The "Father of Tragedy", Aeschylus was born in the city of Eleusis. Immersed early in the mystic rites of the city and in the worship of the Mother and Earth goddess Demeter, he was once sent as a child to watch grapes ripening in the count...

Born in 495 B.C. about a mile northwest of Athens, Sophocles was to become one of the great playwrights of the golden age. The son of a wealthy merchant, he would enjoy all the comforts of a thriving Greek empire. He studied all of the arts...

Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom a significant number of plays have survived. Some ancient scholars attributed 95 plays to him but, a...

Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a prolific and much acclaimed comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays,...

Along with Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone forms part of the Oedipus cycle in which Sophocles dramatizes the tragic downfall of the house of Oedipus. The final chapter in the saga, this play follows Oedipus' daughter Antig...

Christopher Marlowe, English dramatist and poet. Probably the greatest English dramatist before Shakespeare, Marlowe was educated at Cambridge and he went to London in 1587, where he became an actor and dramatist for the Lord Admiral's Comp...

William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His exta...

Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft - Knight in the Order of Saint Michael - was a Dutch historian, poet and playwright from the period known as the Dutch Golden Age. Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, often abbreviated to P.C. Hooft, was born in Amsterdam...

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is a tale of two teenage "star-cross'd lovers" who fall in love despite the ongoing feud between their two families, the Montagues and the Capulets. Friar Lawrence, a Franciscan monk, hopes to reconcile the fe...

Hamlet, one of William Shakespeare's most popular plays, tells the story of a Danish prince haunted by the ghost of his murdered father who wants revenge against the brother (Hamlet's uncle) who poisoned him and married his wife. Hamlet tak...

In Macbeth, or "the Scottish play" as actors sometimes refer to it, William Shakespeare fictionalizes the historical account of King Macbeth, ruler of Scotland from 1040 until his death in 1057. In Shakespeare's drama, Macbeth is urged on b...

Considered one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, The Tragedy of King Lear is based on the life of King Leir, a legendary king of Britain who is said to have had the longest reign of all that line of monarchs at sixty years. In Shakespeare's...

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, was a French theatre writer, director, stage manager, actor, and all-around man of theatre, one of the masters of comic satire. The son of an interior decorator, Jean Baptiste Poquelin los...

John Dryden was an English poet, dramatist, and critic. He first came to public notice in 1659 with his Heroic Stanzas, commemorating the death of Oliver Cromwell. The following year, however, he celebrated the restoration of Charles II wit...

Jean Racine was a French dramatist, one of the "big three" of 17th century France (along with Molière and Corneille), and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition. Racine was primarily a tragedian, though he did w...