Jocasta
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2021
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
"Rock star classicist" and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. In these series she explores (historical and mythological) lives from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They are hilarious and tragic, mystifying, revelatory. And they always tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.
Today Natalie stands up for Jocasta, whose second marriage was to Oedipus. Now for some spoilers if you're thinking of watching or reading Sophocles' play Oedipus Tyrannus.
After some years of happy marriage and four children, Jocasta discovers that Oedipus is, in fact, her son, and the murderer of her first husband (his father) Laius. Jocasta only has a few lines in the famous play, but we learn a remarkable amount about her character. She is smarter than her husband, quicker to understand what's happening and its implications. She is courageous. And she is quicker to act.
The story - in all its forms - is still spellbindingly shocking today.
With Professor Edith Hall. Produced by Mary Ward-Lowery for BBC Audio in Bristol
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.0 | Today I'm standing up for Jakasta. |
| 0:14.0 | Jocasta is the Queen of Thebes. |
| 0:17.0 | She's half of one of the most infamous marriages in antiquity, and she's also the incredible |
| 0:23.1 | disappearing woman of which more later. Let's start with where we're most likely to know her from, |
| 0:29.9 | and that is the Sophocles play, Oedipus Tyrannus. Now you might remember this from all the way back |
| 0:36.1 | in series one, but just in case you haven't done your revision before this series began, |
| 0:41.3 | I thought we might have a recap. So I will take you through the play |
| 0:44.3 | and remind you of where Jocaster comes in. |
| 0:46.3 | The play is set, all the action of the play, is set in a single day, as is usual, with Greek tragedy. |
| 0:53.3 | It has unity of time, as Aristotle identifies it in |
| 0:56.5 | the fourth century poetics when he writes about tragedy and how it works. So unity of time sounds |
| 1:02.0 | like a complicated thing, but isn't it just means that the time span of the play, it runs forward. |
| 1:07.3 | There aren't flashbacks. There's not a sudden jump in time. All the action takes place in this single day. It's also a single location. All right. So all the action in this |
| 1:15.8 | play takes place just outside the Royal House of Thebes. Right. So it is a liminal play. Bing! I know |
| 1:23.5 | some of you will have that exam to do. It takes place in the scenery behind the cast is the |
| 1:28.9 | royal palace of Thebes, right, for scenery such as it is, because obviously Greek tragedy, |
| 1:33.2 | not that big on scenery. We can't go into that palace because this isn't a movie, right? We can't |
| 1:37.3 | go down the corridors and follow the cast as they, this isn't the west wing. And we can't go out |
| 1:42.0 | into the city, which is essentially represented by where the |
| 1:45.4 | audience is sitting because then the story would become far too diffuse right that's epic not tragedy |
| 1:50.4 | we've only got a cast of three so the action has to happen in this place that is between |
... |
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