Dramatists of the modern Age

1. Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828–1906)

Ibsen was born to Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg, into a well-to-do merchant family, in the small port town of Skien in Telemark county, a city which was noted for shipping timber.

At fifteen, Ibsen was forced to leave school. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. In 1846, when Ibsen was 18, he had a liaison with Else Sophie Jensdatter Birkedalen which produced a son, Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkedalen, whose upbringing Ibsen paid for until the boy was fourteen, though Ibsen never saw Hans Jacob.

Literary Career and Works

His first play, the tragedy Catilina (1850), was published under the pseudonym ‘Brynjolf Bjarme’ when he was only 22, but it was not performed. His first play to be staged, The Burial Mound (1850), received little attention. Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful. Ibsen’s main inspiration in the early period, right up to Peer Gynt, was apparently the Norwegian author Henrik Wergeland and the Norwegian folk tales as collected by Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe. In Ibsen’s youth, Wergeland was the most acclaimed and by far the most read Norwegian poet and playwright.

His next play, Brand (1865), brought him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as did the following play, Peer Gynt (1867). With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgements into the drama, exploring what he termed the ‘drama of ideas’. His next series of plays are often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence, becoming the centre of dramatic controversy across Europe.

Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany, in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatising the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and began work on his first contemporary realist drama The Pillars of Society, first published and performed in 1877. A Doll’s House followed in 1879. This play is a scathing criticism of the marital roles accepted by men and women which characterised Ibsen’s society.

Late in his career, Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of society’s moral values and more to do with the problems of individuals. In such later plays as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of current conventions.

Henrik Ibsen is famously known as the father of Modern Drama and it is worth recognising how literal an assessment that is. The Norwegian playwright was not merely one of a wave of new writers to experiment with dramatic form, nor did he make small improvements that were built upon by successors. Ibsen rose to prominence in large part because of his refusal to follow the rules of theatre at the time. His determination to forge his own style of drama coincided with a rising demand by the new intelligentsia for a serious ‘thinking’ theatre, contrary to the frivolous entertainment on mainstream stages. Ibsen’s realist plays, such as A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People, were championed by this class of society upon their publication. He died on 23rd May, 1906.

Major Works

• Ghosts followed in 1881, another scathing commentary on the morality of Ibsen’s society, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration.
• In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen went even further. In earlier plays, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components of the action, but they were on the small scale of individual households. In An Enemy, controversy became the primary focus and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often ‘right’ than the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike.
• The Wild Duck (1884) is, by many, considered Ibsen’s finest work and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play, the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdal’s apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth or the ‘Summons of the Ideal’. Among these truths: Gregers’ father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimise the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. Furthermore, while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary ‘invention’, his wife is earning the household income.

2. Lady Gregory (1852–1932)

Lady Gregory was born as Isabella Augusta Persse on 15th March, 1852 at Roxborough, County Galway, Ireland. Along with Yeats and Edward Martyn, she helped found the Irish National Theater Society and served as manager of the Abbey Theater in Dublin.

Literary Career and Works

In 1896, she met WB Yeats and served as his lifelong patron. She collaborated with Yeats on The Pot of Broth in 1902, the year she wrote her own first plays, The Jackdaw and A Losing Game. Her first performed play was Twenty-Five, which was produced in 1903. Lady Gregory rewrote ancient Irish legends in her plays, Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), Gods and Fighting Men (1904) and The Book of Saints and Wonders (1906). Her work for the Abbey Theatre played a considerable part in the late 19th century Irish literary revival. She died in Coole, Ireland on 22nd May, 1932.

3. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

The youngest child of a civil servant, George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland. Shaw was an Irish dramatist and literary critic. He is considered to be the first modern dramatist to establish his plays as literature. Shaw is the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize in Literature and an Oscar for his work on the film adaptation of his plays, Pygmalion.

Literary Career and Works

Shaw worked as a junior clerk in a Dublin estate agency for sometime, before moving to London in 1876. There, he established himself as a leading theatre and music critic writing reviews for the Saturday Review, Dramatic Review (1885–86), Our Corner (1885–86), The Pall Mall Gazette (1885–88), The World (1886–94) and The Star (1888–90). He also became a prominent member of the Fabian Society (British Socialist Organisation) and wrote many speeches for it.

Shaw began his literary career by writing novels, but all five of his novels proved unsuccessful.

His early plays, Widowers’ Houses (1892), The Philanderer (1898) and Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) have been characterised as ‘unpleasant plays’ because “their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts.” These plays were followed by his ‘pleasant plays’ written to amuse the audience.

These included Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1894), You Never Can Tell (1897) and The Man of Destiny (1895). Arms and the Man was Shaw’s first commercial success. It debunks romantic heroism associated with war and deals with the futility of war. After the interruption of his dramatic output caused by World War I, Shaw returned to the stage with his last works, including his ambitious Back to Methuselah (1921), a five-play cycle on what he called the ‘creative evolution’ and Saint Joan (1923), a play based on the life and trial of Joan of Arc. He died of kidney failure on November, 1950, at the age of 94, precipitated by injuries incurred by falling while pruning trees.

Major Works

Drama :

• Plays Unpleasant (Published 1898)
• Widowers’ Houses (1892)
• The Philanderer (1898)
• Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893)
• Plays Pleasant (Published 1898)
• Arms and the Man (1894)
• Candida (1894)
• The Man of Destiny (1895)
• You Never Can Tell (1897)
• Three Plays for Puritans (Published 1901)
• The Devil’s Disciple (1897)
• Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
• Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899)
• • Man and Superman (1902–03)
• • Major Barbara (1905)
• • The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906)
• Pygmalion (1912–13)
• Back to Methuselah (1921)
• In the Beginning
• The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas
• The Thing Happens
• Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman
• As Far As Thought Can Reach
• Saint Joan (1923)

Essays

• Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)
• The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Ring (1898)
• The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928)

4. James Matthew Barrie (1860–1937)

Scottish author and dramatist James Barrie was born on 9th May, 1860, in Forfarshire, Scotland. He is best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh and spent 2 years on the Nottingham Journal before settling in London as a freelance writer in 1885.

Literary Career and Works

His first successful book, Auld Licht Idylls (1888), contained sketches of life in Kirriemuir, Scotland. Barrie soon wrote a string of popular novels set in Scotland, including A Window in Thrums (1889). After achieving success with fiction, Barrie turned to drama. In 1894, he married actress Mary Ansell. Their marriage was childless. In 1897, he formed an attachment to Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and it was to her sons, through whom he began to live again the experience of childhood, that he told in his first Peter Pan stories.

The famous character of Peter Pan first appeared in The Little White Bird (1902). In 1904, the play Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, premiered on stage. The creation of this boy hero added a touch of romanticism to the whole world of childhood. Barrie died on 19th June, 1937, in London, England. As a part of his will, he gave the copyright of Peter Pan to a children’s hospital in London.

Major Works

• Auld Licht Idylls (1888)
• Better Dead (1888)
• When a Man’s Single (1888)
• A Window in Thrums (1889)
• My Lady Nicotine (1890)
• The Little Minister (1891)
• Richard Savage (1891)
• Quality Street (1901)
• The Admirable Crichton (1902)
• The Little White Bird or Adventures in Kensington Gardens (1902)
• Little Mary (1903)
• Peter Pan (stage) (1904)
• Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906)
• What Every Woman Knows (1908)
• When Wendy Grew Up – An Afterthought (1908)
• Peter and Wendy (novel) (1911)
• A Kiss for Cinderella (1912)
• Mary Rose (1920)

5. John Galsworthy (1867–1933)

English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy was born in Surrey, England in 1867. He was educated at Harrow School and studied law at New College, Oxford. He was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1890. However, Galsworthy soon became dissatisfied with law and turned to writing.

Literary Career and Works

His first collection of short stories, From the Four Winds (1897) and the novel Jocelyn (1898) was written under the pseudonym John Sinjohn. The Island Pharisees (1904) was the first book to appear under his own name.

Galsworthy is best known for his series of three novels and Two Forsyte Interludes. It chronicles the life of an upper class British family and includes the works, The Man of Property (1906), Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918), In Chancery (1920), Awakening (1920) and To Let (1921).

Galsworthy was also a successful dramatist. His famous plays include The Silver Box (1906), which shows how law discriminates between the rich and the poor; Strife (1909), a study of labour rights and industrial relations; Justice (1910), a realistic portrayal of prison life and institutionalism and Loyalties (1922), dealing with anti-Semitism. Galsworthy was awarded the Belgian Palmes d’Or in 1919 and the Order of Merit in 1929. John Galsworthy died of a stroke at his home in London, ‘Grove Lodge’.

Major Works

• From the Four Winds (1897)
• Jocelyn (1898)
• Villa Rubein (1900)
• A Man of Devon (1901)
• The Island Pharisees (1904)
• The Silver Box (1906)
• The Forsyte Saga (1906–21)
• The Man of Property (1906)
• (Interlude) Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918)
• In Chancery (1920)
• (Interlude) Awakening (1920)
• To Let (1921)
• Strife (1909)
• Fraternity (1909)
• Joy (1909)
• Justice (1910)
• The Skin Game (1920)
• Loyalties (1922)
• A Modern Comedy (1924–1928)
• The White Monkey (1924)
• (Interlude) A Silent Wooing (1927)
• The Silver Spoon (1926)
• (Interlude) Passers By (1927)
• Swan Song (1928)
• On Forsyte Change (1930)
• Over the River (1933)

6. Sean O’ Casey (1880–1964)

Born as John Casey in Dublin, Ireland, O’ Casey was the last of the major 20th century playwrights associated with the Abbey Theatre. He was born in a poor, Irish Protestant family and his works give a realistic picture of Irish tenement life. O’ Casey became the General Secretary for the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). He also wrote the Constitution for the ICA and his time in this organisation later provided the material for his first published work, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, 1913–1916.

Literary Career and Works

O’Casey is known for his Dublin Trilogy of plays The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The Shadow of a Gunman deals with the impact of revolutionary politics on the inhabitants of the Dublin slums. It is set in Mountjoy Square, where O’Casey himself had lived.

Juno and the Paycock deals with the effects of the Irish civil war on the poor people living in Dublin. The Plough and the Stars is also set in the Dublin tenements in the year 1916 and centres on a young married couple called Jack and Nora Clitheroe. O’Casey is considered to be the first rooted playwright to write about Dublin working classes. O’Casey died of a heart attack, in England at the age of 84.

Juno and the Paycock

• Juno and the Paycock is the second play of the Dublin trilogy that deals with contemporary historical events in Ireland. The play was first staged at the Abbey Theatre Dublin in 1924. It is set in the apartment of a two-room tenancy belonging to the Boyle family within a tenement house in Dublin.
• O’Casey has taken the characters of Juno and the Paycock from Greek mythology. Juno is the name of a Roman Goddess; protector of suppliants and the jealous wife of Jupiter. However, Juno Boyle in the play is a Dublin housewife, an earthly human figure, who struggles for hard living.
• Juno’s husband, Captain Boyle, has aristocratic airs about him. He hates manual work. He enjoys the company of courtiers like companions and of some sycophant who adores him in flattery and always praises him. He is drawn from Shakespeare’s Captain Jack Falstaff. Boyle’s family consists of four persons; Captain Boyle, Juno Boyle, their son Johnny and their daughter Mary.
• The play examines man’s relationship to his environment primarily in terms of money. It has been labelled as a “tragicomedy”.

Major Works

• • Lament for Thomas Ashe (1917), as Sean O’Cathasaigh
• • The Story of Thomas Ashe (1917), as Sean O’Cathasaigh
• • The Shadow of a Gunman (1923)
• Juno and the Paycock (1924)
• The Plough and the Stars (1926)
• The Silver Tassie (1927)
• The End of the Beginning (1937)
• Red Roses for Me (1942)
• Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949)
• Behind the Green Curtains (1961)

Autobiography (6 Volumes)

• I Knock at the Door
• Pictures in the Hallway
• Drums Under the Window
• Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well
• Rose and Crown
• Sunset and Evening Star

7. Thomas Sterns Eliot

He was born to a wealthy and respectable family of merchants in St Louis, Missouri, USA on 26th September, 1888. Eliot entered Harvard University in 1906 and graduated in three years and received his master’s degree in his fourth year. Being deeply interested in literature, religion and philosophy, he began to write. His first efforts were largely poetic. After graduation he continued his study of philosophy and French literature.

Literary Career and Works

T.S. Eliot’s early volumes of poetry include Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and Poems (1919). His famous poem The Waste Land portrayed the beginning of Eliot’s search for his own religious faith. Another volume of poems The Hollow Men was published in 1925.

From 1930 to 1960, Eliot published a variety of literary works. Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943) were two major poems. In 1934, he wrote The Rock and in 1935, Murder in the Cathedral—both religious dramas. The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1959), The Confidential Clerk (1955) and The Elder Statesman (1959) are his other well known plays. His essays like Tradition and Individual Talent brought him repute as a literary critic. In 1932, he was appointed the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of poetry at Harvard. In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1965.

Murder in the Cathedral is a play in verse about the dangers of temptations on the way to sainthood or power. Thomas Becket resisted several temptations coupled with cajolery and threat. He is offered a return to political power alongside King Henry while at the same time, he is accused of disloyalty to the nation and his ecclesiastical office, and threatened physically. Though tempted by sainthood and lured by power, Thomas sees martyrdom and pleasure as human weaknesses.

Major Works

• Sweeney Agonistes (1926)
• The Rock (1934)
• Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
• The Family Reunion (1939)
• The Cocktail Party (1949)
• The Confidential Clerk (1953)
• The Elder Statesman (1958)

8. Noel Coward (1899-1973)

English playwright, composer, actor and director Noel Coward was born on 16th December, 1899 in Teddington, a quiet suburban village near London. He studied at the Royal Chapel School in London. Coward launched his professional acting career at the age of 12, making his London debut as Prince Mussel in a children’s show called The Goldfish. After this, he starred in several productions with Sir Charles Hawtrey, an actor and comedian.

Literary Career and Works

Coward’s acting career suffered when he was called for military duty in 1918. During the war, he suffered a minor head injury which made him hospitalised for several months. After discharge from the hospital, Noel found that the demand for his acting talents had decreased.

Thereafter, he devoted time to play writing. His first effort as a playwright, Rat Trap, was a realistic study of its characters’ emotions. It was written in 1917, but was not published until 1926. This was followed by the success of I’ Leave It To You (1920), The Vortex (1924) Hay Fever, Fallen Angels (both 1925) and Easy Virtue (1926). Noel Coward died in 1973. He is buried in Firefly Hill, Jamaica.

Major Works

• The Rat Trap (1918)
• The Young Idea (1922)
• The Better Half (1922)
• The Queen Was in the Parlour (1922)
• Weatherwise (1923)
• The Vortex (1924)
• Easy Virtue (1925)
• Semi-Monde Originally Ritz Bar (1926)
• This Was A Man (1926)
• Private Lives (1930)
• Cavalcade (1931)
• Blithe Spirit (1941)
• Quadrille (1952)
• Waiting in the Wings (1960)
• I’ll Leave It To You (1920)
• Sirocco (1921)
• Fallen Angels (1925)
• Hay Fever (1925)
• The Marquise (1927)
• Post Mortem (1932)
• Design For Living (1933)
• Peace In Our Time (1947)
• Nude With Violin (1956)

9. Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

Samuel Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright and poet. He was born near Dublin and educated at Trinity College, but moved permanently to Paris in 1937.

Literary Career and Works

Beckett started his literary career by writing short stories and novels. His first short story collection More Pricks than Kicks was published in 1934. His first novel Murphy is about an Irishman’s escape from a girl, he is about to marry to a life of contemplation as a nurse in a mental institution.  

Although, this novel did not manage to win critical acclaim, Beckett’s trilogy of novels- Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable established his reputation as an influential avant-garde writer. However, it is largely his modernist plays that cemented his reputation. Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, originally written in French, premiered in a Paris theatre on 5th January, 1953.

Waiting for Godot has been defined as a play in which Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes.

This play established Beckett as a leading figure of The Theatre of Absurd, a form of theatre that emphasises the absurdity of human existence through meaningless dialogue, purposeless situations, lack of logical development and mindless repetition of lines and action.

Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. He died on 22nd December, 1989.

Waiting For Godot

• Initially written in French in 1948 as En Attendant Godot. Beckett's play was published in French in October of 1952 before its first stage production in Paris in January of 1953. Later translated into English by Beckett himself as Waiting for Godot, the play was produced in London in 1955 and in the United States in 1956.  

• In his play Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett presents before us a highly absurd situation of two tramps-Vladimir and Estragon waiting for someone called Godot, who doesn't come.

• Both the tramps follow the same routine everyday; come and stand under a tree, wait for Godot, indulge in senseless activities, keep on waiting the whole day, decide to begin afresh the next day. They wait for Godot, try to pass their time but he never arrives. Estragon and Vladimir symbolise the human condition as a period of waiting. Act II of the play is a mere replication of the first act with only one or two changes. Lucky accompanied by his master Pozzo comes in the first act, but in the second the situation is reversed - Lucky is the master, Pozzo is his slave, who is blind now.

• Waiting for Godot is part of the 'Theatre of the Absurd'. This implies that it is meant to be irrational and meaningless. Absurd theatre does not have the concepts of drama, chronological plot, logical language, themes and recognisable settings.

Major Works

Theatre

• Waiting for Godot (1953)
• Act Without Words I (1956)
• Act Without Words II (1956)
• Endgame (1957)
• Krapp's Last Tape (1958)
• Happy Days (1961)

Novels

• Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932; published 1992)
• Murphy (1938)
• Watt (1945; published 1953)
• Molloy (1951)
• Malone Dies (1951)
• The Unnamable (1953)
• How It Is (1961)

10. Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994)

Eugene Ionesco was born in Slatina, Romania to a Romanian father and French mother. He was one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. He studied French literature at the University of Bucharest.

Literary Career and Works

Ionesco had not intended to write plays. He wrote plays almost by accident after having learnt English at the age of forty. His first play The Bald Soprano (1950; English translation, 1958), satirises the deadliness and idiocy of the daily life of a bourgeois society frozen in meaningless formalities. Surprised by the success of the play, Ionesco embarked on a career as a writer. His plays have been characterised as 'anti-plays', which characteristically combine a dream or nightmare atmosphere with grotesque, bizarre and whimsical humour. These plays break the conventions of naturalistic theatre and present parodies of human condition. Ionesco's other well-known plays are The Chairs (a tragic farce that represents the meaninglessness of life) and Rhinoceros (a response to the upsurge of forces of Fascism, Nazism and Communism). Eugene Ionesco died at the age of 84 on 28th March, 1994.

Major Works

• The Bold Soprano (1950)
• Salutations (1950)
• The Lesson (1951)
• The Motor Show (1951)
• The Chairs (1952)
• The Leader (1953)
• Victims of Duty (1953)
• Maid to Marry (1953)
• Amedee or How to Get Rid of it (1954)  
• Jack, or The Submission (1955)  
• The New Tenant (1955)
• The Picture (1955)
• Improvisation (1956)
• The Foot of the Wall (1956)
• The Future is in Eggs, or It Takes All Sorts to Make a World (1957)
• The Killer (1958)
• Foursome (1959)
• Rhinoceros (1959)
• Learning to Walk (1960)
• Frenzy for Two, or More (1962)
• Exit the King (1962)
• Stroll in the Air (1962)
• Hunger and Thirst (1964)
• The Hard Boiled Egg (1960)
• The Overnight (1966)
• The Mire (1966)
• The Killing Game (1970)
• The Duel (1971)
• Double Act (1971)
• Macbett (1972)
• On What
•  a Bloody Circus (1973)
• Man with Bags (1977)
• Journeys Among the Dead (1980)
• The Viscount (unfinished)