From the moment Creon condemns Antigone for violating his decree and because no woman would rule while he was alive (525), Sophocles’ heroine was forever associated with the dead (555). This association does not only portend the dramatic denouement of the play. In the realms of western literary history, it also locks Antigone within the role of a ghost, a revenant, whose presence readers and theatre-goers have felt since she first uttered the untranslatable first sentence/address to Ismene in the Theatre of Dionysus at the foot of the Athenian Acropolis, 25 centuries ago. One such reminder (revenant) is this collection of essays under the title Looking at Antigone – a title to which I will return.

When I was approached to review this collection, I was of course delighted but also intimidated. The essays are not written by cultural theorists or literary historians but by Classicists, whose expertise in classical Greek letters far outweighs mine. This intimidation is well founded. Growing up in Athens, I first read the play as a high-school student of ancient Greek. Sadly, though perhaps rather expectedly, in high school we focused more on subjugating and declaiming correctly rather than on exploring the rich and potentially powerful interventions of the play on contemporary issues and developments. Since then, however, I have been overwhelmed by the sustained and multi-focal attention that a diverse array of thinkers have paid to the Antigone: from Hegel, Lacan, Castoriadis and Žižek to Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, Tina Chanter and others. In my own work, too, I discovered that, as a young student of Greek, Virginia Woolf had read the play at least twice before she turned twenty (T. Koulouris, Hellenism and Loss [2011], p. 104).

The essays offer the reader a wide perspective of approaches. The first three chapters focus on the character of Antigone and Creon. In ‘Antigone: Right or Wrong’ A. Garvie observes that if everyone (including Creon at the end) admits to the wrongfulness of leaving Polynices’ corpse unburied, then Antigone cannot be wrong, either in the linear unfolding of the play or retrospectively. Garvie avoids the didacticism inherent in the binary ‘right or wrong’, underscores the danger of locking Antigone into absolutist corners and asserts that it was not Sophocles’ job to give audiences all the answers. Speaking as a man whose high-school years were blighted by the axiom that the Greek tragedians had all the answers, Garvie's conclusion is as refreshing as it is necessary. In ‘Antigone as Others See Her’ A.H. Sommerstein explores Antigone's exchanges with the other characters, whilst concluding that Creon's folly illustrates the unmitigated ferocity of vox populi, vox dei, which, in this instance, comes as an unrelenting nemesis. In ‘Assessing the Character of Creon’ B. Levett begins by focusing on the reasonableness of Creon's opening speech (p. 39) and closes with the important argument that Creon is the tragic figure of the play – a figure whose fate brings to mind the Aristotelian tragical catharsis.

In ‘Images and Effects of Incest in Sophocles’ Antigone’ S. Mills theorises the incestuous significance(s) of Antigone's words. Mills suggests that, although incest is commonly shrouded in secrecy, in Sophocles’ Theban Cycle (and in the Antigone in particular) this is not the case (p. 56). This, to my mind, is an important issue insofar as it heightens the tragicality of the proceedings and the inevitability of suffering (p. 60). H.M. Roisman, too, keeps her attention in the family, as it were, by exploring the relationship of Antigone and Ismene in ‘The Two Sisters’. Roisman juxtaposes the sisters’ relationship in the Antigone with Sophocles’ Electra and the main character's exchanges with her timid sister, Chrysothemis. In doing so, she succeeds in highlighting Sophocles’ reliance on antithesis and duality. That said, I was surprised that Roisman has not engaged with B. Honig's reading of Antigone and Ismene as, essentially, collaborators – as, in other words, two facets of a singular and powerful resistant subjectivity (B. Honig, Antigone, Interrupted [2013]).

R. Scodel underscores ‘Antigone's Change of Heart’ in the latter's second exchange with Creon and the chorus, and in her powerful final lament (806–940). Expanding on existing work (pp. 80–1), Scodel mobilises ‘attribution theory’ with a view to justifying Antigone's position as one that sees both its own merits and those of others (p. 82). As such, Scodel argues that Antigone's final lament – which may be seen as in contradiction to her initial, perhaps foolhardy stance – is rhetorical because it offers the requisite aesthetic investment in loss, suffering and mourning, whilst acknowledging the validity of Creon's decree as that of a ruler of a state in peril (p. 91).

The focus of the collection shifts with ‘Antigone and the Rights of the Earth’, in which, after a very evocative introduction, R. Rehm launches into an argument premised on the following questions: does the representation of earth, soil and so on, in Greek tragedy in general and in the Antigone in particular, suggest that the Greeks had an understanding of their natural environment as possessed of inalienable ‘rights’? And to what extent might this be evident in Sophocles’ text? In this wonderfully convincing as well as topical chapter, which calls to mind the way in which the Cambridge Ritualists at the turn of the twentieth century emphasised the bond between the Greeks and the earth (especially with what lay beneath it), Rehm successfully argues that Creon's hubris goes against not only the law of the Gods, but also that of the earth. He then reads Creon's folly as a form of pollution, which goes to show how useful (if not crucial) ancient literary texts could be in broaching contemporary subjects if only read from a propitious angle.

The next two chapters turn to religion. In ‘Revealing Divinity in Sophocles’ Antigone’ S. Esposito analyses Sophocles’ dramaturgical investment in the uncanny by means of a careful dissection of the use of triptych scenes in the play. He theorises the ways in which Sophocles succeeds in underscoring the centrality of the divine in classical Greek tragedy without presenting the Gods on stage, thereby further complicating the already ambivalent and complex relationship between human consciousness and the continuous presence of the metaphysical (p. 118). In ‘Religion in Antigone’ R. Garland instrumentalises the potent significatory value of eusebeia (‘piety’) and asebeia (‘impiety’) to uncover the clash between the law of the state and that of the Gods. These two chapters ought to be read in conjunction, insofar as they both punctuate the deeply embedded religiosity of classical Greek theatre.

In ‘Euripides’ Reception of Sophocles’ Antigone’ I. Karamanou compares Sophocles’ play with Euripides’ Phoenissae and, further, with his own version of the Antigone, which now only exists in fragments. She emphasises the much-debated gender aspect of Antigone's stance, whilst thoroughly succeeding in highlighting the Dionysiac, maenadic element of Oedipus’ daughter and the extent to which Euripides invests in it. Further, Karamanou argues, ‘unlike the much earlier Sophoclean Antigone presenting the collapse of Creon's household … Euripides … chooses to rescue Creon's oikos’ (p. 140), before concluding that, whereas in Phoenissae Dionysus ‘seems to have liberated [Antigone] in a symbolic manner’, in his own Antigone the heroine is actually rescued by the God and his ‘liberating power’ (p. 141).

In the last two chapters focus shifts to the reception of the play by modern audiences. In ‘The Voices of Antigone’ H. Foley starts by focusing on the multivocity of Sophocles’ play, especially within the parameters of a clash that is as multifaceted as it is public. She then provides the reader with a well-scoped survey of the ways in which the play has been received by global audiences: from Uruguay, Argentina and Mexico to Japan, Italy, Turkey and Nigeria. Foley closes her chapter with an examination of Bertolt Brecht's version of the play in Switzerland (1948) and concludes that Sophocles’ play, or versions of it, is the most performed play in a global context, thereby preparing the reader for B. van Zyl Smit's ‘Antigone Enters the Modern World’. In the last essay van Zyl Smit first pays attention to the ‘epoch-making’ staging of the play in Potsdam (1841) and then to the reworking of the play by Jean Anouilh in Paris (1944). Her most sustained commentary, however, is on the play The Island (A. Fugard et al. [1973]), in which two black prisoners incarcerated on Robben Island prepare a version of the Antigone, and on Stefan Hertmans's Antigone in Molenbeek (2016), a theatrical monologue designed to explore, as van Zyl Smit writes, the manifold ways in which the Antigone can address ‘some of the cardinal issues in contemporary multi-cultural societies’ (p. 167).

Stuttard offers an illuminating introduction focusing on the myth of Antigone, the moral and societal values of the play, and, interestingly, on Athens’ relationship with the Greek island of Samos, the punishment of which, Stuttard argues, had some bearing on Sophocles’ conceptualisation of the play and its central moral clash (pp. 4–6). Stuttard concludes his introduction with the role of tragedy in classical Athens and the challenges of translating the play for modern audiences. Despite the fact that this collection forms part of the publisher's Looking at series, I would have welcomed an attempt on Stuttard's part to theorise the complex significances of the verb ‘looking’ in the title, especially with reference to a character like Antigone – a girl, by all accounts, who has been ‘looked at’ by global audiences for 25 centuries. Also, to my mind, the introduction would have benefited from a justification of the choice of foci and from some commentary on the intended contribution the collection seeks to make to the continuous appreciation of the play vis-à-vis contemporary problems and challenges (which is, after all, something with which especially the last two essays of this collection are explicitly concerned).

Nevertheless, this is a very important collection. The editor closes the volume with a new translation of the play by himself, which one cannot help but think that it was intended for performance, whilst the choice to render the choral songs in poetic rather than conversational format highlights their function in the play in the most illustrative way. Having seen and enjoyed many performances of Greek plays staged by Actors of Dionysus, the theatre company founded by the editor, I was delighted to be given the opportunity to read and review this wonderfully diverse collection of essays. Despite the complexity of the arguments contained in this collection, the authors have given us twelve insightful and accessible essays, which would benefit specialised scholars and non-specialised readers everywhere.