd:

Novak explains that this is

[p]artly because Thebes was the birthplace and a cult center of Dionysus, a god of the earth and underworld. Oedipus supposes himself of Corinth, whose principle cultwas that of Olympian Aphrodite. The opposition between underworld and Olympian deities recurs in Oedipus' curse, I, i, 496 and in II, i, 266-70. ("Commentary to Oedipus"477 n. 452-55)

Novak further, in commenting on Jocasta's murder of all her children ("swift and wild, / As a robb'd Tygress bounding o're the Woods [5.1.402-03]), points out that Dryden and Lee may have in mind Seneca's Oedipus, "where Jocasta's final entrance is marked by likening her to another Theban matron, Agave, who killed her son in a frenzy . . ., and did so on the wooded slopes of Mount Cithaeron, where she and her fellow Bacchants roamed with and like animals [. . .]" (494 n.402-07).