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Two Contemporary Antigones

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek
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Extract

FROM THE TIME of Sophocles' Antigone, his version of the myth – which relates how Oedipus' daughter buried her brother Polyneices against the decree of Creon and, upon being sentenced to death, died by her own hand – became invariable. It was in modern treatments of the story that changes began to be introduced: these concerned the person or authorities representing the law; the time when the events occur, and their location; the person whom Antigone buries; and why she dies. But a continuing, necessary determinant in such modern incarnations of the myth has been the conflict between the ethos of authority and the ethos of moral belief – this latter being motivated by religion, duty to the family, or love. Without such an opposition, Antigone loses its ground as tragedy.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 10 , Issue 40 , November 1994 , pp. 327 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1. The most important discussions are: Gerald, Else, F., The Madness of Antigone (Heidelberg: Karl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1976)Google Scholar; Steiner, George, Antigones (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Knox, Bernard, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964)Google Scholar. Compare also Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Random House, 1965)Google Scholar, and Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).Google Scholar

2. Gambaro, Griselda, Antigona Furiosa in Information for Foreigners (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992). The play premiered in September 1986 at the Goethe Institute in Buenos Aires. All following quotations are from this edition. Janusz Glowacki, Antigone in New York, translated by Janusz Glowacki and Joan Torres, premiered in March 1993 in the Arena Theater, Washington, D.C. All following quotations are from the unpublished copy provided by the author (as revised, July 1993).Google Scholar

3. Glowacki, , op. cit., p. 35.Google Scholar

4. Gambaro, , op. cit., p. 137.Google Scholar

5. Sophocles, Antigone, translated by Carl M. Mueller and Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek, v, 732.

6. Gambaro, , op. cit., p. 147–8.Google Scholar

7. Glowacki, , op. cit., p. 10. All following quotations are from the same work.Google Scholar