ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses some of the ways in which touch is envisioned on the tragic stage. It use the term "envisioned" purposefully, since the genre dictates that touch remains just that: directly presented to the eye and witnessed as an object of vision or described and offered only to the mind's eye. In Sophocles' dramas, the visual display of heroic bodies in pain almost always includes the significant positioning and touching of them – usually handling them with care while manhandling hovers as a threat. Touch in these scenes becomes an effect of sight; but because touch depends on proximity, it is the only perception engaged by the dramatic event that models shared space and bodily sensation. Touch instead brings things and people closer, attaching body to body and engaging less often awesome or terrifying effects than piteous or tender ones. Oedipus' body evokes intensified versions of such responses and group dynamics, as it devolves from heroic to debilitated.
