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Oedipus Videos 6 videos

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A distraught and helpless Oedipus questions fate and free will when he discovers that he's killed his father and married his mother. 

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Description:

Oedipus learns more about the prophecy and King Lauis' death, with a little help from his on-stage-Greek-chorus friends. It's becoming clear he may have played a role in killing his own father and just didn't even know it. 

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:00

Thank you We sneak in What if it's the king

00:07

Ah la shmoop So basically edifice decides that he needs

00:14

more information quinn and he sets out to find it

00:17

Ok And that's like the question The story Yeah exactly

00:21

Ed abyss in his quest to find more information talks

00:24

to chri on his brother in law Creon says that

00:29

in order to lift the curse he has to figure

00:31

out who killed leia Ce of previous king got names

00:35

The king was murdered And no one knows how ed

00:38

abyss who in a different story was off saving the

00:42

city by figuring out the riddle of the sphinx mose

00:45

that he's not supposed to ask about the murder but

00:49

decides to anyway So oedipus in order to figure out

00:54

what has happened basically begs anyone with information to come

00:58

forward he's looking for ordinary people He's also perhaps looking

01:02

for a profit We might have someone sight into what

01:05

has happened in the past So does he find a

01:07

profit So after a while he does learn that he

01:12

might be implicated in killing the former king He doesn't

01:16

believe this that he wants more information despite the fact

01:19

that the chorus insists that it's not going to be

01:24

to his benefit And can he hear the choruses Warnings

01:28

Yeah the courses on stage in a greek tragedy the

01:32

chorus you can think of it as the town's people

01:35

or people who might already be in the setting But

01:39

then they appear together as one voice and they speak

01:44

to the main characters but they also speak to the

01:46

audience sort of like an omnipresent on ammunition narrator but

01:52

actually on stage got it So how is it possible

01:55

for him to have killed somebody without knowing it That

01:58

is the key question atavus has killed people in the

02:02

past remember he's a warrior he's worked hard to save

02:06

this city and several years ago he did kill a

02:09

man at a crossroads s o there's a chance that

02:14

he could have killed the king Just he didn't know

02:16

it at the time So can you explain to a

02:18

sort of the role of the prophecy and the story

02:21

is this a device that was commonly used in place

02:24

of the time Sure yeah the prophecy does come up

02:27

quite often in greek tragedies just because they're concerned with

02:32

what people can know and what they can't know what

02:35

they don't know What's really and what is sort of

02:38

mystical or controlled by the gods In this case the

02:42

prophecy is sort of of a political device as well

02:46

Edda piss doesn't believe any of the prophecies that he

02:49

gets from tyreese Ius How the blind prophet Instead he

02:54

accuses his brother in law creon of making the whole

02:57

thing up and planting teresi s in order to usurp

03:02

his throne What role does the chorus play in greek 00:03:08.655 --> [endTime] tragedies Explain the significance of prophecies

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