‘The Curtain’s Drawn’: Incest as Spectacle in John Dryden’s and Nathaniel Lee’s Oedipus

First performed at the Duke’s Theatre, probably between September 1678 and January 1679, Oedipus: a Tragedy was the joint effort of John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee. The collaboration between the Poet Laureate and ‘mad Nat’ proved a success and the play had a rather long run of ten days. Based on classical (Sophocles and Seneca) as well as modern French sources (Corneille), the tragedy dramatizes the well-known mythical account of the king of Thebes who killed his father and, after liberating the city from the Sphinx, married his mother unawares. Murder and incest are therefore the pivotal elements around which the play traditionally revolves and Dryden’s and Lee’s adapted the ancient drama to the contemporaries’ gusto by enhancing the horrific and most gruesome components of the plot also by thriving on the spectacular apparatus of Dorset Garden. In fact, as I will argue, incest, to which the two protagonists continually, if unwittingly, allude is problematically dramatized not only because Oedipus and Jocasta are depicted as deeply in love with each other, but also because their forbidden relationship is made spectacular. Incest takes the form of a prodigy, of a dream, but also of a performance, and in a metatheatrical thrust Oedipus and Jocasta look at their crime as if it were a ghastly scene of evil they eventually crave to applaud.