Antigone

Creon has declared it: Polynices, who led a foreign army against Thebes, will not be buried. His body will rot in the open air, a warning to all traitors. The gods require burial of the dead. Creon’s law forbids it. Antigone, Polynices’s sister, is going to bury him anyway — and she knows exactly what it will cost her.

Sophocles’s Antigone is one of the two or three most performed plays in the Western dramatic tradition, and the reason is not complicated: the conflict it presents is irresolvable. Antigone is right. Creon is also right. Both are also wrong. Neither can back down without abandoning something essential. Hegel considered it the supreme work of dramatic art precisely because it presents a genuine tragic collision rather than a simple moral lesson.

Two and a half millennia of performance and commentary have not exhausted the play’s power to provoke and disturb. Every generation finds in it the conflict it needs to think about. This Penguin Classics edition provides the scholarly context for a work that is still alive, still urgent, still unresolved. Essential world drama. Published by Penguin Classics.