Antigone
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what is reputedly the most performed of all Greek tragedies. Antigone, by Sophocles (c496-c406 BC), is powerfully ambiguous, inviting the audience to reassess its values constantly before the climax of the play resolves the plot if not the issues. Antigone is barely a teenager and is prepared to defy her uncle Creon, the new king of Thebes, who has decreed that nobody should bury the body of her brother, a traitor, on pain of death. This sets up a conflict between generations, between the state and the individual, uncle and niece, autocracy and pluralism, and it releases an enormous tragic energy that brings sudden death to Antigone, her fiance Haemon who is also Creon’s son, and to Creon’s wife Eurydice, while Creon himself is condemned to a living death of grief.
→ Listen on BBC Sounds website
Guests
- Edith Hall
19 episodes
Professor of Classics at Durham University - Oliver Taplin
3 episodes
Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Oxford -
Lyndsay Coo No other episodes
Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek Language and Literature at the University of Bristol
Reading list
-
Sophocles: Antigone
Douglas Cairns (Bloomsbury, 2016) Google Books → -
Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy
Lyndsay Coo and P.J. Finglass (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2021) Google Books → -
Female Acts in Greek Tragedy
Helene P. Foley (Princeton University Press, 2001) Google Books → -
History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama
B. Goff (ed.) (University of Texas Press, 2011) Google Books → -
Reading Greek Tragedy
Simon Goldhill (Cambridge University Press, 1986) Google Books → -
A Companion to Greek Tragedy
Justina Gregory (ed.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) Google Books → -
Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun
Edith Hall (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books → -
The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy
Bernard Knox (University of California Press, 1983) Google Books → -
Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage
E. Mee & H. Foley (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2011) Google Books → -
A Companion to Sophocles
Kirk Ormand (ed.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) Google Books → -
An Introduction to Greek Tragedy
Ruth Scodel (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Google Books → -
Antigone
Sophocles (trans. Anne Carson), ed. Edith Hall (Oberon Books, 2015) Google Books → -
Antigone and other tragedies
Sophocles (trans. Oliver Taplin) (Oxford University Press, 2021) Google Books → -
Antigone
Sophocles (ed. Mark Griffith) (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Google Books → -
Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra
Sophocles (trans. H.D.F. Kitto, ed. Edith Hall) (Oxford University Press, 2008) Google Books → -
Oedipus/Antigone
Sophocles (adapted by Blake Morrison) (Northern Broadsides, 2003) Google Books → -
Antigones: The Antigone myth in Western literature, art and thought
George Steiner (Clarendon Press, 1984) Google Books → -
Looking at Antigone
David Stuttard (ed.) (Bloomsbury, 2016) Google Books → -
Greek Tragedy in Action
Oliver Taplin (Routledge, 2002) Google Books → -
Sophocles: An Interpretation
Reginald Winnington-Ingram (Cambridge University Press, 1980)
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Programme ID: m0015lwj
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015lwj
Auto-category: 882.01 (Greek drama and poetry)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello, Antigone by Sophocles, 496 to 406 BC, is reputedly the most performed of all Greek tragedies today and perhaps the most powerfully ambiguous.