Plays

Marlow is gay and shit

>implying shakespeare is good

Yes read hamlet and it' symbolism; powerful play.

its* sorry

Yeah I'm just drunkenly shitposting and trying to get this thread going cause I want to talk about plays

t. pleb

Chekov
Miller
greeks.jpg
Williams
Shaw

THE WILD HOMOMAN

Chekhov is life. Chekhov is love

Don't forget Moliere and the greeks

IBSEN

Ugh. Apart from peer gynt Ibsen is terrible. Overwhelmingly sentimental.

I know he gets memed on here but camus' plays are pretty good. The just is my favourite. He also did a fairly god job of making the possessed into a play

Yeah, pic related is soo sentimental amirite?

Those Athenian dudes

Pic related is one of the better lit charts, you should find it useful

part 2

Eugene O'Neill

AESCHYLUS! *o*

baroque
Lifes a dream is genious

I'll let you into a secret, Shakespeare is the only good one.

Beyond that the canon is more about nationalism than talent.

Theres the Russian one, the Irish one, American one, the Norweigan one etc.

But honestly, hold a copy of Hamlet in one hand a copy of A Doll's House in the other, deep down, in your heart of hearts, you know the score.

Why read theatre? Isn't the whole point that you are watching actors on a stage?

Tennessee Williams is god-tier. Like Shakespeare tier.

>tfw read moliere,corneille, lope de vega, brinsley etc and no one has excited me that much.

I enjoy them a lot but they almost seem like a joke compared to the best prose works, is it cause it's all in the acting?

Pyr Gynt is funnier than anything by shakespeare

No one else is going to say him, so August Wilson.

True. Plays are much better live, but that's not always an option, unfortunately. I'll probably never see a production of Peer Gynt, even though it's one of my favorite plays.

Chekhov

Aeschylus, Euripides, Marlowe and Musset

>Corneille
>a joke compared to the best prose works
Seriously?

>SABINE:
À quoi s’arrête ici ton illustre colère ?
Viens voir mourir ta sœur dans les bras de ton père ;
Viens repaître tes yeux d’un spectacle si doux :
Ou si tu n’es point las de ces généreux coups,
Immole au cher pays des vertueux Horaces
Ce reste malheureux du sang des Curiaces.
Si prodigue du tien, n’épargne pas le leur ;
Joins Sabine à Camille, et ta femme à ta sœur ;
Nos crimes sont pareils, ainsi que nos misères ;
Je soupire comme elle, et déplore mes frères :
Plus coupable en ce point contre tes dures lois,
Qu’elle n’en pleurait qu’un, et que j’en pleure trois,
Qu’après son châtiment ma faute continue.

>HORACE:
Sèche tes pleurs, Sabine, ou les cache à ma vue :
Rends-toi digne du nom de ma chaste moitié,
Et ne m’accable point d’une indigne pitié.
Si l’absolu pouvoir d’une pudique flamme
Ne nous laisse à tous deux qu’un penser et qu’une âme,
C’est à toi d’élever tes sentiments aux miens,
Non à moi de descendre à la honte des tiens.
Je t’aime, et je connais la douleur qui te presse ;
Embrasse ma vertu pour vaincre ta faiblesse,
Participe à ma gloire au lieu de la souiller.
Tâche à t’en revêtir, non à m’en dépouiller.
Es-tu de mon honneur si mortelle ennemie,
Que je te plaise mieux couvert d’une infamie ?
Sois plus femme que sœur, et te réglant sur moi,
Fais-toi de mon exemple une immuable loi.

First of all, dramas are read, not theater. Theater is seen live.

There are multiple reasons to read dramas. One of them has already been mentioned, and that's the practical problem of plays not being performed where you live. Then you might have performances, but they are shitty, or the director modifies the work in some way, modernizes it, and you get a work of art that requires the viewer to already be familiar with the original, and is in fact not what the real author intended to show on stage.

Some plays aren't even entirely intended for a theater. The most famous example is Goethe's Faust, which, if performed entirely is 20+ hours. Seneca's works are similarly theorized to have been intended for reading only. And if you've read modernist plays, you should've come across dramatists whose stage directions are artistic in themselves, and which cannot be directly conveyed on stage. See the opening of Ionesco's "Bald Soprano":
>SCENE: A middle-class English interior, with English armchairs. An English evening. Mr. Smith, an Englishman, seated in his English armchair and wearing English slippers, is smoking his English pipe and reading an English newspaper, near an English fire. He is wearing English spectacles and a small gray English mustache. Beside him, in another English armchair, Mrs. Smith, an Englishwoman, is darning some English socks. A long moment of English silence. The English clock strikes 17 English strokes.
You simply cannot show this directly on stage, the director has to convey it by other means. Then arises the question - which version is the correct one - Ionesco's writing or a director's interpretation? Well, neither is, and both are.

A reason is also the possibly of carefully rereading passages to get the most out of them. Shakespeare live, can, I'll be honest, confuse me when the actors dive into those abstract monologues. At home, with a dictionary nearby, I can simply experience them better.

What bothers you is losing "something" while reading, but how much exactly do you lose? Ancient Greek and Elizabethan plays were relatively primitive visually, but the poetry and beauty of verse compensated for that. When reading a play, you really do get the crux of the work. Even the more modern plays, with detailed stage directions, convey emotions well and are perfectly enjoyable. Some things are lost, some things are gained, but a good play is good in any context.

what translation of Pæːr Gʏnt should I look for, my main friends?

Büchner
von Kleist
Grillparzer