Playwriting

A playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.

The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word 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 has "wrought" words, themes, and other elements into a dramatic form - someone who crafts plays. The homophone with "write" is in this case entirely coincidental.

The term playwright appears to have been coined by Ben Jonson in his Epigram 49, "To Playwright", as an insult, to suggest a mere tradesman fashioning works for the theatre. Jonson described himself as a poet, not a playwright, since plays during that time were written in meter and so were regarded as the province of poets. This view was held as late as the early 19th century. The term playwright later lost this negative connotation.

The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are the Ancient Greeks. These early plays were written for annual Athenian competitions among playwrights held around the 5th century BC. Such notables as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes established forms still relied on by their modern counterparts. For the ancient Greeks, playwriting involved poïesis, "the act of making". This is the source of the English word poet.

In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle wrote his Poetics, the first play-writing manual. In this famous text, Aristotle established the principle of action or praxis as the basis for all drama. He then included a hierarchy of elements for the drama beginning with plot (μύθος mythos), character (έθος ethos), thought (dianoia), diction (lexis), music (melodia), and spectacle (opsis). The ends of drama were plot, character, and thought, the means of drama were language and music, and the manner of presentation a spectacle. Since the myths, upon which Greek tragedy were based, were widely known, plot had to do with the arrangement and selection of existing material. Character was equated with choice as rather than psychology, so that character was determined by action. In tragedy, the notion of ethical choice determined the character of the individual. Thought had more to do and "the imitation of an action that is serious", and so forth, brought with it the concept of mimesis (from real life). Thus, he developed his notion of hamartia, or tragic flaw, an error in judgment by the main character or protagonist. It provides the basis for the "conflict-driven" play, a term still held as the sine qua non of dramaturgy. The Poetics, while very brief and highly condensed, is still studied today.

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