The 25 Greatest Plays Ever Written

Sophocles wrote the play that defined tragedy itself — the form Aristotle dissected, Freud diagnosed, and every dramatist since has tried to escape.

The collected plays of the writer who, more than any other, shaped how speakers of English think, feel, and curse — preserved by two friends seven years after his death.

Goethe's lifelong drama of a man who sells his soul for knowledge — the founding modern myth of overreach and the cost of becoming the person you wanted to be.

Aeschylus's trilogy traces the birth of justice itself — the moment a civilization replaces blood vengeance with the institution of the law court.

Sophocles's drama of a woman who defies the king to bury her brother — the founding Western statement of conscience against the state, debated every century since.

Euripides's play of a woman who murders her own children to revenge a faithless husband — the most disturbing portrait of female rage in ancient literature.

Beckett's 1952 play — two tramps waiting for someone who never arrives — stripped drama to its bones and invented absurdist theatre in a single stage.

Euripides's final tragedy — reason versus ecstasy, the civic order destroyed by the wild god Dionysus; Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy is essentially a commentary on it.

Molière's 1665 comedy created one of Western culture's defining archetypes — the libertine seducer who would reappear in Mozart, Byron, Kierkegaard, and Camus.

Molière's greatest comedies — Tartuffe attacked religious hypocrisy so effectively Louis XIV banned it; his body of work is to French comedy what Shakespeare is to English drama.

Wagner's four-opera sixteen-hour cycle — the greatest work of music drama ever composed, and the aesthetic event that defined late nineteenth-century European culture.

Chekhov's stories and plays — The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya — perfected an art of suggestion and understatement that shaped every later short-story writer.

Attributed to Aeschylus — the Titan punished for giving fire to humanity; the archetype of rebellion against divine tyranny that shaped Romanticism, Marx, and every modern revolutionary.

Euripides's 415 BC tragedy — the women of Troy after the city falls — the most candid anti-war play in ancient literature, revived in every major modern conflict.

Ibsen's 1879 play — Nora slamming the door on her marriage was called "the door slam heard round the world," and founded modern realist drama.

Brecht's 1941 epic theatre masterwork — the anti-war play that invented the alienation effect and shaped twentieth-century drama, film, and political rhetoric.

O'Neill's autobiographical tragedy and his Aeschylean trilogy — the peak of American drama, from the only American playwright ever awarded the Nobel.

Aristophanes's comedy mocking Socrates — Plato suggests in the Apology that the play's ridicule contributed to the atmosphere that produced Socrates's execution.

Shaw's great comedy (adapted as My Fair Lady) and his historical drama — the most intellectually provocative English-language playwright since Shakespeare.

Pirandello's 1921 meta-theatrical play — characters walking onto a stage demanding their story be finished; the founding work of twentieth-century meta-drama.

Soyinka's plays fusing Yoruba ritual with Greek tragic structure — in 1986 the first African Nobel laureate in Literature.

Pinter's plays — menace, ellipsis, pauses so precisely weighted "Pinteresque" entered English as an adjective; the most influential postwar British dramatist.

Aeschylus's 472 BC play — the earliest surviving Greek tragedy, astonishingly sympathetic to the Persian enemy Athens had just defeated at Salamis.

Euripides's tragedy of Phaedra and her stepson — the primary source for Racine's Phèdre and the template for every later drama of forbidden desire.

Aristophanes's 411 BC comedy — the women of Greece striking for sex to end the war; still revived during every major contemporary conflict.