(But not the beef jerky-there are way too many corpses in this play to snack on dried meat.)īut the reason that you should care about Antigone is a whole other can of worms: Antigone wrestles with civil disobedience. And it has the linchpin of tragic magic: a bunch of rich royals that decide to either kill themselves or kill other people. It has covert burying of dead bodies and decidedly not covert entombment of very-much-alive bodies.
It has tragedy that's almost impossible to turn away from. You'll like this play for a whole handful of reasons, you sicko. What is Antigone About and Why Should I Care?
We won't be booking a vacation there anytime soon.īut if you're itching for a hair-rending, crazy-tragic, feel-bad story you pretty much can't do better than Antigone.
Bad call, C: Antigone hangs herself, Creon's son Haemon kills himself, and Creon's wife/ Haemon's mama also decides to shuffle off her mortal coil. But rebel-with-a-cause (the cause is "bury my brother") Antigone decides to do a bit of grave-digging, even if gets her landed in jail.Ĭreon is none too happy with this, and so decides to entomb her while she's still alive. which is both a) not very sanitary and b) in direct opposition with religious doctrine. Polyneices just has to rot out in the open. Long answer: Big King Creon decides that nobody gets to bury the body of the traitor Polyneices. So what goes down in Antigone's Thebes? Short answer: nothing good. And it has all the hallmarks of an ambitious young author's work: namely, some serious verve and intensity. But they'd also have had a wide-reaching influence (and are particularly notable for inspiring Sigmund Freud’s theory of the "Oedipus Complex," or the "kill-the-father-sleep-with-the-mother complex").Īntigone, which comes last chronologically, was the play Sophocles wrote first, around 440 B.C-yup, this play actually came before Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. The Oedipus plays are awesome for a number of reasons: they're gory, they're tragic, and they're bound to make even the most aggressively cheerful theatergoer depressed. (Oedipus keeps it in the family-nudge, nudge.) These plays follow the fall of the great king, Oedipus, and later the tragedies that his children suffer. The population of this city is pretty uniformly doomed-when they're not sleeping with their own mothers (lookin' at you, Oedipus) or acting all high and mighty and assuming that their law is better than the gods' (cough, Creon, cough cough), they're burying their brother when burying their brother is forbidden-c'mon, Antigone we've been over this.Īntigone is the third volume in what is maybe the most messed up Greek tragic trilogy of all time: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.
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