The first complete plays we have come from Athens in the fifth century BC, and they invented almost every theatrical convention later dramatists would either inherit or rebel against — the chorus,…
The medieval period produced a body of drama very different from anything that came before or after — mystery cycles staged on wagons through city streets, morality plays in which abstractions like…
Between the rebuilding of the public theatres in late-Elizabethan London and the closing of the playhouses in 1642, English-language drama produced a body of work — Shakespeare's, Marlowe's, Jonson's, Webster's — so…
After the English Restoration of 1660 reopened the theatres, a wave of comedies of manners, heroic tragedies, and increasingly polished domestic dramas arrived from Britain and France. The Restoration stage introduced women…
The early nineteenth century saw playwrights wrestling with the tension between the highly disciplined neoclassical tradition they had inherited and the emotional, individualistic, often nationalist energies of Romanticism. Schiller, Goethe, Hugo, and…
From the 1860s onward, a new generation of playwrights — Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Hauptmann, Galsworthy — set out to replace the rhetorical conventions of nineteenth-century stagecraft with something that looked and…
A catch-all designation for public-domain plays whose authorship or date sits outside the better-defined eras — anonymous early dramas, lesser-attributed translations, and one-off works that don't fit cleanly elsewhere. Don't let the…
A catch-all designation for public-domain plays whose authorship or date sits outside the better-defined eras — anonymous early dramas, lesser-attributed translations, and one-off works that don't fit cleanly elsewhere. Don't let the…