Play again

Without looking let's assume that William Shakespeare totally rules when it comes to poetry and plays. I'm further guessing that Romeo and Juliet holds top position.

Rather than get in the required mention of Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It, Midsummer Night's Dream or you name it, let's look at the list that Time Out provide

Play	Playwright
Hamlet	William Shakespeare
Long Day's Journey Into Night	Eugene O'Neill
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?	Edward Albee
Death of a Salesman	Arthur Miller
Oedipus Rex	Sophocles
Angels in America	Tony Kushner
The Glass Menagerie	Tennessee Williams
Look Back in Anger	John Osborne
A Raisin in the Sun	Lorraine Hansberry
Woyzeck	Georg Büchner

Three on the list are unfamiliar to me and I did see it as UScentric at first blush but there are Polish, Irish, Russian when you go through the top 50. Really just as you're taught in any good literary class and unexceptional in the best way. Still it's a shame not to have an excuse this time to sneak in Waiting for Godot which is waiting just below the top ten.

Plays now start out on the written page if you don't count the original thought or impulse of the playwright or even earlier works that have influenced them. Collected plays appear in bookshops and libraries and the occasional home.
Unless there are postmodern deconstructing works that are unable to be performed - which, ironically, wouldn't surprise me - plays are written to be performed on stage or in the round.

It is getting a little far from the page to talk about radio plays, screenplays and teleplays. Nonetheless they have their origin in works written on parchment to be performed to live patrons. Not even the narrator has disappeared completely; is downright yappy in some shows.

It is quite fascinating to look at the origin of plays and how they innovated on features we now take for granted. It's also interesting to see how, much like storytelling in general, it exists in an oral tradition before it begins to be written down and codified.