Edippo (Oedipus)

Foscolo had mentioned a young tragedy devoted to Oedipus in the Piano di Studi of 1796, in the Tragedies category: “Edippo = recitabile ma da non istamparsi” ("Oedipus = possible to stage but not to be printed"); it was thought that the work had been lost, along with most of the young Foscolo's output. A later prose draft of a tragedy (probably dating back to 1811-12) and conserved at Livorno's Biblioteca Labronica library is devoted to the same subject.

The question was reopened in recent years (in 1978) when a manuscript entitled Edippo Tragedia di Wigberto Rivalta (Oedipus Tragedy of Wigberto Rivalta) was attributed to Foscolo by Mario Scotti. The manuscript, which is in Rome's archive of “Civiltà Cattolica” (Catholic Civilization), is stored along with some documents that belonged to Silvio Pellico, who reportedly received them in 1815 when Foscolo divided his papers among his closest friends as he left Milan in a rush. According to Scotti, the attribution of the work to Foscolo is also based on findings in the text and in the structure making matches with Tieste plausible thanks to the shared use of Alfieri's methods: the number of characters is reduced to five compared to Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, in compliance with the ideal of concisions theorized by Alfieri; furthermore, there are clear echoes of Alfieri tragedies like Polinice and Antigone.

The attribution of the work to Foscolo, however, has not convinced all scholars and the debate about the corpus of the writer's tragedies remains open.