Successful Writer Blog

There is a strong link between Sophocles and Shakespeare. In the Hebrew version of Wikipedia the theme of Sophocles’ plays is described as follows:
In Sophocles’ plays, the plot revolves around a hero, who due to unusual circumstances, which are to some extent born of the hero’s character, doom his fate. The plot is tangled and is characterized by a lot of activity and tension. The hero, who is the main motif in the play, belongs to the higher classes and his destructive element seals his fate. Sophocles is using a lot of secondary characters; he does not believe in fate (unlike the Greeks of his day) but in free choice, and one can understand that without the hero’s tragic flaw the tragedy wouldn’t have occured.
I guess one can see this paragraph as the basis for the Shakespearian play. I’m not saying that the writers are identical – the times are different, and when I think of the Shakespearian play, which is filled with humor, arspoetica, thoughts of the human condition and cruelty and madness, I like to think that the Shakespearian play is much more open to a wider variety of human behavior. Where are the mad people in the Greek tragedy? Its different perspective of the supernatural – like in Macbeth – is special because that play is based on historical facts. From what I’ve read it is undetermined which of the supernatural parts in Macbeth belongs to Shakespeare. The refined psychology of the Shakespearian play is in my eyes an important stage in looking at the human character without masks.
What can we learn from the Shakespearian tragedy as a lesson for today?
Shakespeare is not afraid to write about real people even if they are seen as larger than life. Haven’t we all seen a child who is having a hard time accepting his stepfather? Don’t tragedies like King Lear happen every day? Still in his wisdom Shakespeare managed to show us in Macbeth how acting is life, and life is acting. Just before Macbeth is headed to his final battle, he says:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. (V,v, ll. 24-28)
As you all know these lines have inspired a Nobel Prize winner, William Faulkner, to write his own tragedy. What inspires your writing?

It might seem odd, that I am dealing here with the Oedipus story. Like in the case of Job, I’m certain there was no Oedipus. Still, this terrible story is so real to us today, and is so well-rooted in our culture, that we have named a psychological condition after Oedipus and we have catch phrases that refer to certain aspects in this story, so one might say that Oedipus is in our blood stream. Oedipus was no ordinary man. He was a prince, he was adopted, but he didn’t know that. In his attempt to escape a prophecy that some day he would kill his father and marry his mother, he unknowingly killed his father, married his mother and she, he and the children she bore him met a terrible and tragic fate. which destroyed the ruling family of Thebes. There are many interesting points in this story and its adaptation throughout history. Oedipus Rex the Sophocles masterpiece is basically a detective story, where the detective discovers that he is the killer. Can you think of any modern author that can build such a plot? Can you believe such complexity was written several centuries before Christ? I admit that perhaps what we see in those classical plays isn’t what the Greek viewers saw in them. The play Antigone, for example, which had many adaptations throughout the years, is being read as a play against tyranny, while in Sophocles’ time it was read as a play dealing with obeying the law of the gods. This brings me to the conclusion that a good play or artwork can change its focal point over the years, or a masterpiece is an artwork that every generation can find its own reflection in it. I think that this is also the point in Shakespearean plays, and I will deal with this idea in the following post.