Oedipus’ εἴδωλον, “Lear’s shadow” (OC 110, King Lear 1.4.222)

The essay analyses the principle correspondences between the themes of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Shakespeare’s King Lear. The double plot of the Shakespearean tragedy reworks and expands Sophocles’ interwoven themes of sovereignty and pater- nity which simultaneously contaminate both the bonds of kinship and power relationships. Resorting to poetic retrieval or quotation, or to more elusive recollection – exclusion-vagrancy-resilience; blindness-madness; endurance-(re)action; dynastic and generation- al conflict – the possibility emerges that King Lear, though its per- spective is of course Elizabethan, takes up certain of the main ide- as behind Sophocles’ Theban plays, but with the specific intention of assuming and dramatizing the space-time of liminality and of the transformation of the aged king. This space-time, only presumed and never confronted by the surviving Sophoclean tragedies that fall between the end of Oedipus Rex and the beginning of Oedipus at Colonus, is the space-time of knowledge and consciousness that re-elaborates the shame and repudiates the guilt constantly evoked by the aged Oedipus, by now an anachronism to himself and about to undergo the miraculous consecration of his death.