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When Oedipus enters the stage for the first time in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, he carries the invisible burden of a backstory—familiar to spectators but not yet himself—that calls into question his claim to transparent self-presentation as sovereign of Thebes. The tragic theatricality of Sophocles' drama, manifest in this entrance, derives not only from its protagonist's failure to recognize his crimes but also from the way in which the drama stages crises of recognition that extend even to the spectator. As critics such as Knox, Vernant, and Foucault have shown, Sophocles' drama stages the collision of incompatible epistemic frameworks that paradoxically come together to bring about Oedipus's tragic recognition of his crimes. This essay synthesizes the classic epistemic readings of the grounds of recognition in Oedipus the King with a dramaturgical approach to character entrances inspired by Juliane Vogel's Making an Entrance. Like the off-stage events eventually brought to light and recognized on stage, Oedipus, too, must cross the boundary between the on- and off-stage to become visible and recognizable to spectators. As he comes to realize (and spectators realize before he does), his on-stage appearance is inextricably tied to an invisible, intractable ground symbolically located in the off-stage space. The ground here appears in various shadings (epistemic, spatial, and temporal), acting as a foundation for appearances and a force that undermines them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]