The inception of literary tragedy can be traced back to ancient Greece. One can easily argue that tragedy is heavily influenced by bloodlust: most, if not all, Greek tragedies culminate in macabre finales filled to the brim with unbridled anguish: for example, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex culminates in the titular character committing regicide, incest, and self-mutilation. At the heart of tragedy, however, is not bloodlust but catharsis. The dire endings of tragedy are inevitable, yet to truly appreciate the genre one must consider the actions the characters take in their limited time. With this in mind, Shakespeare’s great work Hamlet could easily be considered the spiritual successor to the conclusion of Sophocles’ great Oedipus trilogy, Antigone. Hamlet and Antigone both center on the theme of redemption. When considered as literary counterparts, both plays dive into what is truly at the heart of tragedy: to achieve catharsis, there must be sacrifice. In the case of these two works, the common factor is family: in order to redeem the family, the self must be sacrificed.

The most obvious parallel between Hamlet and Antigone is the situation regarding the monarchy: both Hamlet and Antigone have their uncles as king. However, neither of the two characters are particularly concerned with power, and instead one must look toward the past to discover their true motives. Hamlet is looking to avenge his father King Hamlet after his ghost appears and speaks of the regicide that solidified Claudius’s ascension to the throne of Denmark: “A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark/ Is by a forged process of my death/ Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,/ The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/ Now wears his crown” (Shakespeare 1.5.36-39). Antigone too has a relative who cannot achieve rest beyond the grave: her brother Polynices cannot be buried by decree of king Kreon: “It’s Kreon. The way he’s treated our brothers./ Hasn’t he buried one with honor?/ But he’s shamed the other. Disgraced him!/ Eteokles, they say, was laid to rest/ according to law and custom./The dead will respect him in Hades./But Polynikes’ [sic] sorry body can’t be touched. The city is forbidden to mourn him or bury him./-No tomb, no tears” (Sophocles 27-35). To achieve eternal rest his corpse must rest below the earth, yet his body lays tormented and unburied.

This unrest is at the center of both plays. The worlds in which Antigone and Hamlet are set are both warped and somber, as if the dead were reaching beyond the grave to poison reality. A key aspect of all tragedy is the inevitability of death and despair, and the unrest of the dead is justification for the bitter and bloody ends that the characters in both plays meet. The agitation of the deceased has rippled through dimensions to alter the fate of the living; and in both plays nobody is safe from their inevitable doom. As in all tragedy this doom is inescapable, yet death is neither the concern of Hamlet nor Antigone; instead both characters struggle to achieve redemption for their deceased loved ones at all costs. When the ghost of King Hamlet approaches his son, he speaks directly to what must be achieved in order to restore the balance between the living and the dead: “I am thy father’s spirit;/ doomed for a certain term to walk the night,/ And for the day confined to fast in fires,/ Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/ Are burnt and purged away” (Shakespeare 1.5.9-13). King Hamlet cannot rest until he is avenged, and the murky, somber, and twisted realm of Denmark shall be shrouded in a cloud of despair until redemption is achieved. Similarly, Sophocles all but spells out to the reader that Antigone has accepted her inevitable death and is instead focused solely on laying her brother to rest: “My own death isn’t going to bother me,/ but I would be devastated to see/ my mother’s son die and rot unburied” (Sophocles 503-505). The titular characters of both works emphasize the importance of family, as both are concerned less with the power that lies in the crown that adorns their respective uncles’ heads but instead the fate of their deceased loved ones.

To Antigone, the matter is simple. Antigone possesses an iron will: she is going to bury Polynikes even at the cost of her own death. In fact, Antigone herself specifically states that death is a comfort: “I’ll die someday—How could I not know that?/ I knew it without your proclamation./ If I do die young, that’s an advantage,/ for doesn’t a person like me, who lives/ besieged by trouble, escape by dying?” (Sophocles 498-502). The death of her father and the slayings of her brothers have exhausted Antigone to the point where she would rather be dead than alive, and in this way laying her brother to rest also symbolizes her yearning to join him: she has lived a life of anguish and is prevented from eternal rest only by the corpse of Polynices unceremoniously rotting aboveground. Antigone addresses her sister Ismene, who is distraught at Antigone’s self-destructive choices, with the seemingly grim statement “You made the choice to live. I chose to die” (Sophocles 600). With these words, she reveals her sincere belief that her death will bring her the peace that has been absent throughout her life. In this way the statement is not grim at all, but rather represents Antigone’s only glimmer of hope in a world of violence and strife: the belief that death will bring her some semblance of peace. Antigone’s utterance of “who knows what matters to the dead?” (Sophocles 565) to King Kreon, is an almost sarcastic statement. She herself states that her life revolves around death: “Your life goes on. Long ago/ I dedicated mine to the dead” (Sophocles 604-605), so why would she dedicate her life to something as uncertain and enigmatic as death? The answer lies in her past, as her entire life has revolved around death. Her mother’s tragic suicide, her father’s mystical passing, and her brothers fratricidal warfare instilled have led to Antigone’s life being steeped in the bitter tea of death since her childhood, and perhaps underneath the noble act of redeeming her brother is a suicidal ideation: if everything she loved and cared for has died, why should she not to? In some ways it could be considered that Antigone uses the burying of her brother, and the death sentence that comes with defying Kreon, as justification for her own suicide. Whether it be for her brother’s sake or her own morbid suicidal thoughts, one thing remains clear: Antigone is determined to bury her brother at all costs.

Hamlet does not share Antigone’s conviction. Instead, he must wrestle with his situation. Hamlet’s desire to avenge his father is battling against his own cowardice. Antigone cared not for what would come after her death because she knew it had to be better than the anguished world in which she lived, but to Hamlet the prospect of what happens after death is as terrifying as avenging his father: “But that the dread of something after death,/ the undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveler returns, puzzles the will,/ And makes us rather bear those ills we have/ than fly to others that we know not of?” (Shakespeare 3.1.78-83). Hamlet’s dilemma about whether to commit suicide or avenge his father is a torment that Antigone never had to bear: to her there was a clear definition of what she must do and no doubt about how to achieve it. Hamlet struggles not only with the events occurring in Shakespeare’s bizarre and warped Denmark, but has to grapple with his own mind as he navigates his twisted dilemma. The key difference between Antigone and Hamlet when it comes to redeeming their family is the element of doubt. Antigone lacks any doubt about burying Polynikes and committing suicide. Hamlet doubts everything from whether or not his father’s ghost is real to what really happens after death, and as a result he is left paralyzed. Antigone not only accepts her doom but welcomes it as well. Hamlet, somewhere in his mind, must know doom is inevitable, yet his fear of action means the question of whether or not King Hamlet will ever be avenged hangs in the air.

The catharsis both characters achieve comes when they tell others of their death. When Antigone tells Ismene “You made the choice to live. I chose to die” (Sophocles 600), the rest of her life is simply a manner of mechanically executing her plan to bury Polynikes and commit suicide. She knows that soon her life will be over and her brother will be at rest, and her catharsis comes from this knowledge: that perhaps finally she and her family shall be dead and at peace. When Hamlet eventually avenges his father’s death and tells Horatio “Horatio, I am dead; Though livest; report me and my cause aright/ To the unsatisfied” (Shakespeare 5.2.309-312), he achieves catharsis because he no longer has to struggle with the agony of decision: he can finally be at peace knowing that his father is avenged and his story will be told.

Aristotle often mentions the necessity of peripeteia in tragedy, and Antigone and Hamlet showcase how vital a sudden reversal of fortune is to the genre. This reversal is evident in both plays. Antigone herself holds one firm conviction until the end, so peripeteia instead falls to Kreon, as he is left alone with nothing but the corpses of all those he loved. Kreon’s drastic change is the cost of power: his role as king took all those he loved. A drastic and unforeseen change in fate takes place within Hamlet when he avenges his father: the very act of shattering his indecision and taking action to avenge King Hamlet is change that, while leading to his eventual death, provides Hamlet with both peripeteia and catharsis. The majority of Hamlet is contemplative rather than a story of action, and when this slow pace breaks in the finale it is a swift reversal of the previous circumstances: Hamlet takes violent action that erupts from the meditative pace of the play into a bloody finale that is all at once the culmination of the core elements of tragedy: death, peripeteia, and catharsis. Sophocles perhaps helped lay the groundwork for swift reversal of fate in tragedy, yet Hamlet is an example of the concept in its finest form.

Antigone and Hamlet are tales of the struggle to choose what to accomplish with little time left. Antigone’s iron will and conviction free her from the torment of choice that Hamlet must suffer through. Antigone and Hamlet are both left to clean up the mess and tie up the loose ends that their fathers left them, and the only way to effectively execute these tasks is to sacrifice oneself in the process. The two characters simply offer a look into the duality of thought process that humans undergo when facing a daunting or fatal task: to charge head on or to run away. Both characters eventually sacrifice their lives, yet the emotional toll that such a task undertakes varies greatly between the two: to Antigone it is simply a matter of action, and to Hamlet a matter of deep horror. Whatever ecstatic, or perhaps terrible, fate awaits beyond the grave, the corpses of Antigone and Hamlet may be laid to rest knowing they achieved perhaps the most noble of sacrifices: to lay down one’s life for their loved ones.

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