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.

→ Play 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)

Related episodes

• The Bacchae
  
  18 Mar, 2021 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• The Oresteia
  
  29 Dec, 2005 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• Oedipus Rex
  
  8 Jun, 2023 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• Thebes
  
  23 Nov, 2017 930 History of the Ancient World
• Hamlet
  
  28 Dec, 2017 820 English and Old English literatures
• Tragedy
  
  2 Dec, 1999 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Henrik Ibsen
  
  31 May, 2018 830 German and related literatures
• Romeo and Juliet
  
  17 Feb, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• Cleopatra
  
  2 Dec, 2010 930 History of the Ancient World
• Pericles
  
  17 Sep, 2020 930 History of the Ancient World
• The Iliad
  
  13 Sep, 2018 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• Plato’s Gorgias
  
  25 Nov, 2021 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• Elizabethan Revenge
  
  18 Jun, 2009 820 English and Old English literatures
• Macbeth
  
  1 Oct, 2020 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Odyssey
  
  9 Sep, 2004 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• The Mytilenaean Debate
  
  20 Jun, 2019 930 History of the Ancient World
• Comedy in Ancient Greek Theatre
  
  13 Jul, 2006 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• The Tale of Sinuhe
  
  1 May, 2014 930 History of the Ancient World
• The Greek Myths
  
  13 Mar, 2008 290 Other religions
• Seneca the Younger
  
  23 Feb, 2017 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism

---

Programme ID: m0015lwj

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015lwj

Auto-category: 882.01 (Greek drama and poetry)