Forma Breve

Celebrar Abril, sob o signo de Antígona

Carlos Morais — 2025-10-31

Sem resumo disponível.

There Are many Ways to Die. Antigone: A Rereading of the Myth in an Anthropological Key. Power, Resistance, and Pain

María Cecilia Colombani — 2025-10-31

In this paper we will analyze Antigone, the Sophoclean tragedy, from certain anthropological coordinates present in the tragediographer’s work. In a first segment we will go through the structure of the myth as an operator of meaning. In a second segment we will work on the meaning of the presence of a myth in the framework of the anthropological scenario. In a third one, we will approach Sophocles’ play in order to highlight its content, the dramatic aspect of the piece, its theatrical play, the role of the characters and their insertion in the framework of their historical time and their trans-temporality.

Antigone’s tragic genome: transmission and mutations of the Theban myth

Ana Paula Pinto — 2025-10-31

Long before gaining an unequivocal prominence in the production of all the great tragediographers of the Classical Period - who seem to have almost obsessively poured the ominous shadow of contemporary fratricidal struggles into their symbolic flow - the mythical saga of Thebes, based on the unfortunate line of succession of the royal family inaugurated by Cadmus, occurs in multiple narrative allusions, from the primordial poetic testimony of the Iliad and the Odyssey,
which will end up being replicated later in multiple allusions by the various archaic poets, and detailed in the narrative sequence of the so-called Theban Epic Cycle.
Founded on the symbolic nucleus of a curse, transmitted hereditarily from parents to children, where patterns of deviance and mechanisms of subversion, similar to those of a segregating disease, multiply and worsen, the Theban saga will also occur in textual transmission, sequenced by very diverse narrative versions, marked by recurring inconsistencies.
Under this peculiar thematic framework, we therefore set out, like a genetic sequencing exercise, to decode Antigone’s genome, comparatively analysing the ancient textual versions and identifying their deviations and narrative mutations. By comparing the different versions, we try to understand the extent to which the ancient worldview deepens the conviction that a mistake or deviation in behaviour, configured as a subversion of linearity, can become a driving force for tragic action for those in need.

Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Antigone: A model of interlocution

Maria de Fátima Silva — 2025-10-31

Sophocles achieved enormous success with his Antigone, not only among his contemporaries, but throughout the millennia. Even today, his 441 BC creation remains the most performed tragedy, with the greatest repercussions in terms of adaptations and rewrites.
Echoing this same popularity, Euripides composed his own Antigone years later, a play that is lost to us, but which was also popular in antiquity. As far as the testimonies and fragments that have been preserved allow us to conclude, Euripides took up the strong lines of Sophocles’ play, but by altering their proportion, he turned a tragedy with a strong political character into a play of a novelistic nature.

Antigone – The Mythical Notion of Justice

Jaa Torrano — 2025-10-31

The hermeneutical analysis of the relationship among the episodes and the choral chants, of the episodes sequency and of repetitions in each episod shows that the plot of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone is organized around and supported by the mythical notion of the connection between “Justice” (Díke) and “Destiny” (or “Portion”, Moîra) and around the tribal notion of collective penal justice. It will be verified that and how, in this tragedy, the plot is a diegetic image of mythical notion of justice – the Justice of Zeus.

Order and Disorder in the Works of Sophocles: Preliminary Considerations Starting from Antigone

Auretta Sterrantino — 2025-10-31

The article investigates how Sophocles recorded and reinterpreted the social tensions that traversed 5th century B.C. Athens in his tragedies, through a preliminary analysis conducted on Antigone. The reflection focuses on the idea of order and disorder, examining the use of terms
derived from κοσμ- and their meaning in the contexts in which Sophocles used them within the play, aiming to understand the dramaturgical relevance of these terms within the drama. This results in the possibility of identifying behaviors κατὰ κόσμον and οὐ κατὰ κόσμον, highlighting
how the intentions of the characters in conflict reflect the dynamics of political-social tension ready to revolutionize the established order (kosmos) and transform it into disorder (akosmia). Socio-political equilibrium is achievable only by respecting the deities and through the constant attempt to reconcile the interests of individuals, as part of a community, and to mediate between the remnants of the aristocratic archaic culture and the new democratic direction of the Athenian polis.

Antigone. A fissure in the logos and in the city

Maria Mafalda Viana — 2025-10-31

The text of Sophocles’ Antigone may reveal some incipient consciousness of how human mind and logos that «build» the city simultaneously includes an essential fissure. So the chorus says at the very beginning of his praise of the city that there is no other thing δεινότερον than man. The text as a whole shows the duplicity in the adjective – how the wonderful human logos and mind that «build» the city may become terrible.

Aesthetic Elements in Sophocles' Antigone

Madalena Machado — 2025-10-31

The course of this research is a critical reading of Sophocles' tragedy Antigone, highlighting the aesthetic elements present in the text through a direct association with classical and contemporary poetics. Our purpose is to visualize a canonical text according to the literary qualities
pointed out in the arguments of authority that we raised. They served as a theoretical basis, Aristóteles (2005, 2008), Horácio and Longino (2005), Steiner (1995), Calvino (2007), Bloom (2010) and Perrone-Moisés (2009).

Antigone and the social weight of ritual. A contemporary staging

Vincenzo Quadarella — 2025-10-31

The burial rite of Antigone at the beginning of the tragedy of Sophocles raises a series of interpretative problems that affect both the act itself and the social weight of the denied rite. In fact, it is undeniable that the confrontation between Antigone and Creon is marked by various political, social and religious aspects; it is equally undeniable that the burial rite was perceived as a fundamental step to “let go” of the dead into the afterlife. And precisely this rite marks a border that is at once political, religious and cultural, capable of unleashing the wrath of Creon and the piety of Antigone. The rite by Antigone recomposes the fracture between the living and the dead, and among the living, recomposes justice. Thus, the rite draws the line between the just and the unjust, between the decision in your own name or in the name of the collective, between the living and the dead. The limit, however, although firm, in the case of Sophocles strives to maintain its contours, remains blurred to the eye and, although strongly marked by the rite (fulfilled or not), turns out to be labile. To understand the ritual of the gesture of Antigone in the contemporary scene we will analyze the Antigone with the direction of I. Papas of 2005 in the Greek theater of Syracuse.

The Stone Bed of Antigone and Niobe: a common place (S. Ant. 823-840)

Andrea Navarro Noguera — 2025-10-31

In the tragic play Antigone, the young heroine, after learning of her fatal fate, lamentfully compares her unfortunate position with that of Niobe (l. 823-833). The aim of this paper is to analyze these lines along with the consoling response of the chorus (l. 834-838) in order to shed light on the debate about Sophocles’ characterization of Antigone.

Antigone, woman of no

Francesco De Martino — 2025-10-31

The women’s “no” are few, but exemplary: to sexual harassment, to husband suitors (Penelope, Danaids, Daunian women) and to husbands (in Lysistrata), to media and censorial power (Penelope, Electra) and to political power like that of Antigone against the lex of Creon, illegal because contra legem.

Tragic and comic tactics for confronting power: Antigone and Lysistrata

Luisa S. Buarque de Holanda — 2025-10-31

Antigone and Lysistrata, the protagonists who give their names to the famous tragic and comic pieces, have tactics for confronting power that can perhaps be characterised as antagonistic. The first goes tenaciously and consciously towards death, fulfilling the task that seems right to her and at the same time reaping the glory that will accompany her deed (Antigone, v. 502): the success of her enterprise is inseparable from her own sacrifice. The second dribbles past the representatives of power with strategic planning and guile; her endeavour is successful and crowned with a comic feast. The first has confrontation (anti-, against) inscribed in her name, the second liberation (lysis-, the action of untying, releasing). On the one hand, both can be seen as representatives of their literary genres: the first going against power and deliberately perishing as a result; the other cleverly dissolving, in a stroke of wit with doses of absurdity and comicality, the obstacles that stand in her way. On the other hand, both can also be seen as representatives of the same feminine gender, and in this sense there are many themes that bring them together: the opposition between the logic of political power and the logic of the family and the oikos; the disastrous consequences that male warfare causes in the feminine sphere; the privileged relationship of women with philia and marriage are some of them. The aim of this paper is to compare the tactics of the two heroines in terms of how they use their feminine status to confront the prevailing masculine power.

Greek Myth and Christian Mystery

Alex Villas Boas — 2025-10-31

This text aims to present how the relationship between myth and the narrativity of the Christian experience associated with the question of the Mystery of God has had different forms of interpretation in contemporary times. This difference sometimes brings together and sometimes distances these elements of narrative. A work of great importance is precisely Hugo Rahner’s “Mythes grecs et Mystère Chrétien”, as it became better known in its French version in 1945. However, the various ways of relating myth and Christianity, as well as myth and rationality, end up obfuscating the contribution of the Austrian Jesuit’s work, which is why the aim here is to recapture some of his important insights.

Antigone’s Contests: Pasts and Presents in Scholarship and Performance, ancient and modern

Lorna Hardwick — 2025-10-31

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.

Antigone under the universe of intertextuality: literature, female, freedom

Flavia Maria Corradin — 2025-10-31

The dramatic text Antes que a noite venha (1992), by Eduarda Dionísio, has as its theme the speeches of Juliet, Antígona, Inês de Castro and Medea, historical-mythological characters marked by love, but who meet a tragic destiny. Based on the conception that concrete time – the night – becomes mythical time, the space in which these characters will inhabit, we will focus our attention, this time, on the lines dedicated to Antigone. We intend to start from the dialogue that the Dionysian character has with the mythical Antigone, considering aspects such as the specificities of dramatic writing. Furthermore, we must examine the discussion about the female condition, which crosses the diegesis, and the character’s relationship with the Portuguese context at the end of the century, since the text is from 1992, but also with the current moment in which the 50th anniversary of the recovery of freedom. Such a concept that must always be remembered so that we never forget that without freedom we are nothing.

Antígona Gelada: A gnostic manifesto

Telmo Alexandre Ferreira — 2025-10-31

The present study aims to observe the points of connection between Sophocles’ Antigone and Armando Nascimento Rosa’s Antígona Gelada in light of a Gnostic understanding of the myth. This analysis is supported by an interview conducted with the latter author (January 2021) and by the study of works on Greek tragedy, science fiction, and Gnosticism. Noting that the play Antígona Gelada stems from the same archetypal nature as Sophocles’ Antigone, the first is analyzed as a dramatic reception of the Sophoclean myth in the light of a radical Gnosticism, as outlined by Harold Bloom in his various works on the subject.
It is concluded that the Gnostic influence in Antígona Gelada reveals, through the protagonist’s archetype, an ontological discourse on the inadequacies of the human condition. Despite indicating a departure from the materialist interpretations of the Antigone myth in the modern period, this influence makes Antigone confront the polis with an alternative concept of empathy, one not inscribed in the ideological apparatuses of a democratic state, thus maintaining a political discourse.

Hermínia Silva’s New Antigone: a socio-political parody (1946 and 1976)

Nuno Simões Rodrigues — 2025-10-31

In 1946, during the height of the dictatorial regime, Hermínia Silva played the role of Anti- gone in Sempre de Pé!, a parody of Júlio Dantas’ play, which had premiered that same year at the National Theatre. This performance earned the actress the National Theatre Award in 1947. The choice of the character Antigone for this parody primarily served as a response to Dan- tas’ play, which had been staged by the Robles Monteiro-Rey Colaço Company and featured the debut of the young actress Mariana Rey Monteiro. Sempre de Pé! challenged the restric- tions of censorship by
delivering subversive messages through creative means, and thus the “New Antigone” became a symbol of defiance in the face of oppression. Thirty years later, in 1976, in the revue play Afinal como é?, Hermínia Silva reprised the New Antigone from 1946, this time to critique the new political landscape emerging in Portugal. Two years after the April Revolution, Antigone was once again employed as a means of reflecting on the political climate and the regime of the time. This essay focuses on analysing Hermínia Silva’s perfor- mance, her influence on the portrayal of resistance to the dictatorship, and the significance of revue theatre in the broader context of the fight for freedom. Additionally, it explores how f Antigone provided a foundation for conveying these ideas, this time through the forms forms of comedy and parody.

Antigone at school. Female characters from antiquity in Ana Cristina Oliveira’s didactic theatre

Adriana F. Nogueira — 2025-11-05

In this paper, I aim to answer some questions that were raised by the work of Ana Cristina Oliveira, a philosophy teacher, playwright, director, and actress, in the school theater group she founded, Tapete Mágico (Magic Carpet), particularly regarding her choice of female characters from antiquity in the plays she writes for – and with – the students. I intend to understand how antiquity is received by young people, how the themes of Greek tragedians’ plays can relate to the concerns of today’s youth, and the relevance of these issues and the new questions they raise.

Antigona in the air

Carmen Morenilla Talens — 2025-10-31

The play Antigone by Sophocles is one of the best known and most representative tragedies of its author, but the reading that emerges from it makes it a subversive work at certain times. For this reason it has been censored. In the radio broadcasting in Spain in the second half of the 20th century, it was replaced by versions of this tragedy that were able to overcome the hard censorship of Franco’s regime.

Three Antigones and one author: Guillermo Heras Antígona en la frontera, Hantígona and Ardiente Antígona

Carmen González-Vázquez — 2025-10-31

The Spanish actor, director, critic, cultural manager, teacher and playwright Guillermo Heras, although he is an international reference in contemporary drama and its staging, was also interested in Greek mythology and the classics, publishing texts inspired by the figures of Phaedra,
Andromache and Antigone. We look at the three titles that have come from the pen of Heras, one published (Ardiente Antígona) and two of them unpublished (on loan from the author to me), composed months before his death in 2023. Interested in very different characters, located in dissimilar spaces and times, under disparate moral codes, but facing the same problems both in fiction and in reality, dominated by passions that make them seem more and more human, I am interested in determining how his Antigones are projected in successive dramatic variations, but with the same purpose: to awaken the spectator’s lucidity about the world that welcomes them.

The two divergent tales of Antigone (Sophocles/Hyginus) present in 18th century opera

Helena Guzmán García — 2025-10-31

The mythical story of Antigone is well known. She returns to Thebes after the death of Oedipus at Colonus at the time of the confrontation between her two brothers. After Eteocles and Polyneices have killed each other, she disobeys the law decreed by the sovereign Creon and performs funeral honors on the corpse of her brother Polyneices. After this infraction, the mythical story has two versions: in the first -whose main source is Sophocles- Antigone is locked up alive and kills herself, causing the subsequent suicide of her fiancé Haemon and her mother. In a second version, found as a complete source in Hyginus, it is said that Antigone did not die, but rather fled from Thebes and had a son. This article demonstrates how these two versions of the classical world will also appear represented in opera librettos as examples of Classical Reception. Two operas performed in the second half of the 18th century are taken as an example, both titled Antigona: the first, performed in Rome in 1751, with text by the librettist Gaetano Roccaforte and music by the composer Baldassare Galuppi, in which a woman is shown on stage, Antigone mother; and the second, performed in Saint Petersburg in 1772, which follows the Sophoclean version, with text by Marco Coltellini and music by Tommaso Traetta.

Tragic Depictions of Political Resignation: Ismene and Chrysothemis in Galician Dramatic Literature

Iria Pedreira Sanjurjo — 2025-10-31

The reworking of the themes, characters and motifs from Greek-Latin mythology is a verified trend in contemporary Galician drama since the second half of the 20th century to the present day. Many of the playwrights who remake these myths for Galician drama know the original Greek or Latin texts and usually engage in a dialogue with their current situation through the canonical paradigm of the classic, being tragedy and the tragic sense of drama the preferred ways of all the authors who approach that dialogue. For this reason, there are many tragic characters who stand as a model and reference for a certain political reading of ancient texts, highlighting those figures of tragic heroism who do so in a positive sense. However, for this paper, we will try to offer a critical and analytical reading of the characterization of two of the most reviled secondary characters of the ancient tragic imaginary in the Galician theater that reworks them: Ismene (daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta and sister of Antigone) and Chrysothemis (daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and sister of Electra). Their recharacterization will be reviewed in the Galician plays in which these characters appear, paying attention to the reference of the Greek hypotexts and highlighting the main differences and concomitances found in the comparative reading of the texts, without neglecting the different reinterpretations in a political and social key that underlie the reworkings of the Galician authors.

Creón, Creón. La Antígona distópica de Rodríguez Pampín

María Teresa Amado Rodríguez — 2025-10-31

In the 1950s, Galician literature began to show signs of recovery after having practically disappeared during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). The efforts of the Galaxia publishing house, founded in 1950 by a group of Galician anti-Francoists, to translate texts from the European avant-garde and the Ribadavia Theatre Exhibitions encouraged the creation of dramatic texts by authors who had not previously cultivated the genre. This is the case of Rodríguez Pampín, who in 1975 published his first play, Creón, Creón, a futurist rewriting of Antígona, which we will analyse in this paper.

Tragic Justice in Suso de Toro’s Non volvas

Marta Mariño Mexuto — 2025-10-31

The novel Non volvas (2000), by Suso de Toro, tells the story of a woman who returns to the village where she grew up in search for answers about her identity. What she finds out there about herself –like a tragic anagnorisis– also affects the previous generations and leads her to accomplish a terrible vengeance. This act purifies her in a certain way and re-establishes justice. Similar to Antigone, a character that the author himself references in his text, the protagonist feels compelled to commit an unorthodox action that is out of the man-made laws, in order to obey a superior, transcendent law. In this work, we analyse the parallels between Sophocles’ heroine and Encarnación, the protagonist of Non volvas, paying special attention to the achievement of a form of justice that goes beyond herself and that defies the established limits.

Antigone, Madame Royale

Corrado Cuccoro — 2025-10-31

In the history of Antigone’s reception, an ancient French play, which apparently only survives in a unique manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, has been overlooked, or even ignored, by scholars: it is dedicated, under the title of Antigone. Tragédie En 5 Actes, by a self-styled Vicomte of… (the specification is omitted), to an unnamed Son Altesse Royale Madame la Dauphine. This paper is intended to be a contribution to a desirable critical edition of that tragedy, not only because of its inherent quality, but also in that it is a part of a distinguished tradition and an evidence of the theatrical tastes of Ancient Régime as well.

Antigone, by Walter Hasenclever – To die for what ideal?

Maria de Fátima Gil — 2025-10-31

In 1917 Walter Hasenclever wrote to Albert Ehrenstein, shortly after completing his Antigone: “I only know the Sophoclian Antigone superficially – the whole plan will persuade you that it is my work and that this really is an Antigone of 1917.” In our paper we will evaluate the correctness of these statements, for which we will begin by tracing the historical-social framework and the literary context that gave birth to the drama, then seeking to ascertain the relations of intertextuality with Sophocles’ Antigone and to highlight the specificity of this rewriting.

«Elle retourne au pays des sources» Ecopoetics of revolt in some contemporary Antigone(s)

Paolo Dias Fernandes — 2025-10-31

While the idea of revolt fills, if not dominates, the narrative space of these more or less faithful rewritings of the Antigone myth, the landscape, despite being the setting and backdrop, seems to vanish. The elements that evoke the landscape in these texts are few and far between, but they are always strongly connoted and symbolically charged. If the landscape is an image of the country, in other words of the setting, the context, what does the literary picture of a revolt with an elusive landscape tell us? This paper proposes to analyse, through the prism of ecopoetics, the literary representations - and non-representations - of landscape in four rewritings of Antigone’s revolt: Jean Cocteau’s (1928), Marguerite Yourcenar’s short story ‘Antigone ou le choix’ (1936), Jean Anouilh’s famous dramatic rewriting (1944) and Sophie Deraspe’s movie : Antigone (2019).

Antigone in Troy: The Women of Troy, by Pat Barker

Maria José Ferreira Lopes — 2025-10-31

Few figures from Greek mythology have aroused such a profound and creative fascination over time, and particularly in modern times, as Antigone, seen as a heroine of resistance to oppression following Sophocles’ founding play. At the same time, the myths surrounding the Trojan War constitute one of the most productive foundations of the Western imagination, also the object of constant analysis and rewriting. In the novel The Women of Troy (2021), the second in her recent Trojan trilogy, the English writer Pat Barker transplanted to the post-fall of Troy the conflict resulting from the prohibition of performing the rituals due to the dead. In this case, it is Priam who takes the place of Polynices, and Amina, a fragile but stubborn young Trojan girl, who takes the role of Antigone. The trigger for the events is an unexpected Creon: the still-teenaged Pyrrhus, physically imposing and prone to violence, marked by the disregard with which he is viewed simultaneously by Greeks and Trojans, and by the unattainable aura of his father. It is precisely the negative comparison with Achilles suggested by Priam that leads Pyrrhus to kill him, in an excruciating manner, a scene witnessed by the then unknown Amina. The humiliation that the existence of this witness entails for Pyrrhus leads him to kill her after being caught making a second attempt to bury Priam, who had been exposed to the elements for a long time like Polynices and Hector. In the constant process of interaction and deconstruction of the classics, Briseis, the young queen who became Achilles’ slave after the capture of her home city, plays a central role. Pregnant by the dead hero, she had been married by him, shortly before his announced death, to one of his lieutenants, for future protection. Briseis, who continues to perform household chores common to the other prisoners of the Greek masters, behaves as a compassionate and supportive protector of the Trojan slaves – and even of the hideous Thersites – and ends up assuming the role of a prudent Ismene, but is also overwhelmed by her affection for Priam. Much of the narrative is presented from her perspective, which allows for a constant analysis of the subordinate and precarious condition of women in general, and especially of war captives, who are silenced and victims of a terrible abuse, seen as part of war. Underneath Amina’s insistence on defying Pyrrhus’ orders is precisely her refusal to submit to this violence and her purpose of maintaining her dignity intact. The aim of this text is to explore the way The Women of Troy uses and deconstructs the Theban and Trojan cycles, highlighting the enormous relevance of the characters and the episodes they experience.