Drama
Plays that resist the tragic or comic label.
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The Greeks had only the two, and the shelf’s oldest entries are the plays that strain them: the Bacchae, which is a tragedy with a god laughing; Euripides’s Medea, whose murderer flies off in a chariot; Sophocles’s Philoctetes, which ends in a rescue. Shakespeare wrote histories and romances as well as the two kinds, and the Tempest and Henry IV are here for that reason, along with Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, which nobody has ever settled a label on.
Goethe’s Faust is the form’s largest experiment, a play in two parts that took sixty years and contains a tragedy, a comedy, an opera and a philosophy. Marlowe’s Faustus, from the same legend, is the Renaissance version and much shorter. Webster, Jonson, Massinger and Dekker are the other Elizabethans, and Corneille and Racine the French classical stage.
Modern drama begins with Ibsen, whose plays about marriage and money and the lies families live on shocked the 1880s and are the model for everything since. Chekhov, Pirandello, O’Neill, Beckett and Hansberry carry the form into the twentieth century. A Raisin in the Sun is the newest play on the site. Read plays aloud if you can; they were not written for the page.
