Interest in Sophocles is unabating. If it was marked in the periods which followed the two world wars, yet now, when the second war has been over for more than thirty years, books and articles on Sophocles still flow from the presses. There is clearly a fascination here – a sense of relevance, if one may use a modish word. From all this scholarly and critical activity – and much of it has been of quality – one ought not to expect or even desire that a consensus should emerge any more than from the critical study of Shakespeare. The range of opinion, however, has been and still is fantastically wide. There are orthodoxies and dogmas, but they conflict. There is conflict over the interpretation of individual tragedies and over the tragic thought of Sophocles in general.

A complete survey would be tedious. We have been asked to look at Sophocles in many different guises: the virtuoso playwright, unconcerned with ideas or consistency or character; the portraitist; a Homeric, or aristocratic, or conservative, Sophocles turning his back on the contemporary world or confronting it with paradigms of a lost heroism; a pious Sophocles, the outcome of whose plays must always reflect well upon the gods; an acceptant Sophocles, but also, by contrast, one whose heroes rightly arraign the gods. On the critical stage they have had their entrances and their exits and their reappearances with a change of mask and costume; and we seem to look in vain for the face behind the mask.