Drama In Antigone

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Your brothers are dead. Your uncle refuses to allow one to be buried. This is not how people imagine things going for them, but for Antigone, this is where we find her. Antigone’s blight has been told over and over again throughout the years ever since the play by the same name was written during the Golden Age of Greece by a man named Sophocles. The Golden Age of Greece was possibly the height of ancient culture due to the creation of modern drama, a prime example of which is Antigone by Sophocles.
The Golden Age of Greece lasted from 500 to 300 BCE (Ancient). Within this time, there were quite a few wars. The Persian Wars lasted 30 years into the Golden Age, ending with a tentative Greek victory circa 479 BCE (Farah 122). In 334 BCE, Alexander the Great launched his military campaigns into Asia Minor and the Middle East (141). This conquest led to the Hellenistic Age, a time in which Persian and Greek cultures blended into a grand new culture (144). This time and the time before led to theatre unlike anything the world had ever seen.
Greece’s Golden Age was when drama developed into a form that is similar to modern day drama. Evidence of this is the Comedy and Tragedy Masks, an international symbol for drama today. These masks were originally worn by the actors in ancient Greek plays. It was not uncommon for the actors to play multiple parts, so the masks were used to show when an actor was portraying one character or another. These plays were written for festivals in honor of the god Dionysus, the Wine God. The playwrights that everyone looked for at these festivals were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes (Ancient).
Sophocles wrote a fair sum of plays during this time period. Born in 496 to a prosperous weapons factory own...

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...st (Sophocles). Creon and his son come back to the cave a little later to find that Antigone has hung herself (Sophocles). At the sight of this, Creon’s son proceeds to commit suicide as well, bringing forth the tragic end (Sophocles).
The tragedy of Antigone is a great example to drama of the time and drama of today. One can easily draw parallels between the work of the great Greek playwrights and some more modern works, such as Shakespeare’s tragedies. The level of language appears similar, and the amount of emotion wielded by these works feels on par.
All of this pulls back to ancient Greece being the starting point of modern drama and theatre. Everything from the symbols of theatre to the plays of modern masters has its roots in the hub of the ancient world. I can assure you that we still have not seen the last of it, and we shall not until the end of humanity.

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