A "dramatist" is a playwright whose scripts have become recognized as dramas, as literature. All the great dramatists--Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Shaw, O'Neill--have been great playwrights. Most of them learned their craft through long years of acting or directing or theater management, or through long years of close study of plays in the theater. Many distinguished men of letters--poets and novelists such as Browning, Shelley, Stevenson, Dickens--have tried without success to devise and write playscripts of distinction. Only a few modern novelists and writers of short stories--such as Maugham, Galsworthy, Chekhov--have really been successful playwrights. The novelist and poet, accustomed to writing for the reader's eye and ear, find it difficult to devise and write a playscript for production by actors in the theater.
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Genre Comedy + Tragedy
[Critical Concepts] ***
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