The blindness of mind and eyes in Sophocles’ Theban Tragedies and Shakespeare’s King Lear: Oedipus, Lear, and Gloucester

Abstract

   Similarities between Sophocles’ Oedipus and Shakespeare’s Lear were first noticed decades ago. Scholars called attention to the episodes in which both kings repel truthtellers (e. g., Tiresias and Kent); Oedipus’ two sons and Lear’s two daughters are killed; Oedipus laments over his wife and mother, the dead Jocasta, and Lear weeps over his daughter, the dead Cordelia; Creon enters with Antigone’s corpse and Lear with Cordelia’s corpse; the blind Oedipus is led by Antigone and the blind Gloucester by Edgar; etc. A few years ago (2019) an entire collection of articles was published on the parallels between Oedipus at Colonus and King Lear. Although in this collection the similarities between the two plays are analyzed from different points of view, no special attention has been paid to the metaphorical meaning of blindness of mind and eyes, an aspect about which the author of this article first wrote in 2015 and discusses it in more detail in this paper. “It is better to be blind in the eye than blind in the mind”: this saying of the 5th century Armenian historiographer Yeghishē, found in other ancient sources as well, perfectly fits the dramatic story of Oedipus, who in his turn has well-known counterparts in Shakespeare’s King Lear, namely Lear and Gloucester. This paper focuses on an interesting parallel between these three characters, namely, the painful, tragic way by which they acquire wisdom (in the case of Oedipus, prophetic wisdom) through blindness.