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

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.