There was a time when pretty much all I read was novels and short stories; the plays I knew were those assigned at school or university. Then I got into Shakespeare and my favourite plays a couple of years ago were all by Shakespeare.
But now I have got a better grasp of drama, especially classical drama, so here’s a list of favourites that aren’t by Shakespeare (listed chronologically by the dramatist’s birth year, and grouped by country):
- The Oresteia by Aeschylus, which is actually three plays: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides
- Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus
- Oedipus the King
- Antigone
- Electra by Sophocles
- Hippolytus
- Hecabe
- The Bacchae by Euripides
- Lysistrata
- The Frogs by Aristophanes
- Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
- The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
- The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley
- The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton or Cyril Tourneur
- Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
- Tartuffe
- Don Juan
- The Misanthrope by Molière
- Phèdre by Jean Racine
- The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen
______________________________________
What can we see here? My tastes are predominantly Greek (and Shakespearean): 10 out of 20 plays are by the Athenian playwrights (or 12 out of 22 if you don’t count the Oresteia as one). Molière is another favourite.
Only one play from the 19th century. No Goethe. No Chekhov—is that a surprise?—I struggled with his plays, having read only two, and much prefer him as a short story writer. No Oscar Wilde, simply because I haven’t read him—if “allowed” to include plays I’ve seen onscreen, I would name The Importance of Being Earnest (though it’s hard to say which play I would remove to make place for it).
No Tennessee Williams, whom I liked at university. No one contemporary, but then the only one I know is Tom Stoppard—one day I’m going to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which I would probably like.
Now this list is a bit of a cheat—a list of favourite plays, by Shakespeare and other dramatists, would be much, much harder.
Name your favourite plays.
My favorite non-Shakespeare plays, hm … I probably don’t read enough to have an opinion, but here’s a highly eclectic list of plays I like:
ReplyDeleteThe Changeling
Every Man in his Humour
Oedipus Rex
The Oresteia
Glengary Glenn Ross
Brighton Beach Memoirs
The Seagull
Witness for the Prosecution
Shakespeare in Love
Hold on a minute, Shakespeare in Love???
DeleteThere really is a lot of excellent late 19th and 20th century drama that would be worth your time. Some playwrights you haven't mentioned -- Shaw. Brecht. Eugene O'Neil, Ionesco, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, Robert Bolt (at least "A Man for All Seasons"), Beckett, August Wilson, Athol Fugard, Sam Shepard, Pirandello, Tony Kushner.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, there are lots of important playwrights I haven't read.
DeleteI very much live in some period before the 20th century though.
I'm reading Adrian Poole's short book about tragedy at the moment and makes an interesting point that there's no real tragedy after the 17th century, or perhaps it's better to say that there's a clear difference between tragedy before and after that time, and part of it is because in the time of ancient Greece or Shakespeare's period, the world was infused with divinity, which is not the case after that point, especially from the time of Ibsen and Chekhov.
A definition of tragedy that excludes O'Neil's "A Long Day's Journey Into Night" or Miller's "Death of a Salesman" among many others seems rather narrow.
DeleteSome favorite non-Shakespeare plays (not including musicals), in no particular order:
ReplyDeleteImportance of Being Earnest, Wilde
Candida, Shaw
The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov
Bacchae, Euripides
Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Moliere
A Man for All Seasons, Bolt
A Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neil
Jumpers, Stoppard
Death of a Salesman, Miller
A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry
The Chairs, Ionescu
Waiting for Godot, Beckett
Mother Courage, Brecht
Rossum's Universal Robots, Karel Capek
The Dybbuk, Ansky
Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello
Blithe Spirit, Coward
I was thinking that there were no women on my list, but I had an excuse. Your list is much more modern than mine but there are no women either (observation, not complaint).
DeleteBut then who are the greatest female playwrights? I can't name one. Do women prefer novels and short stories or?
Lorraine Hansberry who tragically died at the age of 35, wrote a great play, "A Raisin in the Sun".
DeleteMary Chase wrote "Harvey" which is fun.
Eva Ensler wrote "The Vagina Monologues" which I have neither seen nor read, but which is well-regarded.
There have been many very fine woman screenwriters: Nora Ephron, Ruth Praver Jhabvala, etc.
Oh yeah, I missed Hansberry on your list.
DeleteI've read The Vagina Monologues! Forgot about that one.
Also Lillian Hellman (Little Foxes, Children's Hour)
DeleteSome people really want to attribute everything to disenchantment / lack of divinity. I would suggest instead a big shift in the taste for irony and sentiment, relflected in and possibly influenced by the rise fo the novel.
ReplyDeleteStoppard is wonderful. I doubt I will ever do it, but he is one of the few writers who has tempted me to Read Everything.
I've read one Stoppard! Arcadia.
DeleteNot a fan of his screenplay for Anna Karenina though.
The theater environment, all over the world, was deeply sexist until recently, much like the film industry. But now, in the US at least, theater is 50%+ women playwrights. E.g., the top 10 productions of 2023-4:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.americantheatre.org/2023/10/18/the-top-10-most-produced-plays-of-the-2023-24-season/
And look at 2018-9:
https://www.americantheatre.org/2018/09/20/the-top-10-most-produced-plays-of-the-2018-19-season/
I have seen just one play from these two lists, so cannot speak to greatness. I doubt any of them are, just statistically, greatly great.
I see. Thanks for the links, I will have a look.
DeleteEverything always changes over time, and drama is no exception. As for trying to figure out reasons, since no explanation can be proved or disproved, any old explanation may suffice. One explanation not often put forward is the individual qualities of an artist, and the influence they have on subsequent artists. So Chekhov, say, developed ways of creating dramatic climaxes out of things *not* happening; subsequent dramatists thought this good, were influenced by it, and adapted it for their own work; and these works, in turn, … etc. But it all sounds more impressive if you attribute it to loss of faith in God (Darwin, Nietzsche, and all that), the disenchantment that followed WW1, and so on.
ReplyDeleteI tried putting together a list of my 20 favourite plays, and ended up with 25. Following exhortations from Di, I cut it down to 20. I decided not to have more than two plays by any one writer - otherwise I could easily have included a dozen or so by Ibsen.
These choices merely reflect my personal taste - and nothing more.
The Oresteia - Aeschylus
Electra - Sophocles
The Bacchae - Euripides
The Duchess of Malfi - Webster
The Misanthrope - Molière
The Critic - Sheridan
Woyzeck - Büchner
Peer Gynt - Ibsen
The Master Builder - Ibsen
The Importance of Being Earnest - Wilde
Three Sisters - Chekhov
The Cherry Orchard - Chekhov
The Ghost Sonata - Strindberg
Headtbreak House - Shaw
The House of Bernarda Alba - Lorca
Six Characters in Search of an Author - Pirandello
Long Day’s Journey Into Night - O’Neill
Mother Courage & her Children - Brecht
Waiting for Godot - Beckett
No Man’s Land - Pinter
Also, it does seem rather pointless to propose a strict definition of tragedy, and to determine whether a work is or isn’t a tragedy on the basis of whether or not it meets the pre-determined criteria. As tragedy evolves over time, so should the definition.
ReplyDeleteI tried to write something here about the nature of “tragedy”: https://argumentativeoldgit.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/the-tragic-vision-and-its-discontents/
Himadri,
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't think I fully grasped Adrian Poole's arguments, so I won't try to paraphrase them.
I thought you yourself said that nowadays writers don't create larger-than-life character anymore, whose emotions shatter heaven and earth? And that it relates to the mystic?
Your list is very different from mine. I'm going to have to read more Ibsen, but not yet.
DeleteSure, everything changes over time, and it is true that modern literature tends not to create the kind of character we recognise as “larger than life” - Clytemnestra, Macbeth, Milton’s Satan, Heathcliff & Cathy, Ahab, etc. I am just a bit suspicious nowadays of pat explanations to account for this. I am inclined to think these days that what drives the changes are not so much external factors, but rather, the individual artistic imaginations of major artists. For instance, I have heard it said that modernist movements were a consequence of the disenchantment that followed WW1, and I wonder whether “The Waste Land” is bleaker than “Jude the Obscure”, or whether Picasso’s “Guernica” more horrific than Goya’s “Disasters of War”. I think it more likely that modernism came about because that generation of writers, artists and composers had absorbed the creations of writers, artists and composers of past generations, and had used their own imaginations to build upon what had gone before.
But I digress. Sorry about that. I hadn’t meant to argue against Adrian Poole, since I haven’t yet read him.
In drama, I particularly love the trio odf Ibsen-Strindberg-Chekhov, and am fascinated by many dramatists who appeared in the following decades - Pirandello, Lorca, Brecht, Beckett, etc. And that solitary masterpiece by Eugene O’Neill (I really don’t think even the best of his other plays reach the level of Long Day’s Journey Into Night). But as I say, these are matters of personal taste.
Contemporary writers create large numbers of larger-than-life figures. These writers work in genres some of you don't like much. There is a genre, for example, that has recently had a popular run at the movies, where all of the characters are larger-than-life figures. Many of those characters were created in the 1960s, or the 1930s, but I assume that is modern enough for this point.
ReplyDeleteAh - the genre some of us don’t like very much! That’s a splendid way of putting it. And yes - Guilty as charged, m’lud! But we may concede, I think, that this particular genre is at some remove from the real world. However, you may counter, so are the works that have given us the characters I mentioned in my comment above.
DeleteIn depicting fictional worlds closer to reality, it has become, it seems to me, very difficult to create those characters whom we recognise as being “larger than life”. Which is not to say they can’t exist, but our modern urban environments lend themselves more to depictions of humanity as ants scurrying in an anthill, with little scope for big characters to impose themselves without attracting the attention of men in white coats. I don’t know. I’m merely trying out a few conjectures. But it does seem to me that, for whatever reason, it has become more difficult to accommodate such “larger than life” figures without explicitly moving into a world of fantasy.
The "real world," ha ha ha, where did that come from. I thought we were talking about literature. But yes, I do not think Watchmen or V for Vendetta are more removed from the "real world" than Moby-Dick or Wuthering Heights.
DeleteI am worried about the contemporary fiction you are reading. What is this anthill fiction? I do not read so much contempory work, but what I do read, including the more "real world" adjacent, is not about ants, and has plenty of big characters.
It is possible that because of the rise of domestic fiction and perhaps melodrama the larger-than-life characters have shifted place, not just to fantasy but to Hollywood and Bollywood and Nollywood. Charles Foster Kane, Vito Corleone, Scarface, that oilman Daniel Day-Lewis played, like that.
When I look at the upcoming Broadway season I see plenty of larger-than-life characters. Many are based on real people, but when has that not been true. The biggest Broadway hit of the century has been about larger-than-life men, and come to think of it why does Hamilton not count as a tragedy? Burr and Hamilton even have tragic flaws.
Where did that come from? A very tired brain at the end of a long day, that’s where.
DeleteThe anthill image is a gross exaggeration, but, from my own limited reading, from the middle of the 19th century onwards, characters do seem smaller than they used to be, more subject to the material constraints of the world they inhabit. But this is, as I say, based on merely limited reading.
This week will continue to be a bit fraught, I’m afraid, so let’s continue this discussion later. From my end, things will settle down a bit towards normality next week, and I trust my brain, such as it is, will be more in gear by then.
I was out all day yesterday, not touching my laptop, and now there's an interesting discussion in the comments haha.
ReplyDeleteThis is great.
I'm going to have to think some more about this.
Anyway, yes, good points. I was going to object to the point about superheroes as larger-than-life characters, but "Charles Foster Kane, Vito Corleone, Scarface, that oilman Daniel Day-Lewis played, like that", yes.
ReplyDeleteOn a side note, I looked at your link, Tom, about Broadway shows and it mentions Robert Icke's adaptation of Oedipus. I hope that's not the text I saw in a bookshop because jeez, it's so juvenile and ridiculous.
Broadway and "juvenile and ridiculous" sounds like business as usual to me. So, yes, that's probably it.
ReplyDeleteIt's weird though, as I've seen his Hamlet. Not a fan, especially of Andrew Scott's performance, but there were interesting things in it.
Delete