Antigone’s Contests: Pasts and Presents in Scholarship and Performance, ancient and modern
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34624/fb.v0i21.41426Keywords:
Presentism, The past, Agon, Adaptation, Custodianship, ObligationAbstract
In modern times, the figure of Antigone has become an emblem in the struggle for liberty from oppression. It provides a fitting focus for a conference that celebrates the 50th anniversary of the carnation revolution in Portugal. This paper starts by identifying and analysing some of the contexts and performance styles in which contemporary concerns have shaped interpretation, translation, adaptation and performance of Sophocles’ text. The main part of the discussion then poses the question of whether ‘present’ concerns have appropriated the play in ways that marginalise or even excise some aspects of Sophocles’ text. ‘Presentism’ has often been used by classicists as a term of disapprobation in order to criticise subsequent receptions of ancient texts, sometimes with the implication that there is a fixed meaning to be discovered if the ancient text is considered philologically and in terms of the context of its composition and performance, and that ‘presentist’ interpretations subvert this. The paper then argues that: (i) there is a variety of ‘presentist’ perspectives. Some are inevitable in scholarly work as well as in the creative processes attached to performance and spectating. The ‘present’ (any present) is one node in a network of mediations and receptions. The concerns, life experiences and cultural and ethical hinterlands of the practitioners and scholars working with Sophocles’ Antigone inevitably have a shaping role in their agency because their life experiences and socio-cultural orientations are not confined to those of ancient Greece. The same is true of readers and spectators who, wittingly or unwittingly, relate the play to their own ‘present’. These ‘present’ concerns can generate a positive engagement with the ancient text and context. They only become negative if they are unacknowledged and if they close down meaning. (ii) Philological and performative analysis of Sophocles’ play demonstrates that the tragedian himself was engaged in a form of ‘presentist’ activity. The narratives associated with Antigone and her family were adapted and augmented through a lens that reflected the social, religious and political urgencies of fifth-century Athens, especially the contested relationships between funerary traditions and social cohesion and the transfer of power from aristocratic families to the polis. The concluding section of the paper argues that analysis of the relationship between ancient and modern ‘presentisms’ enhances both scholarly commentary and critique of tragedy in performance. Sophocles’ play provides a site of temporal and metaphorical space that promotes and provokes engagement between ancient and modern, to the benefit of both.
Downloads
References
Adorno, T. W. (2005). The Meaning of working Through the Past. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, tr. H. W. Pickard. New York: Columbia University Press, 89. Alonzi, L. (ed.). (2023). History as a Translation of the Past: Case Studies from the West. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Bromberg, J. (2021). Global Classics. London and New York: Routledge
Chabrit-Kajdan, A. (2024). Sophocles’ Antigone by French Director Adel Hakim (2011): Using Greek Tragedy to Pay Tribute to Palestinian Resistance. In Donizeau et al. (eds.), 162-179.
Connolly, J. (2018) Epilogue: The Space between Subjects. In M. Formisano, & C. S. Kraus (eds.), Marginality, Canonicity, Passion (pp. 313-328). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Pourcq, M., de Haan, N., & Risjer, D. (eds.). (2020). Framing Classical Reception Studies: Different Perspectives in a Developing Field. Leiden: Brill.
Donizeau, P., Khajehi, Y, & Potenza, D. (eds.). (2024). Greek Tragedy and the Middle East. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Dougherty, C. (2019). Travel and Home in Homer’s Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foster, C. L. E. (2020). Familiarity and Recognition: Towards a New Vocabulary for Classical Reception Studies. In De Pourcq et al., 33-69.
Fradinger, M. (2023). Antigonas: Writing from Latin America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Greenwood, E. (2013). ‘Omni-local classical receptions’, Afterword to Classical Receptions in Central and Eastern European Poetry, Special Issue: Classical Receptions Journal vol 5, Issue 3, 354-361.
Greenwood, E. (2021). Herodotus, Anti-colonialism, Diversity, and Black Traditions in the Modern World, Herodotus Helpline, 24 March (https://www.herodotushelpline.org/seminar-schedule, with videolink, last accessed 23/09/22)
Grethlein, J. (2011). Historia magistra vitae in Herodotus and Thucydides? The exemplary use of the past and modern temporalities. In Lianeri (ed.), 247-263.
Griffith, M. (1999) ed. and comm. Sophocles: Antigone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, E. (2011). Antigone and the Internationalization of Theatre in Antiquity. In Mee & Foley (eds.), 51-63.
Hardwick, L. (1993). Philomel and Pericles: Silence in the Funeral Speech. Greece and Rome, 147-162.
Hardwick, L. (2018). Epilogue. Voices, Bodies, Silences and Media: Heightened Receptivities in Epic in Performance. In F. Macintosh et al. (eds.), 558-572.
Hardwick, L. (2019). Thinking with Classical Reception: Critical Distance, Critical Licence, Critical Amnesia? In Richardson (ed.), 13-24.
Hardwick, L. (2020). Aspirations and Mantras in Classical Reception Research: Can There Really be Dialogue between Ancient and Modern? In De Pourcq et al. (eds.), 15-32.
Hardwick, L. (2021). Tracking Classical Scholarship: Myth, Evidence and Epistemology. In S. J.
Harrison & C. Pelling (eds.), Classical Scholarship and Its History: Essays in Honour of Christopher Stray (pp. 9-31). Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
Hardwick, L. (2022a). Hearts and Minds in Greek Tragedy: Metanoia in Text and Performance. In F. Lourenço & S. Marques (coord.), Miscelânea de Estudos em Honra de Maria de Fatima Silva (vol. 1, pp. 67-84). Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra.
Hardwick, L. (2022b). Heightened Receptivities: when ancient and modern meet in Greek Tragedy. In I. Karamanou (ed.), Ancient Theatre: Proceedings of the Nafplion Conference on Otherness (pp. 283-295). Tripoli (GR): University of the Peloponnese.
Hardwick, L. (2023). Translation and Temporalities in Classical Reception Histories: Narratives, Genres, Forms and the Agencies of Translators. In Alonzi (ed.), 49-68.
Hardwick, L. (2025). New Surveys in the Classics: Reception Studies (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hardwick, L., & Stray, C. A. (eds.). (2008). A Companion to Classical Receptions. Malden MA, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Harloe, K. (2013). Questioning the Democratic and Democratic Questioning. In L. Hardwick & S. J. Harrison (eds.), Classics in the Modern World: A ‘Democratic Turn?’ (pp. 3-13). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heaney, S. (1995). The Redress of Poetry. London: Faber.
Holmes, B. (2016). Cosmopoiesis in the Field of “The Classical”. In Butler (ed.), 269-289.
Lianeri, A. (2023). Translated History and Historical Time: Transtemporal Understandings of Greek and Roman Concepts. In Alonzi (ed.), 141-168.
Lianeri, A. (ed.). (2011) The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lianeri, A., & V. Zajko (eds). (2008). Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Liapis, V., & Sidiropoulou, A. (eds.). (2021). Adapting Greek Tragedy: Contemporary Contexts for Ancient Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Macintosh, F. (2008). Performance Histories. In Hardwick & Stray (eds.), 247-258.
Macintosh, F. (2011). Irish Antigone and Burying the Dead. In Mee & Foley (eds.), 90-103.
Mee, E. B., & Foley, H. P. (eds.). (2011). Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Michelakis, P. (ed.). (2020). Classics and Media Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morais, C., Hardwick, L., & Silva, M. F. (eds.). (2017). Portrayals of Antigone in Portugal: 20th and 21st Century rewritings of the Antigone myth. Leiden: Brill.
Richardson, E. (ed.). (2019). Classics in Extremis: The Edges of Classical Reception. London: Bloomsbury.
Shamsie, K. (2017). Home Fire. London: Bloomsbury.
Torrance, I. (2020). Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland. In I. Torrance & D. O’Rourke (eds.), Classics and Irish Politics 1916-2016. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zandieh, R. (2024). Antigone in Iran: Towards a Political Subject of Resistance. In Donizeau et al. (eds.), 111-125.
