A play is a score — its full meaning emerges only in performance. But the greatest plays also read as the most compressed, intelligent writing in the language. Here is the canon of the stage.
Literature written to be spoken aloud
Drama is the strangest of the literary arts because it is only half-finished on the page. A play is a score, waiting for actors and an audience to complete it. And yet the greatest plays read as some of the most concentrated, intelligent writing humans have produced — Shakespeare could say more in five lines of dialogue than most novelists manage in a chapter.
This collection gathers the summits of world theater available in the public domain. The Greeks invented tragedy and comedy and got the essentials right the first time — Sophocles' Oedipus is still the model of dramatic irony. Shakespeare expanded what a play could hold until it could hold everything. Then the modern stage, led by Ibsen and Chekhov, turned drama inward, to the quiet desperation of ordinary rooms, while Wilde and Shaw made the comedy of ideas crackle.
Read a play and you read fast — it is almost all dialogue. But read it slowly and you find the deepest character writing in literature, because on stage there is nowhere to hide: a person is only what they say and do. Better yet, read it aloud.