ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that it is less the theater than the courtroom, if in the contemporary Anglo-American experience there is a milieu that shapes a secular character capable of standing the test of time. It discusses the experience of time available to the audience is somewhat more immediate than the experience of time in the rituals. The outcome of a play, for instance, may be known in advance, but, as the climax is reached, it may still come with a frisson of surprise or even horror to the audience. In Sophocles first play about Oedipus, Oedipus Rex, the hero finds himself in what is truly, for him, a unique and unprecedented situation. In the first play, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus suffers from an event so far beyond the range of the ordinary that it is virtually unthinkable and unimaginable. In the second play Oedipus at Colonus about Oedipus, then, Sophocles creates the possibility of a continuing secular apocalypse.
