Philoctetes and Modern Criticism

Abstract

Philoctetes has attracted more critical attention in the 'last fifteen years than any other play of Sophocles, more perhaps than any other Greek tragedy. This may be partly because its themes—alienation and communi cation, ends and means—are familiar and important to modern readers, partly because it is a play of remarkable complexity which presents a special challenge to the interpreter. What follows is a brief attempt to take stock, to see how far there are areas of common agreement and where the important problems now seem to lie. I begin with dramatic technique, on which much of the best recent work has been concentrated,1 leading us to a deeper understanding of the play's extremely refined and subtle design. We can now make a number of fairly confident assumptions without having to argue from scratch about the nature of Sophocles' methods: i. Here as in the other extant plays Sophocles releases the crucial information on which the action turns in a piecemeal and ambiguous way. If pressed too literally, as if it were historical evidence, it turns out to be inconsistent; but this is how he gives himself scope for effects of suspense and surprise and progressive revelation. The prophecy of Helenus is expounded in a way which leaves its detail uncertain until late in the play, and (as Robinson has pointed out)2 Sophocles makes his characters respond to it as people would in real life, interpreting the cryptic revelation of the future according to their sense of what is actually feasible in the circumstances. Thus in the Prologue Odysseus argues, from his knowledge that Philoctetes is a man with both a bitter grievance against the Greeks and