Antigone
Antigone | |
---|---|
Abode | Thebes, Ancient Greece |
Personal information | |
Parents | Oedipus Jocasta or Euryganeia |
Siblings | Ismene Eteocles Polynices Oedipus |
In
In Sophocles
The story of Antigone was addressed by the fifth-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles in his Theban plays:
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus at Colonus
Antigone serves as her father's guide in Oedipus at Colonus, as she leads him into the city where the play takes place. Antigone resembles her father in her stubbornness and doomed existence.[1] She stays with her father for the majority of the play, until she is taken away by Creon in an attempt to blackmail Oedipus into returning to Thebes. However, Theseus defends Oedipus and rescues both Antigone and her sister who was also taken prisoner.
At the end of the play, both Antigone and her sister mourn the death of their father. Theseus offers them the comfort of knowing that Oedipus has received a proper burial, but by his wishes, they cannot go to the site. Antigone then decides to return to Thebes.[2]
Antigone
In her own namesake play, Antigone attempts to secure a respectable burial for her brother Polynices. Oedipus's sons, Eteocles and Polynices, had shared rule jointly until they quarreled, and Eteocles expelled his brother. In Sophocles' account, the two brothers agreed to alternate rule each year, but Eteocles decided not to share power with his brother after his tenure expired. Polynices left the kingdom, gathered an army and attacked the city of Thebes in the war of the Seven against Thebes. Both brothers were killed in the battle.
King
Antigone is brought before Creon, and admits that she knew of Creon's law forbidding mourning for Polynices but chose to break it, claiming the superiority of divine over human law, and she defies Creon's cruelty with courage, passion, and determination. Creon orders Antigone buried alive in a tomb. Although Creon has a change of heart, due to a visit from soothsayer Tiresias, and tries to release Antigone, he finds she has hanged herself. Creon's son Haemon, who was engaged to Antigone, commits suicide with a knife, and his mother Queen Eurydice also kills herself in despair over her son's death. She had been forced to weave throughout the entire story, and her death alludes to The Fates.[2] By her death Antigone ends up destroying the household of her adversary, Creon.[1]
Other representations
In the oldest version of the story, the burial of Polynices takes place during Oedipus' reign in Thebes, before Oedipus marries his mother, Jocasta. However, in other versions such as
Seven Against Thebes
Antigone appears briefly in Aeschylus'
Euripides's Lost Play
The dramatist
Appearances Elsewhere
Different elements of the legend appear in other places. A description of an ancient painting by
Genealogy
Cadmus | Pentheus | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Polydorus | Oclasus | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Labdacus | Menoeceus | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Laios | Jocasta | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Oedipus | Jocasta | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Eteocles | Polynices | Ismene | Antigone | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gallery
-
Oedipe et Antigone by Johann Peter Krafft, 1809
-
Oedipus and Antigon by Franz Dietrich
-
Oedipus and Antigone by C. W. Eckersberg (1812)
-
Oedipus and Antigone by Per Wickenberg (1833)
-
Edipo y Antigona by José Ribelles (circa 1800)
-
Oedipus and Antigone by Charles Jalabert (1842)
-
Oedipus and Antigon
-
Oedipus and Antigon by Antoni Brodowski (1828)
-
Antigone and the body of Polynices (Project Gutenberg)
-
Ödipus (mit Ismene und Antigone) verurteilt Polyneikes by Marcel Baschet (1883)
-
Antigone and Ismene
-
Antigone in front of the dead Polynices by Nikiforos Lytras (1865)
-
Antigone donnant la sépulture à Polynice by Sébastien Norblin (1825)
-
Oedipus and Antigone by Charles Thévenin, Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums Collection
Cultural references
This article needs additional citations for verification. (March 2017) |
In modern times, Antigone is invoked as a symbol of heroism.[7] The character of 'Ani' in True Detective season 2 is named after Antigone.[8]
Adaptations
The story of Antigone has been a popular subject for books, plays, and other works, including:
- three extant Theban plays by Sophocles(497 BC – 406 BC), the most famous adaptation
- Antigone, a play by Euripides (c. 480 – 406 BC) which is now lost except for some fragments
- Antigona, opera by Tommaso Traetta, libretto by Marco Coltellini (1772)
- Antigona, opera by Josef Mysliveček, libretto by Gaetano Roccaforte (1774)
- Antigone (1841), settings of the choruses by Felix Mendelssohn as incidental music for a performance of Johann Jakob Christian Donner's translation of Sophocles
- Antigone, opera by Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), libretto by Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
- Antigonae (Salzburg 1949), opera by Carl Orff (1895–1982)
- Antigone (1944), French adaptation of Sophocles's play by Jean Anouilh (1910–1987) performed during the Nazi occupation of Paris
- "Antigone-Legend", for soprano and piano (text by Bertolt Brecht), by Frederic Rzewski (1938–2021) and presented as a play in two slightly different versions in 1948 and 1951
- Αντιγόνη (Antigone), ballet[9] by Mikis Theodorakis (b. 1925), 1959
- Αντιγόνη (Antigone), opera by Mikis Theodorakis (b. 1925), 1995–96
- Antigone (1990/1991), opera by Ton de Leeuw (b. 1926)
- Antígona Furiosa (Furious Antigone), play by Griselda Gambaro (b. 1928)
- Another Antigone, play by A. R. Gurney (b. 1930)
- Antígona, play by Salvador Espriu (1939)
- "Antigone", a short story by Sheila Watson (1959)
- Tegonni, An African Antigone by Femi Osofisan (b. 1946)
- Antigone, adaptation of Sophocles's play by Peruvian poet José Watanabe (b. 1946)
- Antigone, opera by Mark Alburger (b. 1957)
- Yorgos Javellas, starring Irene Papas.
- La tumba de Antígona (1967), philosophy work in poetry (razón poética) by María Zambrano (1904–1991)
- The Burial at Thebes (2004), by Seamus Heaney, adapted into a 2008 opera with music by Dominique Le Gendre
- Antigone, play by Mac Wellman
- Antígona Vélez (1950), adaptation of Sophocles' play by Argentine writer Leopoldo Marechal (1900–1970)
- Antigona (1960), a play by Dominik Smole
- Antigonai (2009), opera based on fragments by Sophocles and Hölderlin for three choirs and a women's trio by Argentine composer Carlos Stella
- Antigone (1948), by Bertolt Brecht, based on the translation by Friedrich Hölderlin and published under the title Antigonemodell 1948[10] An English translation of Brecht's version of the play is available[11]
- Antigonick, play by Anne Carson (2012) which is a free and poetic adaptation of the Sophocles play.[12] Carson and her colleagues presented a reading of Antigonick in 2012 at the Louisiana gallery in Denmark.[13]
- Antigone (2019), a film by Sophie Deraspe
- Arch-Conspirator (2023), a dystopian re-imagining by Veronica Roth
Analysis
In the works of
- she was aware of the fact that, in transgressing the human law and being crushed by it, she was obeying a higher commandment—that she was obeying laws that were unwritten, and that had their origin neither today nor yesterday, but which live always and forever, and no one knows where they have come from.[14]
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan writes about the ethical dimension of Antigone in his Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Others who have written on Antigone include theorist Judith Butler, in their book Antigone's Claim, as well as philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in various works, including Interrogating the Real (Bloomsbury: London, 2005) and The Metastases of Enjoyment (Verso: London, 1994).
Contemporary productions
A new translation of Antigone into English by the Canadian poet Anne Carson has been used in a production of the play (March 2015) at the Barbican directed by Ivo van Hove and featuring Juliette Binoche as Antigone. This production was broadcast as a TV movie on April 26, 2015.[15] The play was transferred to the BAM Harvey Theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, running from September 24 to October 4, 2015.[16]
References
- ^ a b c Roman, L., & Roman, M. (2010). Encyclopedia of Greek and Roman mythology., p. 66, at Google Books
- ^ OCLC 608624785.
- ^ a b public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Antigone (1)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 2 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 125. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ^
Scott Smith, R.; Trzaskoma, Stephen; ISBN 978-0-87220-820-9.
- ^
Heydermann, Heinrich (1868). Über eine nacheuripideische Antigone [On a post-Euripideian Antigone] (in German). Berlin: OCLC 601932362.
- ^ Sophocles; Jebb, R. C. (1890). Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments. Cambridge: CUP Archive.
- ISBN 9780192834027.
Antigone: In her defiance of the state she is often seen as a model of courage and heroism.
- ^ True Detective and Philosophy A Deeper Kind of Darkness. Wiley. 2017. p. 148.
- ^ commissioned by the Royal Ballet, 1959
- ^ .
OCLC 1456885.
- ^ Malina, J. (1990) Sophocles’ Antigone. New York: Applause Theatre Books
- ^ Carson, A., (2012). Antigonick. (illustrated by Stone, B.). New York: New Directions.
- ^ Anne Carson: Performing Antigonick, 2013-01-28, retrieved 2021-08-13
- ^ Maritain, J. (edited by Sweet, W., 2001). Natural law: Reflections on theory and practice. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press (p 26)
- ^ "Antigone at the Barbican". IMDb.
- ^ Antigone at Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Further reading
- Antigones by OCLC 318365852.
- Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death by OCLC 43951993. Retrieved 24 May 2011.
- Rayor, Diane J. (2011) Sophocles’ Antigone. Cambridge University Press. Translation with introduction and notes.
- Söderbäck, Fanny, ed. Feminist Readings of Antigone. New York: SUNY Press, 2010. .
- Wilmer, S. E., and Zukauskaite, Audrone, eds. Interrogating Antigone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-19-955921-3. Including recent texts by Judith Butler, Bracha L. Ettinger, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.
External links
- Antigone – a review of the Antigone myth and the various productions of her story