List of the Greatest Dramatists in English Literature

In this article, we shall be discussing arts, particularly outlining the list of the greatest dramatists in English Literature ever since the world had begun to experience uncommon creativity. The history of human reading culture cannot deny the fact that it had since been witnessing consistent emergence of stars and luminaries in the field of literature.

Each of these stars, great thinkers and skillful wordsmiths is an expression of the diverse cultural backgrounds that colored the universe. Hence, the expression of their talents is a doorway to understanding the world. The English culture has productively contributed to cross-border unity and harmony.  This is achieved following the speedy spread of the English language as a universal language.

Ever since the proselytization of the language, different writers have evolved with different literatures composed in the language and thus it has gained its very strong ground all over the world. Because of the wide outreach of the language across the universe, many of these writers whose various genres have defined them as playwrights, dramatists, novelists, poets, etc. have thus become largely popular.

Read Also: Dramatists Meaning in Literature

Specifically, we will be sharing with you the list of the greatest dramatists in English Literature in this content for you to know. The list runs from reputable, prominent, and well known dramatists to the lesser known dramatists of today. These items are listed below:

• William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (baptized 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist. He is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon”.

His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire.

• Ben Jonson

Benjamin Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet, whose artistry exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy.

He popularized the comedy of humors. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humor (1598), Vulpine, or The Fox (c. 1606), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry.

“He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I.”

Jonson was a classically educated, well-read and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–1625) and of the Caroline era (1625–1642).

• Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career.

One of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

He famously wrote about the period that “the negro was in vogue”, which was later paraphrased as “when Harlem was in vogue”. Growing up in a series of Midwestern towns, Hughes became a prolific writer at an early age. He graduated from high school in Cleveland, Ohio and soon began studies at Columbia University in New York City.

• Athol Fugard

Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard OIS (born 11 June 1932) is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director who writes in South African English. He is best known for his political plays opposing the system of apartheid and for the 2005 Academy Award-winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood.

Fugard was an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. For the academic year 2000–2001, he was the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana.

He is the recipient of many awards, honors, and honorary degrees, including the 2005 Order of Ikhamanga in Silver “for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre” from the government of South Africa. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

• Samuel Shepard

Samuel Shepard Rogers III (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017), known professionally as Sam Shepard, was an American actor, playwright, author, screenwriter, and director whose career spanned half a century. He won ten Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most won by any writer or director. He wrote 44 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs.

Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. He received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009.

New York magazine described Shepard as “the greatest American playwright of his generation.”Shepard’s plays are known for their bleak, poetic, surrealist elements, black comedy, and rootless characters living on the outskirts of American society.

His style evolved from the absurdism of his early off-off-Broadway work to the realism of later plays like Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class.

• Arthur Asher Miller

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and a controversial figure in the twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956). He wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961).

The drama Death of a Salesman has been numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century. Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was married to Marilyn Monroe.

In 1980, Miller received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He received the Prince of Asturias Award, the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2002 and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003, as well as the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 1999.

• August Wilson

August Wilson (April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each work in the series is set in a different decade, and depicts comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the 20th century.

• David Alan Mamet

David Alan Mamet was born in November 30, 1947 and he is an American playwright, film director, screenwriter and author. He won a Pulitzer Prize and received Tony nominations for his plays Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988).

He first gained critical acclaim for a trio of off-Broadway 70s plays: The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo.

His plays Race and The Penitent, respectively, opened on Broadway in 2009 and previewed off-Broadway in 2017. Feature films that Mamet both wrote and directed include House of Games (1987), Homicide (1991), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Heist (2001), and Redbelt (2008).

His screenwriting credits include The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), The Verdict (1982), The Untouchables (1987), Hoffa (1992), Wag the Dog (1997), and Hannibal (2001). Mamet himself wrote the screenplay for the 1992 adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross, and wrote and directed the 1994 adaptation of his play Oleanna (1992). He was the executive producer and frequent writer for the TV show The Unit (2006–2009).

• Jane Anderson

Jane Anderson (born c. 1954 in California) is an American actress, playwright, screenwriter and director. She wrote and directed the feature film The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005), and wrote the Nicolas Cage film It Could Happen to You (1994). She won an Emmy Award for writing the screenplay for the miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014).

• Samuel Barclay Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both English and French.

Beckett’s work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humor, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career.

He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the “Theatre of the Absurd.” Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.” He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

• Eugene O’Neill

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into U.S. drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg.

The drama Long Day’s Journey into Night is often numbered on the short list of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. O’Neill’s plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society.

They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.