The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [385]
But the wise Teiresias never prophesies in vain. We then hear how, after Creon's men have buried Polynices and gone to the cave, they hear the voice of Haemon already inside. They summon Creon, who when the cave is opened sees Antigone swinging from a rope, where she has hanged herself, and Haemon weeping for his lost love. Haemon spits in his father's face, lunges at him with a sword, then plunges it into himself, before dying with his arms round his dead beloved. As this is being reported on stage, Creon's wife Euryidice hears it and leaves without a word. We then hear that, within the palace, she has followed her son's example by driving a sword into her heart. When Creon receives the news he cries `There is no man can bear this guilt but I ... I am nothing. Lead me away ... I know not where to turn, where look for help.'
What gives Antigone its particular force is the absolute starkness of its contrast between the values represented by Creon and those represented by Antigone. Creon adopts all the masculine language of order, the law, obedience, loyalty, the need to preserve the unity of the state and to punish traitors. But behind it, as his son so subtly teases out, is really nothing but Creon's own remorseless will. He is one of the supreme examples in literature of the Tyrant, the flint-hearted senexfigure piously pretending to uphold the good of the community when in fact he has confused this entirely with the demands of his own egotism. In contrast, Antigone represents precisely the value which this one-sided masculinity lacks: she is the `light feminine' who can feel for the humanity of her dead brother and who can `see whole' above the petty distinctions of worldly loyalties. Certainly in this respect she is feminine. But she also combines this with steely inner strength and resolve. When she talks of burying her brother, she invariably refers to this as giving him `honourable' burial. She wishes to observe all due honour and propriety. These are masculine values, but made life-giving because they are rooted in a loving heart, which cannot see any distinction between traitor and patriot because both are now equal in death and both are her brothers. So inspiringly does Antigone represent the values of the Self in this play that she draws after her Ismene, Haemon, the people of Thebes, even Creon's own wife: everyone except the ever-more isolated figure of the Tyrant himself. They may all by the end have been sucked down into the black hole of his insatiable egotism. But there is no question which figure and whose values shine out at the end of the story as having been its victor. Because that is what storytelling is about. The story could not seem properly resolved or strike such a deep chord of recognition in the human unconscious if it ended any other way.
Hamlet: The original version
Two thousand years after Sophocles's death, the greatest playwright of the modern world produced his own puzzle play. We find Hamlet infinitely more perplexing than any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. Why does its clever, thoughtful, engaging hero have to die? Why does he get reduced to such a jelly of indecision over whether he should avenge his murdered father? Why do so many other people in the story get caught up in the resulting mess and also have to die?
There is no better starting point for unravelling the mystery of Hamlet than to look at the mediaeval legend from which Shakespeare derived his story. The first thing which may strike us about the plot of Amleth, included by the mediaeval historian Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, a collection of old Danish tales, is how it is a straightforward Overcoming the Monster story, about a hero who overcomes a'Dark Father-figure' to become king.
Horwendil, a mighty warrior who has defeated and slain the king of Norway