Shakespeare’s Whisper in Smole’s Antigone

Abstract

On its surface, Dominik Smole’s play Antigone is an imitation of Sophocles’ tragedy because it takes place at the same time and place and features characters with the same names and the same family and hierarchical relationships. However, the playwright relativizes this appearance by using diverse physical and verbal anachronisms, altering the personalities of the majority of the characters, modifying the course and duration of the plot, and adding intertextual links. In addition to the points of contact recorded so far, especially those with Anouilh’s Antigone, this article also establishes reminiscences of Shakespeare’s plays, which Smole undoubtedly knew, and especially Hamlet. What is reminiscent of these plays is the analogue design of the entire text uncharacteristic of Smole—up to that time a prose writer—using distinctly rhythmized verse lines of varying lengths, continuous transitions from the poetically elevated “high” style into the banally “low” jargon style, and distinct aphorisms combined with irony and paradoxes. Even some of Smole’s characters resemble Shakespeare’s: the Theban “princess” Antigone, who is guided by her moral commitment to her dead brother just as Hamlet is guided by his commitment to his murdered father, is characterized with insanity just like the Danish prince; the court councilor Teiresias and his impersonator, Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancée Haemon, are faithful students of Lord Chamberlain Polonius in word and deed; Ismene oscillates between loyalty to and betrayal of her sister Antigone just like Queen Gertrude oscillates between betrayal and love of her son Hamlet; and here and there Smole’s Creon and Shakespeare’s Claudius share the same thoughts about the king’s status and responsibility. All of this confirms the multifaceted intertextual inclusion of Smole’s Antigone within classic European literature as well as its simultaneous completion of the mission that Shakespeare defines through Hamlet’s words—namely, that as a metaphorical mirror, a play should remind contemporaries of current social and moral issues. Thus regardless of its manifest antiquity, from its very beginning it has functioned as a play on contemporary moral issues; it has been especially effective because of its unconventional artistic perfection.