Friday, 31 October 2014

Antigone (Sophocles) Theban Play

Creon: "Never the same rights or treatment for a traitor as for a patriot!"

Teiresias: "How precious, above all wealth, is good counsel."

Antigone is perhaps the most classical of the Greek tragedies or goat-songs. It is certainly one of the most famous. It is not just, however, the story of the tragedy of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, but it is also king Creon's tragedy as well. Both are tragic figures; both stubbornly believe they are right; both believe they have rights; but these rights are antagonistic [perhaps a pun was deliberately intended by Sophocles in Ancient Greek with the name of the play], and completely incompatible and contradictory with and to each other, and therein lies the unfolding of the tragedy. Once king Creon has announced his edict and Antigone has actually defied it, the tragedy is set in motion. It is played out like a game of chess on the stage, fatalistically and deterministically leading to the trial and sentence of Antigone, her execution and subsequent suicide, followed by the suicide of Haemon, son of Creon, and betrothed to Antigone, and the suicide of Euridyce, queen and wife to Creon, and then the censure, and impeachment of Creon by the gods, placing huge psychological stress upon him, unfit to rule anymore this leads him to be banished both by the elders and by his own personal choice from Thebes and sent into exile. Indeed the characters have choices at every point in the unfolding of the play, indeed they are advised at every point in every scene to make the right choice: Ismene, sister of Antigone advises her to be moderate, Haemon directly tells Creon he is wrong, Tiresias, the blind prophet advises king Creon to apologise fully and make sacrifices to the gods. But both ignore these. Therein they are fated.

Antigone is a political play. Antigone represents the struggle of individual and human rights versus those of the state. She represents honour. The play is about the right of everyone to be able to enjoy religious freedom, the freedom to practice their religion without interference from the state. It is about the kinds of freedom that an individual should enjoy even in the most extreme of circumstances. Antigone finds partisans in modern society because of this. She is their heroine: Creon is seen as an undemocratic, unsympathetic autocrat. Besides what right anyway does he have to rule, to be king of Thebes? Has he usurped the throne? Or was Greece a patriarchal society in which women could not succeed to the throne? Perhaps it was. Why isn't either Antigone or her sister Ismene queen and ruler of Thebes after the death of their brothers? Those latter questions aside what rights as a ruler does Creon have? Does he enjoy a divine right as king to rule. When making and before promulgating the decree that he did, did he sufficiently consult the elders of the city [the chorus], his council and parliament? Does law by decree override those of the freedoms of ancient family custom and religion? And why do the gods ultimately support individual freedom? Or do they? These are the constitutional questions that Antigone raises. Antigone is a thinking person's play, a parable It was play in which Sophocles asks his audience to think about their democratic rights and responsibilities and to think about the importance of their customs and religion, all in the manner as a good play should do.

Oedipus' dysfunctional family is cursed. Thebes, the tragic city, is cursed because its royal family are all relatives or direct descendants of Oedipus, and Thebes and its royal family must consequently suffer the fate given to it by the gods. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons and daughters.

Antigone is often described as a feminist heroine, as she stands up in the play against the dominant male authority in the person of Creon, but this is a mistaken interpretation. She is simply a woman who stubbornly believes that it is her sisterly duty to bury her brother with the proper rites no matter that in the eyes of the state he was a traitor and had allied himself with Thebes' arch-enemies, and that his proper burial had been explicitly forbidden by decree by Creon, her uncle the king. Indeed Greek women of her time were expected to fulfill this duty of formal burial for members of their family, and to perform the necessary rites. In the time of Ancient Greece, if the dead did not receive their funeral rites, their souls would wander the earth forever thereafter. Every member of the audience in 5th century bc in Greece would have immediately understood and have sympathised with this duty that Antigone insisted that she had.

The tragic dramas of ancient Athens were political in nature, and related to the rise of democracy in that society. Antigone is one of the more renowned plays of that time. The central question in this play: is loyalty to one's family more important than loyalty to the city state? Indeed does the state have any right at all to interfere in family matters? What are the limits to the power of the state?

Another big question in this play, whose tragedy is it?  Is it a tragedy about Antigone herself, or Creon, who has more stage time, and who suffers just as much being cursed by a prophet and at the hands of the gods with loss of his own family, his wife and son at the end of the play?

Additional matters and questions

Sophocles in this play and in his Electra describes in some detail about the burial practice and rituals in 5th century Athens.


The endings and tragedies in Shaespeare's Romeo And Juliet and Sophocles' Antigone are in several ways strikingly similar. Was Shakespeare influenced by Sophocles?

The role of the gods, fate and the blind prophet [Tiresias] in Greek drama.

References



Tyrrell Translation [relatively faithful to original Greek]

Structure
http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/ant/antigstruct.htm

Script Analysis 2010 - Final Plot Analysis for Antigone
http://goo.gl/LxaVJO

Play Tyrrell Translation



1904 - Richard C. Jebb, prose: full text

1938 - Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, verse: full text

1946 - Jean Anouilh, (modern French translation)

1994 - Hugh Lloyd-Jones, verse (Sophocles, Volume II: Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at ColonusLoeb Classical Library No. 21, 1994; ISBN 978-0-674-99558-1)




Sophocles (2004). The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 978-1-55849-454-1.

Summaries

Antigone Jean Anouilh


 Sophocles



YouTube Films, TV and Audiomedia



Αντιγόνη (Antigone) (1961) - YouTube   Irene Papas as Antigone Greek with English Subtitles

Juliet Stevenson as Antigone


Antigone by Sophocles (497 BC - 406 BC), translated by Francis Storr (1839 - 1919).

Antigone [Librivox Francis Storr translation]

Richard Seaford. (1990). The Imprisonment of Women in Greek Tragedy. The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 110, 76–90. https://doi.org/10.2307/631733 https://www.jstor.org/stable/631733






Academic Works and Papers

Sophocles; Karl Reinhardt (1967). Antigone. Verlag Ars liborum.


Ars tragica Sophoclea cum Shaksperiana Comparata by Lionel Horton-Smith
Review by: Chas. W. Bain
The Sewanee Review 
Vol. 5, No. 4 (Oct., 1897) , pp. 497-501
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27527958


Assumptions and the creation of meaning: reading Sophocles' Antigone
Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
The Journal of Hellenic Studies
Year: 1989  Volume: 109 Start page:134
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/632037

The Family in Sophocles' "Antigone" and "Electra"
Christina Elliott Sorum
The Classical World
Vol. 75, No. 4 (Mar. - Apr., 1982), pp. 201-211
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4349362

Tragédie et dramaturgie: les ambiguïtés dans l'Antigone d'Anouilh
Andrew Hunwick
Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France
96e Année, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1996), pp. 290-312


Lacan's Antigone: The Sublime Object and the Ethics of Interpretation
Paul Allen Miller
Phoenix
Vol. 61, No. 1/2 (Spring - Summer, 2007), pp. 1-14
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20304635

Hegel's interpretation of Antigone


The Death of Antigone
Joseph S. Margon
California Studies in Classical Antiquity
Vol. 3, (1970), pp. 177-183
Dionysos and Katharsis in "Antigone"
Scott Scullion
Classical Antiquity Vol. 17, No. 1 (Apr., 1998), pp. 96-122
Published by: University of California Press
DOI: 10.2307/25011075
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25011075

Sophocles the Unphilosophical. A Study in the "Antigone"
D. A. Hester
Mnemosyne
Fourth Series, Vol. 24, Fasc. 1 (1971), pp. 11-59

Judith Butler; (2013). Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-51804-8.

Kopff, E. (1976). Thomas Magister and the Text of Sophocles' Antigone. Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), 106, 241-266. doi:10.2307/284102 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/284102

Sophocles's Enemy Sisters: Antigone and Ismene
Wm. Blake Tyrrell and Larry J. Bennett
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture
Vol. 15/16, (2008-2009), pp. 1-18
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41925300

Antigone's Final Speech (Sophocles, Antigone 891–928)
Martin Cropp
Year: 1997  Volume: 44 Start page:137
Greece & Rome (Second Series)
Antigone's Laments, Creon's Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception
Bonnie Honig
Political Theory
Vol. 37, No. 1 (Feb., 2009), pp. 5-43

The Two Burials in Antigone
W. H. D. Rouse
The Classical Review
Vol. 25, No. 2 (Mar., 1911), pp. 40-42
http://www.jstor.org/stable/694563

Wisdom and Foolishness: A Further Point in the Interpretation of Sophocles' Antigone
Rosanna Lauriola
Hermes
135. Jahrg., H. 4 (2007), pp. 389-405
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40379138

Was Antigone Murdered? - Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies





mthoyibi.files.wordpress.com-2011-05-antigone_2.pdf

Sophocles (2007). Antigone. RicherResourcesPublications. ISBN 978-0-9797571-0-5.

Jean Anouilh; E. Freeman (2000). Antigone. A&C Black. ISBN 978-0-413-69540-6.



Heroism in Sophocles’s Antigone
Willow Verkerk
Philosophy and Literature
Volume 38, Number 1, April 2014 pp. 282-291

The Prudent Dissident: Unheroic Resistance in Sophocles' Antigone
Kirkpatrick, J.
The review of politics. VOL 73; NUMB 3, ; 2011, 401-424

Puppo, F.
ARSP. Beihefte.; International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy; Epistemology and ontology; Lund, Sweden, 2003; Aug, 2005, 127-132 -- Stuttgart; F. Steiner;
 Zenon Bankowski (2005). Epistemology and Ontology: IVR-Symposium Lund 2003. Franz Steiner Verlag. pp. 127–. ISBN 978-3-515-08707-0.

Citing the Law in Sophocles's Antigone
Fletcher, J.
Mosaic : a journal for the comparative study of literature. Volume 41 (3); 2008, pp. 79-96 
Citing the Law in Sophocles's Antigone - HighBeam Business- Arrive Prepared
University of Manitoba
Mosaic Journal Volume 41 (3) Sept 2008 Issue devoted to Antigone



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Female Control of Funeral Rites in Greek Tragedy: Klytaimestra, Medea, and Antigone
Kerri J. Hame
Classical Philology
Vol. 103, No. 1 (January 2008), pp. 1-15
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/590091


Sophocles (2012). Antigone. Hackett Publishing. pp. 1–. ISBN 978-1-58510-672-1.

Sophocles (2007). Antigone. Richer Resources Publications. ISBN 978-0-9797571-0-5.

Greek Ideas as to the Effect of Burial on the Future of the Soul
Frank B. Tarbell
Transactions of the American Philological Association (1869-1896)
Vol. 15 (1884), pp. 36-45
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935798 

Rachel Kitzinger (2008). The Choruses of Sophokles' Antigone and Philoktetes: Dance of Words. BRILL. pp. 11–. ISBN 978-90-474-3286-9. 

Articles in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies

Was Antigone Murdered?
William M. Calder III

A Reconstruction of Sophocles’ Polyxena
William M. Calder III

Sophokles’ Political Tragedy, Antigone
William M. Calder III

An Alternative Date for Sophocles’ Antigone
 R. G. Lewis

The Revolt of Images: Mutual Guilt in the Parodos of Sophokles’ Antigone

Johan Tralau

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