2.2: Global Histories of Playwriting

Studying the history of storytelling—especially embodied or performed stories—reveals much about the society that produced them. Yet, any attempt to write a short global history of playwriting must begin by acknowledging the enormity—and in some ways, the impossibility—of the task. As we’ve already discussed, theatre has long been intertwined with ritual, and separating the two can be difficult and arbitrary. Who counts as a playwright depends on how we define a play. Western theatre historians have often privileged written text over oral tradition and individual authorship over collective creation. But if we define a playwright as someone who designs a blueprint for action, then most of the world’s playwrights are anonymous—priests, poets, scribes, monks, storytellers—whose works were never written down or whose names have been lost to time. Taking this wider view exposes the notion of a single-authored play as a Western construct fueling myths of white male genius. Shakespeare frequently wrote with collaborators just as Michelangelo employed assistants and apprentices to help him paint the Sistine Chapel. These facts do not diminish their accomplishments. They remind us that artwork does not happen in a vacuum. Artists require collaborators. Furthermore, the survival or destruction of any work of art is often a matter of colonization, deliberate suppression, or historical accident, rather than merit.

Roots of Theatre and Drama

The Triumph of Horus, an ancient Egyptian ritual drama so named by two British Egyptologists, survives not because the Egyptians memorialized its playwrights, but because they carved the script into the Temple of Edfu’s stone walls thousands of years after the drama’s probable first performance (Blackman and Fairman 1942–1944). Likewise, in ancient Greece, the identities of some playwrights have survived because of monuments and medieval manuscripts. The record is incomplete, but the fragments suggest the vast scale of playwriting in the ancient Mediterranean world. Thousands of plays were likely written by hundreds of playwrights in this region over several centuries. Of these, only forty-six complete plays remain from five playwrights: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander. Those five playwrights and their forty-six plays represent a veritable treasure trove when compared to the countless practitioners of other ancient traditions about whom little to no evidence survives. Nothing is known about the playwrights who wrote the Rabinal Achí, a 15th-century K’iché Mayan play, among the world’s oldest continuously performed dramas. Nor do we know the names of the composers of the Japanese Shinto Kagura dances that predate Nōh, or the Yoruba communities sustaining Egungun masquerades honoring ancestors, the organizers of Indigenous Australian ceremonies, and the performers of ancient Polynesian dances. In the face of these incalculable losses, any global history of playwriting must also reckon with a history of disappearance.

With so much anonymity and fragmentary evidence, this history must offer more than a catalogue of names. We need to have a sense of what these playwrights were trying to do. Given the patchwork nature of the surviving record, scholars can only guess at the civic and philosophical purposes of theatre in the ancient world. The Triumph of Horus appears to have been intended to knit together the Upper and Lower kingdoms of Egypt under one pharaoh and tie that leader to the worship of the god Horus. Horus engages in ritual combat with his uncle Seth, and the audience responds to a series of call-and-response choruses, reaffirming their fealty to the pharaoh. Extant ancient Greek plays provide a similar glimpse into the interplay between the stage and the body politic of 4th and 5th century BCE Athens. Writing a century after the so-called golden age of Athenian drama, Greek philosopher Aristotle theorized that tragedy dramatizes the fall of a person who is neither entirely good nor bad from a high place to a low one, evoking pity and fear and resulting in catharsis, or emotional purging. This, he suggested, made audiences stronger and more socially useful, better citizens. The center of Greek tragedy is the agon, the argument between two opposing forces. In Sophocles’ Antigone, for example, the central conflict is between Antigone, who represents the will of the gods in her desire to bury her brother, and her uncle Creon the king, who represents the laws of men in his command that her brother should rot. Their conflict reaches its climax in the agon, an extended scene where Antigone and Creon debate the merits of their positions. This ends in tragedy. Creon buries Antigone alive and consequently loses his son, his wife, and his kingdom. The late Brazilian director Augusto Boal critiqued Aristotle’s model of tragedy as coercive. In Boal’s view, “Aristotle formulated a powerful purgative system, the objective of which is to eliminate all that is not commonly accepted, including the revolution, before it starts” (Boal 1993, 47). Tragedy offers a binary choice between two opposing views and in doing so prevents any meaningful change or challenge to state power. Like the Egyptian ritual dramas that sought to reinforce a political order through call-and-response, Greek tragedy seems to have served a similar function—only through dialogue and subtler forms of control.

Premodern Theatrical Traditions

Other premodern (before 1850 CE) traditions pursued different ends. Roman playwrights such as Plautus and Terence crafted comedies for enslaved and colonized audiences as part of the Roman Empire’s bread-and-circuses strategy. Yet as theatre historian Odai Johnson argues, these “low” comedies carried traces of empire’s suppressed rage and trauma (Johnson 2009). In contrast, Sanskrit playwrights like Kālidāsa sought emotional refinement through rasa—a blend of emotion and sensation cultivated by the playwright to elevate the audience’s experience. In medieval Europe, drama served didactic purposes, teaching Christian doctrine through mystery cycles and morality plays, often written anonymously. These plays also functioned as advertisements for the craftsmanship of the guilds that performed them. The ship builders told the story of Noah and the ark, the wool weavers guild sponsored the story of the shepherds encountering baby Jesus, and so on. Because these plays were also part of popular culture and served as tourist destinations, they could be paradoxically sacrilegious. The Pinner’s Play, from the York Cycle, for example, uses Christ’s crucifixion to announce the strength of their nails. During this period, the earliest known female playwright in Western Europe, a German nun named Hrosvitha adapted Roman comedies into Christian parables, though likely these were “closet dramas” intended to be read, not enacted. Meanwhile, in Yuan dynasty China, playwrights like Guan Hanqing used vernacular language and everyday characters to craft complex, emotionally driven social dramas. In the Muromachi period of Japan, Zeami Motokiyo wrote dozens of Nōh plays that mixed indigenous Shinto ideas with the more recent Zen Buddhist principles. He also ran a Nōh theatre company and authored several treatises on Nōh practice.

Early Modern and Modern Playwriting Practices

The early modern and modern eras of playwriting, roughly spanning the 17th to early 20th centuries, was shaped by print culture, colonial expansion, and the rise of the nation-state. Playwrights such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Molière, Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Aphra Behn gained fame not only because of their dramatic innovations but because their work was circulated, printed, and canonized within emerging national literatures. These writers often wrestled with themes of governance, morality, and social mobility, using theatre to reflect on and shape public discourse. But even as they became fixtures of European theatre history, other voices across the globe were innovating in ways often overlooked by mainstream narratives. In the Americas, Mexican-born Spanish nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz used religious theatre in colonial Mexico to assert intellectual authority and subtly question gender and power hierarchies. In Japan, Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote for the Bunraku puppet theatre, crafting domestic tragedies that blurred class lines and dramatized private suffering in a public form. In the Global South, the collision of colonialism and local performance traditions gave rise to new dramatic forms. In India, Rabindranath Tagore combined Bengali folklore, classical Sanskrit drama, and Western romanticism to critique colonialism and explore spiritual and national identity. In Nigeria, the Yoruba tradition of storytelling and ritual performance laid the groundwork for playwrights like Wole Soyinka, who fused indigenous storytelling traditions and religious rituals with Greek tragedy and modernist experimentation. Across these and other traditions, playwrights shaped and reshaped theatre, responding to colonialism, class conflict, and the rise of global modernism. While realism became the dominant aesthetic in Western drama by the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the plays of Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Elizabeth Robins, Susan Glasspell, and Eugene O’Neill, playwrights from the global majority, such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Rabindranath Tagore, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aimé Césaire, Alice Childress, Amiri Baraka, and Wole Soyinka, often employed more poetic, symbolic, hybrid, or ritual-inflected modes of storytelling, complicating the singular narrative of modernity.

Global Postmodern Playwrights

In the postmodern era, from the mid-20th century to today, global playwriting has expanded in both form and voice. As formerly colonized nations gained independence, playwrights emerged who decolonized not only content but form, rejecting the Aristotelian model in favor of circular, episodic, and participatory dramaturgies. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o rejected writing plays in English and instead created community-based works in Gikuyu, grounded in collective experience and anti-imperial resistance. Inspired by Japanese Kabuki dance, German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht developed epic theatre with his collaborator Irwin Piscator. This form of theatre sought to conscientize the audience by calling attention to the constructed-ness of the performance and making the familiar strange. In South Africa, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, as well as Fatima Dike, Mbongeni Ngema, Percy Mtwa, Matsemela Manaka, and Zakes Mda dramatized apartheid’s human rights abuses using fragmented structure and multilingual dialogue. Meanwhile, Black American postmodernists Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange broke Western traditional forms entirely, blending poetry, dance, and song to center Black womanhood as both aesthetic and political practice.

Global playwriting today is increasingly transnational and intersectional. Wajdi Mouawad, a Lebanese-Canadian playwright, uses family trauma and myth to investigate war, displacement, and identity. In Latin America, post-dictatorship playwrights such as Griselda Gambaro and Guillermo Calderón use minimalist staging and fragmented narratives to confront state violence and historical amnesia. In the United States, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Antoinette Nwandu, and Tarell Alvin McCraney challenge the boundaries between actor and audience, representation and critique—forcing white spectators to reckon with their own complicity in structures of oppression. Suzan-Lori Parks reinvents history through repetition, revision, and collage, crafting plays like Topdog/Underdog that merge myth with contemporary Black experience. Young Jean Lee stages identity as performance, playfully destabilizing categories of race, gender, and nation. Naomi Iizuka blends classical myth, pop culture, and nonlinear storytelling to explore migration, belonging, and hybridity. Elsewhere, Caryl Churchill continues to dismantle theatrical convention through fractured forms, while Nigeria’s Femi Osofisan and Bode Sowande remix European dramaturgy with Yoruba ritual and storytelling. These and other contemporary playwrights do not merely update old forms, they dismantle and reimagine them, asking what theatre can be in a world fractured by colonial legacies and digital spectacle. At the same time, Indigenous playwrights and artists continue to reclaim and revitalize theatre as a tool for cultural survival and resurgence. Mary Kathryn Nagle uses legal history and storytelling to assert sovereignty on stage, while Larissa Fasthorse skewers white neoliberalism. Playwrights such as Paula Vogel, Taylor Mac, and Sylvan Oswald are reshaping the field with works that resist linearity and normative narrative arcs—foregrounding fragmentation, camp, and refusal as central artistic strategies. In these postmodern and contemporary practices, the playwright is no longer an anonymous scribe or single author but a cultural critic, world-builder, and often co-creator reflecting a global theatre that continues to challenge borders, genres, and hierarchies.