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Oedipus at Colonus and King Lear: Classical and Early Modern Intersections
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Bigliazzi, Silvia |
| Copyright Year | 2019 |
| Abstract | Since Sam Shepard’s death on July 17, 2017, of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), there has been an uptick in reevaluations of his legacy. The “Backpages” section of the Contemporary Theatre Review featured a number of articles/eulogies that took issue with a ‘narrow’ critical discourse that had framed Shepard as a writer of “family dramas” (Scott-Bottoms 2017: 536); or, conversely, praised him for not writing “the same play over and over again”, becoming “more not less ambitious as he got older” (Parker 2017: 541); or, celebrated his willingness to experiment beyond the conventions of mainstream theatre (Kreitzer 2017: 542). James A. Crank, in Understanding Sam Shepard, affirmed Shepard’s late-career “evolution” from the “familiar emotional territory of his early work” (2012: 114) towards a more experimental theatre devoid of psychological realism. Shannon Blake Skelton’s monograph, The Late Work of Sam Shepard, argues that Shepard’s “late style” – beginning with his film Far North in 1988 – constitutes not a tapering off of creativity, but a new phase that “stands apart from [his] pre16 vious work” (2016: 3) both formally – creating “transmedia” works that revolutionized his approach to theatre – and in forging into new thematic territory, including topical politics, feminism, and aging, among others. Add to this the critical acclaim for the prose works Shepard published during the last two decades of his life – three story collections and two novels – and it seems that a scholarly renovation of Shepard is beginning to pick up speed. As in Skelton, this paper argues that a productive reading of the last new play Shepard lived to see staged, A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations), must abandon the usual critical practice of focusing either on Shepard’s treatment of a mythic, western American masculinity, or the family drama. Neither of these explains why A Particle of Dread should be considered an important play within Shepard’s canon. Rather, it is the play’s focus on the diseased body in light of its source texts – Sophocles’ King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus – that offers critical insight. In this play, the body’s treatment as metaphor – for either the moral order or the state – is continually questioned. Hence the play’s fascination with DNA, blood, dismemberment, procreation on the level of content, and with disintegration on the level of structure. As Lisa Diedrich suggests in Treatments: Language, Politics and the Culture of Illness, Shepard’s play belongs to that late 20thand early 21st-century literature that treats the body as both “affective as well as effective” (2007: xviii), in ways at once highly personal but also beyond “any particular individual’s experience and account of it, reflecting wider cultural categories” (vii). Shepard’s long obsession with identity – poised between authenticity and performance – is put to bed here, as the play suggests that the condition of both is nothing more than healthy biology. The play is less a reenactment of Sophocles than its impossibility. With that comes the undoing of much of what the source text foregrounds: accountability, individual and state order, revelation. Ultimately, however, the institution that Shepard takes on is not Sophocles but himself. As Skelton observes, an artist’s late style is often a repudiation or reconsideration of, as well as alienation from, the early works and the discourse they are part of (2016: 4). In Shepard that includes what James A. Crank has noted as the conflation of the fiction and autobiography that constitutes the public persona of Sam Shepard 404 Tamas Dobozy |
| Starting Page | 291 |
| Ending Page | 315 |
| Page Count | 25 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.13136/ts.67 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://textsandstudies.skeneproject.it/index.php/TS/catalog/download/67/13/461-1?inline=1 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://textsandstudies.skeneproject.it/index.php/TS/catalog/download/67/13/454-1?inline=1 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.13136/ts.67 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
