Oedipus Tyrannus

Oedipus Tyrannus

Oedipus Tyrannus, a dramatic poem touching on the theme of paper money, was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), the English poet famous for such poems as Ode to the West Wind.

Oedipus was the hero in a Sophoclean tragedy who blinded himself in a fit of painful self-revelation. The name Oedipus referred to his feet, made misshapen by a thong binding when he was a discarded baby. Shelley’s poem is presented as a translation of a Greek tragedy, but bears a closer resemblance to one of Aristophanes’ comedies. Shelley translated Oedipus Tyrannus as Swellfoot the Tyrant. Swellfoot reigned in Thebes over a kingdom of pigs who remained firmly under his heel. His queen, Iona Taurina, lay under a reproach of some crime, presumably promiscuity. The queen had been driven from land to land by a gadfly, and her impending return has brought to mind a prophecy that:

• Boeotia, choose reform or civil war!
• When through the streets, instead of hare with dogs,
• A Consort Queen shall hunt a King with Hogs,
• Riding on the Ionian Minotaur.

The play was an allegory of the English royal politics at the time. When George III died in 1820 the Prince of Wales was crowned in a ceremony that banned his wife, Princess Caroline, who had been investigated for adultery, from attendance. The people of England championed the cause of Princess Caroline, who in vain tried to attend the coronation and died a week later. Shelley regarded Princess Caroline as “a vulgar woman, with all those low taste, which prejudice considers as vices” (Reiter, 1967). His judgment of the king was no kinder, writing that the king, “no less than his ministers, are so odious that everything, however disgusting, which is opposed to them, is admirable” (Reiter, 1967).

In Act I Swellfoot stands before the statute of the goddess of famine, praying:

• Thou to whom Kings and laurelled Emperors,
• Radical-butchers, Paper-money millers,
• Bishops and Deacons, and the entire army
• Of those fat martyrs to the persecution
• Of stifling turtle-soup, and brandy-devils,
• Offer their secret vows!

When the pigs bemoan their fate and ask for clean straw and hogwash, an infuriated Swellfoot orders that the sows be spayed, and when the pigs run wild he orders them killed. The king’s councilor, fearing for the safety of the kingdom, observes:

• The troops grow mutinous—the revenue fails—
• There’s something rotten in us—

Mammon, the priest of the goddess of Famine, answers:

• Do the troops mutiny? —decimate some regiments;
• Does money fail? come to my mint—coin paper,
• Till gold be at a discount, and ashamed
• To show his bilious face, go purge himself,
• In emulation of her vestal whiteness

Mammon’s daughter, Banknotina (a reference to banknotes), inherited his estate, called Fool’s Paradise, and consisting of funds in “fair-money, bonds, and bills.” Later in the poem a reference is heard of “kings and priest and lords, who rule by vizers, sceptres, bank-notes, words.”

The poem ends with the queen leading a rebellion of pigs against Oedipus, his councilors and allies, hinting at an outcome as lawless and merciless as the French Revolution. The prophecy of civil war in Boetia had come true.

Shelley wrote Oedipus Tyrannus toward the end of England’s first experience with inconvertible paper money, which lasted from 1797 until 1821. His play sounded a theme that would often recur—the association between extravagant abuse of paper money and political and social conditions that lead to revolution.