This worksheet pack provides six independent activities for use while reading or after completing Sophocles’ Antigone. Rather than concentrating on plot recall, the activities ask students to examine competing obligations, trace consequences, evaluate how characters respond to disagreement, construct evidence-based character claims, identify turning points, and develop a final interpretation of the tragedy.
Teachers may use the worksheets in sequence or select individual activities to accompany particular stages of the play.
Worksheet 1: Competing Obligations
The central conflict of Antigone involves more than a simple choice between obedience and disobedience. Characters recognize different kinds of obligation—to family, the city, political authority, religious duty, and personal conviction.
Students compare the obligations emphasized by Antigone, Ismene, Creon, and Haemon and consider what happens when legitimate duties cannot easily be reconciled.
Questions encourage students to consider which obligations are hardest to reconcile and whether one kind of duty should always take precedence over another.
Worksheet 2: Decision and Consequence Tracker
Characters repeatedly make decisions intended to accomplish one thing that ultimately produce much larger consequences.
Students trace several important choices, including Creon’s prohibition of Polyneices’ burial, Antigone’s decision to bury her brother, Ismene’s response to Antigone, Haemon’s confrontation with Creon, and Creon’s eventual attempt to reverse course.
For each decision, students distinguish between the intended result and the actual or later consequence.
The activity then asks a larger question: how responsible is someone for consequences that were not intended but might have been foreseen?
Worksheet 3: Listening and Refusal
Creon receives unwelcome information from a series of people: the Sentry, Antigone, Haemon, the Chorus, and Tiresias.
Students track what each person tells him, Creon’s initial response, and what that response reveals about his understanding of disagreement and authority.
The worksheet encourages students to look for patterns. Does Creon react differently depending upon who challenges him? What kinds of disagreement does he find hardest to hear? At what point does listening finally lead to action?
Worksheet 4: Character Claims and Evidence
This activity helps students move beyond broad descriptions such as “Antigone is brave” or “Creon is stubborn.”
Students choose a character, identify an important quality or tendency, locate a specific action or response that supports that impression, and explain how the quality affects the conflict.
They then turn those observations into an analytical claim.
A final question asks students to identify evidence that complicates their own interpretation. This helps prevent character analysis from becoming a collection of simple labels.
Worksheet 5: Turning Points
Students identify three moments when the direction of the tragedy changes—or when a different choice might still have altered what follows.
For each turning point, they consider:
- What happens?
- What choice is made or refused?
- What becomes harder or impossible afterward?
Students then choose the turning point they consider most important and trace at least two later consequences back to it.
Worksheet 6: Final Synthesis
The final worksheet brings several of the play’s central problems together.
Students consider who bears the greatest responsibility for the catastrophe, complete an analytical statement about when authority becomes dangerous, and examine what Creon finally recognizes that he failed to understand earlier.
The concluding challenge asks students to formulate a statement about the relationship between conviction and wisdom and then identify something in the play that complicates their own conclusion.
This last step is important: interpretation becomes stronger when students learn to test an argument against evidence that does not fit it perfectly.
Primary text: Sophocles, Antigone, translated by Ian Johnston, Richer Resources Publications.
Note to the Educator
This worksheet pack may be used in sequence or selectively during guided reading, independent study, small-group work, class discussion, or written analysis. Because many questions invite interpretation, students should be evaluated on the clarity of their reasoning and their use of evidence rather than on agreement with a single predetermined response.
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