The goat, Sylvia, represents the ultimate social taboo.
- Martin’s love for the goat pushes beyond the limits of what society considers acceptable.
- By choosing bestiality, Albee deliberately selects a boundary that audiences cannot comfortably rationalize.

Symbolically:
- The goat represents desire that exists outside social norms.
- It forces the audience to confront how morality is constructed and where society draws its lines.
Albee isn’t endorsing the act; he is asking:
Are moral limits absolute, or are they socially constructed?

Scholarly criticism often reads the goat as representing:
- The collapse of rational categories: Martin insists his love is genuine even though it violates rational or moral frameworks.
- The instability of language: Much of the play involves arguments about words and definitions (love, normal, moral).
- Scapegoating: Even Albee suggested the goat represents a scapegoat figure, echoing ancient ritual symbolism.

The name “Sylvia” has literary significance.
- It references the poem Who Is Silvia? written by William Shakespeare in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
In Shakespeare, Silvia is idealized as a perfect woman.

Albee’s twist:
- The “perfect beloved” is literally a goat.
This creates irony and critiques the romantic idealization of love.

Martin is a successful architect who prides himself on rationality and order.
Symbolically:
- His confession represents the breakdown of the rational modern self.
- It shows how desire can destroy carefully constructed identities.
This mirrors a classic tragic structure, similar to characters in ancient tragedy who are undone by forces beyond their control.

The play takes place entirely in Martin’s home.
The house symbolizes:
- Order
- Domestic stability
- Civilized society
As the play progresses:
- Language becomes chaotic
- Relationships collapse
Symbolically:
Civilization is shown to be fragile—one taboo can destroy the entire structure.

At the end, Stevie kills Sylvia and brings the body on stage.
Symbolically this represents:
- Society enforcing its moral order
- The destruction of the forbidden desire
But the act is also disturbing because:
- Stevie becomes violent and tragic, not morally triumphant
The ending suggests there is no clean moral resolution.

Albee intentionally structures the play like a classical tragedy.
Connections include:
- Uncontrollable fate
- Moral catastrophe
- Destruction of family
This echoes the tradition of tragedies like Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, where the protagonist commits a taboo act that destroys everything.

The play uses an extreme taboo to explore:
- the limits of tolerance
- the nature of love and desire
- the fragility of moral systems
- and the thin boundary between civilization and chaos

• Transcript
  Hans Fischer - Welcome to SwissEduc. My name is Hans Fischer and my guest is Edward Albee. Welcome, Mr. Albee.

  Edward Albee - Thank you.

  Hans Fischer - In your play "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?" you show an almost picture book family, that is getting into a terrible crisis, because Martin, the husband, falls in love and has sex with a goat. You furthermore mention other sexual taboos - a sexual kiss between father and son, and the fact that a father gets sexually aroused while holding his baby on his lap. What made you write a play bringing up our sexual taboos?

  Edward Albee - The sexual taboos in my play "The Goat" are secondary to the reason that I wrote it. They are merely methods of examining what the play is really about. The play is really about the limits of our tolerance. We play games with ourselves and pretend that we are a tolerant people; but we don't really listen to ourselves or think very much about our tolerances. We are tolerant of some things and intolerant of others, depending upon what is convenient for us and what is easy for us and what is safe for us. So I wanted to go as far out as I possibly could too to examine our limits of tolerance. I want people who see this play not to sit there and pass judgement, but I want them to imagine how they themselves would respond if they were the characters in the play. If the things that are happening to the characters in the play were indeed happening to them.

  Hans Fischer - Why did you choose a goat, for me a rather stupid animal and not a more intelligent one?

  Edward Albee - Well, I don't know that a person who is falling in love necessarily spends much time worrying about the intelligence of the partner. In most relationships that I have noticed intelligence has not been a major factor.

  Hans Fischer - Yeah, right. Martin's love to a goat does not lessen his love to his wife.

  Edward Albee - No, of course not.

  Hans Fischer - It is simply, as he puts it, and then I quote, something he is "supposed to feel, but that nobody understands, because it relates to nothing."

  Edward Albee - Exactly.

  Hans Fischer - How should we understand that something relates to nothing?

  Edward Albee - Well, we have many things that related to nothing discernibe. Faith for example, is a prime example of this. It is something that indeed we take on faith. And love is very much the same thing. It is rational and irrational at the same time, it is explicable and inexplicable at the same time.

  Hans Fischer - Toward the end of the play, Stevie, the wife, says, "We see what's hideously wrong in what most people accept as normal." I think a key sentence. What in your opinion is wrong with our society?

  Edward Albee - Well, there are many things wrong with American society at this point. Political sloth, selfishness - so many things are wrong with United States at this point that it is hard to pinpoint one. But an intelligent relationship understands, more than a stupid relationship does, the compromises that are essential to maintain a relationship, and the limits that those compromises should have.

  Hans Fischer - Now you mention in America. Would you say then The Goat is a very American play?

  Edward Albee - Well, I can't really answer that. I'm a United States playwright. Almost all of my - yes, I guess all of my plays, with the possible exception of "Seascape," which has two lizards in it, are about humans who live in the United Sates; I guess I'm an American playwright, I never think in those terms.

  Hans Fischer - The play begins with Martin mentioning his fear of forgetting, even of getting Alzheimer's. How does this fact relate to the message of the play?

  Edward Albee - Oh, it's merely something that he thinks that might possibly explain the strange feelings that he is having. No, Alzheimer's really has nothing to do with the play. The play is about remembering and not forgetting.

  Hans Fischer - Now despite raising very important questions you make the reader smile and sometimes even laugh. So seriousness and laughter, do they go together?

  Edward Albee - The great Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote a great book called " Laughter in the Dark." I find that tragedy and absurd comedy are so close to each other in our civilization, that anything that isn't serious and funny at the same time has something missing.

  Hans Fischer - Your characters correct each other's English. Even at the height of the crisis Martin reminds Billy of using a wrong metaphor. Why is this?

  Edward Albee - It's just those two characters, that's the way they behave. You know, it's not me doing it. It's my characters. These two characters are semantically involved. And so they make comments semantically. And they probably do it in a way to disarm the other one, I would imagine.

  Hans Fischer - You call your play "notes toward a definition of tragedy." Why notes and a definition?

  Edward Albee - Well, why toward a definition of tragedy - every time I turn on television these days or read the newspaper I see the term tragedy misused. Somebody falls off a building, that's a tragedy all of a sudden. It is not a tragedy, of course. The term tragedy has been misused to the point that it's lost whatever function it has and I think we need to find a new definition. And I say notes toward because I don't have a new definition, but I think we must find one.

  Hans Fischer - Mr. Albee, thank you very much.

  Edward Albee - You're welcome.

  This interview took place over the telephone on July 27, 2005. Technical support by Kanal K Radio, Aarau, Switzerland