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This volume contains three masterpieces by the Greek playwright Sophocles, widely regarded since antiquity as the greatest of all the tragic poets. The vivid translations, which combine elegance and modernity, are remarkable for their lucidity and accuracy, and are equally suitable for reading for pleasure, study, or theatrical performance. The selection of Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Electra not only offers the reader the most influential and famous of Sophocles' works, it also presents in one volume the two plays dominated by a female heroic figure, and the experience of the two great dynasties featured in Greek tragedy--the houses of Oedipus and Agamemnon.
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SOPHOCLES
ANTIGONE, OEDIPUS THE KING & ELECTRA Translated by H. D. F. KITTO Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Edith Hall ISBN 0192835882 English translation © Oxford University Press 1962 Editorial material © Edith Hall 1994
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Several people have helped me in the preparation of this edition. John Betts, Nicholas Hammond, Christopher Robinson, Christopher Rowe, George Rowell, and Glynne Wickham all helped me to track down the history of the genesis and first performances of the translations. My students at Reading made it quite clear to me what they would wish to find in an edited translation of Sophocles. I would also like to record my heartfelt thanks to Linda Holt, Fiona Macintosh, Oliver Taplin, and especially Richard Poynder, for invaluable assistance of other kinds.
CONTENTS Introduction Note on the Texts Select Bibliography Chronology ANTIGONE OEDIPUS THE KING ELECTRA Explanatory Notes
ix xxxvii xxxix xliv 1 47 101 155
INTRODUCTION Time is a recurrent topic in Sophoclean tragedy. Of Oedipus, so recently so fortunate, the chorus sings, 'Time sees all, and Time, in your despite, | Disclosed and punished your unnatural marriage' (p. 91). Within the stark temporal economy of these tragedies, whose actions commence at dawn and are consummated within a single day, human fortunes are completely overturned. Antigone dies, Oedipus the king becomes a blinded outcast, and Electra is reunited with her long-lost brother Orestes, who slaughters the incumbents of the Mycenaean throne. Time is the only conceptual benchmark by which Sophocles' mortals can fully understand their difference from divinity. Unlike the power held by Creon or Oedipus or Clytemnestra, the sovereignty of the gods is immune to time's passing. The chorus of Antigone
praises Zeus' immortality: 'Sleep ... cannot overcome Thee, | Nor can the neverwearied | Years, but throughout | Time Thou art strong and ageless' (p. 23). Sophoclean drama has proved to be as 'strong and ageless' as its immortal gods. These plays in this volume do not die; they are merely reinterpreted. The inventory of Sophocles' admirers and imitators, in the English-speaking world alone, includes John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Percy Shelley (who translated Oedipus the King and drowned with a text of Sophocles in his pocket), Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and more recently Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison. 1 Sophocles' influence extends beyond literature to philosophy and psychology. Hegel's dialectic and view of tragic conflict are inseparable from his understanding of Antigone; 2 Sigmund Freud's most famous theory is named after the protagonist of Oedipus the King. 3 Nor, for over 400 years, has this poet been confined to the academy. The earliest-attested performance of a Greek tragedy in modern translation presented an audience of Italian humanists, in Vicenza, with a production of Oedipus the King on 3 March 1585. 4 Although the performance of Sophoclean drama was, in nineteenth-century Britain, generally proscribed on moral grounds by the Lord Chamberlain, 5 this playwright has never enjoyed so many revivals as