Playwright
A
playwright, also known as a dramatist, is someone who writes dramatic literature or
drama. These works may be written specifically to be performed by actors or they may be
closet dramas or literary works written using dramatic forms but not meant for performance.
The term is not a variant spelling of
playwrite, but something quite distinct: the word
wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder (as in a
wheelwright or
cartwright). Hence the prefix and the suffix combine to indicate
someone who crafts plays. The
homophone with
write is in this case coincidental.
The term 'playwright' appears to have been coined by
Ben Jonson (see his Epigram 49, 'To Playwright[
1]') as an insult, to imply an inferior hack-writer for the theatre. He always described himself as a poet. It later lost this negative connotation.
The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are
Ancient Greeks with some of the earliest plays being written around the
5th century BC. These playwrights are notable as they established forms that are still relied on by modern playwrights. Notable among them are
Aeschylus,
Sophocles,
Euripides, and
Aristophanes.
Shakespeare wrote classical tragedies and comedies which a lot of other work is based on. For example,
Kiss Me, Kate is based on
The Taming of the Shrew, and
Romeo and Juliet has been remade more times than can be counted. Tom Stoppard created the play
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead in 1966 which is a modern transformation of
Hamlet.
Playwrights often do not reach the same level of fame or cultural importance that they have in the past. This may have to do with the current state of professional theatre, in which fewer new works are produced by theatres. Instead, theaters have tended towards remounting past successes. For example,
Playwrights Horizons produced only six plays in the 2002-03 seasons, compared with thirty-one in 1973-74[
2]. As revivals and large-scale production musicals become the de rigeur Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, in has become much more difficult for playwrights to make a living in the business, let alone become major successes.
However, the most successful playwrights â€" in stark contrast to the lot of the
screenwriter â€" are often high-status figures in their industry. This is a corollary of the more literary approach that has characterised the
theatre since its roots in
poetry. The form often has a greater reverence for the text and arguably is less oriented around the work of a
director. The playwright's vision often takes precedence.
In recent years this attitude has, sadly, started to be slowly overhauled. A less rigidly formal approach to text for performance is now common, informed by practitioners like
Joan Littlewood and her protégé
Mike Leigh.
Documentary plays are also a common feature of the theatrical landscape since the middle of the Twentieth Century when they were employed, often tendentiously, in
agit-prop or general political protest. These plays demand something different of a playwright, often the editing and reproduction of the other people's words within a narrative structure. A recent example is
Stuff Happens,
David Hare's 2004 play about the
Iraq War, in which many of the speeches were taken verbatim from
George W. Bush,
Tony Blair et al.
*
List of playwrights *
Screenwriter *
Script (comic) *
Scriptwriter*
Playwriting 101 - A playwriting tutorial written by playwright and screenwriter Jon Dorf.
*
The Playwriting Seminars - playwriting site written and maintained by Richard Toscan of the Virginia Commonwealth University, USA.
