My teacher, Cedric Whitman, once said that reading Oedipus Rex made him feel as if he were being driven on a mountain road in Italy with a very skilled but utterly fearless driver: at every moment, it looks as if the car will lose the road and the play will fall into the abyss. He was talking about the dramaturgical and narratological risks the play takes, that the audience will stop believing in the drama, whose story depends on unlikely coincidences and the believability of whose action requires that the spectator remain completely absorbed at every moment. The effect of the play's flirting with being completely past belief, though, is easy to appreciate. Somehow, difficult though it is, we need to overcome the accumulated weight of expectation about this tragedy of all tragedies. The critical tradition pushes audiences to want a profound yet immediate message about the gods or fate or a valuable moral about life.

We do not know the date of production of Oedipus the King. Stylistically, it appears to be later than Antigone, and it is almost certainly earlier than Electra. The only other criteria for dating are the general similarity between Oedipus's intellectual self-confidence and the atmosphere of Periclean Athens, and the plague that initiates the action. Athens suffered a terrible epidemic in 430 BCE, with recurrences in 429 BCE and the winter of 427–426 BCE. (Analysis of a mass burial excavated in 1994–5 has suggested typhoid, but the issue is still under scientific debate.