Read the excerpt from "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment.

What problem is Douglass referring to in this excerpt?
the alarming rise in crime that was taking place
the difficulties of living in Virginia prior to the Civil War
the injustice and unreliability of the death penalty
the unfair treatment of African Americans in the courts

The main themes of the play are: fate and free will with the inevitability of oracular predictions is a theme that often occurs in greek tragedies the conflict between the individual and the state similar to that in sophocles’ “antigone” and   people’s willingness to ignore painful truths both oedipus and jocasta clutch at unlikely details in order to avoiding facing up to the inceasingly apparent truth and sight and blindness the irony that the blind seer tiresius can actually “see” more clearly than the supposedly clear-eyed oedipus, who is in reality blind to the truth about his origins and his inadvertent crimes.