(~ 429–425 B.C.)
The Tragedy of Oedipus
One of the most dramatic and touching stories of the world is the ancient Greek, 2500- year- old tragedy of the kingly family of Oedipus of Thebes, who, cursed and cast out as an infant for his father's own pedophile misdeeds with tragic end (and with the consent of his mother), and spiritually blinded by the Gods, as a grown man unwittingly kills his own father and marries his own mother (thus fulfilling the curse), and begets four children with her: Two boys and two girls. After coming to knowledge of what he had done, he physically blinds himself, while his mother and wife commits suicide. Yes, that's the one.
The two brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, then personally kill each other in a civil war over the heirloom kingdom, after first having agreed to share the throne alternately (naturally, the first one won't relinquish when the time has come), and the two daughters get into a dispute about whether they should both be buried or not (which has been forbidden by their uncle Creon), who has taken the better of the mutilated bodies to be displayed as that of the hero and decreed the other to rot in the field in dishonor; but their sister Antigone defies the order by penalty of death by symbolically strewing dirt over the perceived traitor, thus sealing her fate. Her sister Ismene, or so it seems, does not.
In modern form:
Antigone by Jean Anouilh
Jean Anouilh (1910 – 1987) wrote the new tragedy "Antigone" between 1941 and 1942 in France (during the German occupation).
An excerpt:
CREON: Funny, isn't it?
Polynices lies rotting in the sun while Eteocles is given a hero's funeral and will be housed in a marble vault. Yet I have absolute proof that everything that Polynices did, Eteocles had plotted to do. They were a pair of blackguards - both engaged in selling out Thebes, and both engaged in selling out each other; and they died like the cheap gangsters they were, over a division of the spoils.
But, as I told you a moment ago, I had to make a martyr of one of them. I sent out to the holocaust for their bodies; they were found clasped in one another's arms - for the first time in their lives, I imagine. Each had been spitted on the other's sword, and the Argive cavalry had trampled them down. They were mashed to a pulp, Antigone. I had the prettier of the two carcasses brought in and gave it a State funeral; and I left the other to rot. I don't know which was which. And I assure you, I don't care.
(Long silence, neither looking at the other.)
ANTIGONE (in a mild voice). Why do you tell me all this?
CREON. Would it have been better to let you die a victim to that obscene story?
ANTIGONE. It might have been. I had my faith.
CREON. What are you going to do now?
ANTIGONE (rises to her feet in a daze). I shall go up to my room.
CREON. Don't stay alone. Go and find Haemon. And get married quickly.
ANTIGONE (in a whisper). Yes.
CREON. All this is really beside the point. You have your whole life ahead of you - and life is a treasure.
ANTIGONE. Yes.
CREON. And you were about to throw it away. Don't think me fatuous if I say that I understand you; and that at your age I should have done the same thing. A moment ago, when we were quarreling, you said I was drinking in your words. I was. But it wasn't you I was listening to; it was a lad named Creon who lived here in Thebes many years ago. He - was thin and pale, as you are. His mind, too, was filled with thoughts of selfsacrifice.
Go and find Haemon. And get married quickly, Antigone. Be happy. Life flows like water, and you young people let it run away through your fingers. Shut your hands; hold on to it, Antigone. Life is not what you think it is. Life is a child playing around your feet, a tool you hold firmly in your grip, a bench you sit down upon in the evening, in your garden. People will tell you that that's not life, that life is something else. They will tell you that because they need your strength and your fire, and they will want to make use of you. Don't listen to them. Believe me, the only poor consolation that we have in our old age is to discover that what I have just said to you is true. Life is nothing more than the happiness that you get out of it.
---
- And so on; but, this being a tragedy... fate, karma, call it what you will, the sins of the fathers, unrelentingly demand their toll:
CHORUS. And there we are. It is quite true that if it had not been for Antigone they would all have been at peace. But that is over now. And they are all at peace. All those who were meant to die have died: those who believed one thing, those who believed the contrary thing, and even those who believed nothing at all, yet were caught up in the web without knowing why. All dead: stiff, useless, rotting. And those who have survived will now begin quietly to forget the dead: they won't remember who was who or which was which. It is all over. Antigone is calm tonight, and we shall never know the name of the fever that consumed her. She has played her part.
(THREE GUARDS enter, resume their places on steps as at the rise of the curtain, and begin to play cards.)
CHORUS. A great melancholy wave of peace now settles down upon Thebes, upon the empty palace, upon Creon, who can now begin to wait for his own death. Only the guards are left, and none of this matters to them. It's no skin off their noses. They go on playing cards.
---
Written 1942, it is one of the most modern plays in the world.
Read it. It's wonderful. The introduction alone!
https://aphunniblog.edublogs.org/files/2015/10/Anouilh_Antigone-4-odifms.pdf
https://www.sfponline.org/Uploads/8/Antigone.pdf
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