4 Major Playwrights

Happy belated birthday Arthur Miller!

1.

His birthday was on 17th October. Born on the year 1915, in Harlem, New York. His family was wealthy until the Wall Street Crash of 1929 caused them to move to Brooklyn. Miller graduated high school in 1933 and worked a few odd jobs, including hosting a radio program, in order to enrol in Cornell University and Michigan University. At first, both universities turned him down. Then Michigan University accepted him studying journalism and became the night editor for the student paper Michigan Daily. At the same time, he began experimenting with theatre and completed his first play, No Villain. During college, Miller also took courses with playwright professor Kenneth Rowe who taught his students how to construct a play to achieve an intended effect. Inspired by his professor, Miller moved back east to begin his career. In 1939, after he left Michigan University, he wrote plays for the Federal Theater. 

Works by Arthur Miller:

 

Arthur Miller's prolific writing career spans a period over 60 years.

• 26 plays
• First play: No Villain (1936)
• Second play: Honors at Dawn (1937)
• Third play: The Great Disobedience (1938)
• Fourth play: The Golden Years (1940)
• First radio plays: The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man (1941)
• Second radio play: William Ireland's Confession (1941)
• Third radio play: The Four Freedoms (1942)
• A novel: Focus (1945)
• All My Sons (1946)
• The Crucible (1953)
• Several travel journals
• A View From The Bridge (1955)
• After The Fall (1964)
• A collection of short stories: I Don't Need You Anymore (1967)
• An autobiography entitled Timebends: A Life (1987)

Miller has received numerous honours and awards throughout his career. Miller's accolades include: the Michigan's Avery Hopwood Award, 1936 and 1937; the Theater Guild's Bureau of New Plays Award, 1937; the New York Drama Critic's Circle Award, 1947; the Pulitzer Prize, 1949; the New York Drama Critic's Circle Award, 1949; the Antoinette Perry and Donaldson Awards, 1953; and the Gold Medal for Drama by the National Institutes of Arts and Letters, 1959. Miller was also elected President of PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) in 1965.

In his final years, Miller's work continued to grapple with the weightiest of societal and personal matters, and scandals involving famed actress Marilyn Monroe. His last play of note was The Price (1968), a piece about family dynamics. In 2002, Miller's 3rd wife, Inges, died. The famed playwright promptly took a 4th wife, 34-year-old minimalist painter Agnes Barley. The two planned to marry, but on February 10 2005, during the 56th anniversary of Death of a Salesman's Broadway debut, he passed away. Surrounded by Barley, family and friends, Arthur Miller died of heart failure at 89 years old. 

2.

William Shakespeare, the English national poet, the greatest dramatist of all time. He was not born into a family of nobility or significant wealth. He did not continue his formal tertiary education, nor did he come under the mentor-ship of a senior artist, nor did he marry into wealth or prestige. His talent as an actor seems to have been modest, since he is not known for starring roles. His success as a playwright depended in part upon royal patronage. Yet in spite of these limitations, Shakespeare is now the most performed and read playwright in the world. 

What seems to be true is that William Shakespeare was a respected man of the dramatic arts who wrote plays and acted in some in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. But his reputation as a dramatic genius wasn't recognised until the 19th century. Beginning with the Romantic period of the early 1800s and continuing through the Victorian period, acclaim and reverence for William Shakespeare and his work reached its height. In the 20th century, new movements in scholarship and performance have rediscovered and adopted his works. 

Today, his plays are highly popular and constantly studied and reinterpreted in performances with diverse cultural and political contexts. The genius of Shakespeare's characters and plots are that they present real human beings in a wide range of emotions and conflicts that transcend their origins in Elizabethan England.

Works by William Shakespeare:

When William Shakespeare died in his birthplace of Stratford-upon- Avon, he was recognised as one of the greatest English playwrights of his era. In the four centuries since, he has come to be seen as not only a great English playwright, but the greatest playwright in the English language. Reflecting upon the achievement of his peer and sometimes rival, Ben Jonson wrote of Shakespeare, "He was not of an age, but for all time."

3.

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on the 13th April 1906 in Foxrock, Dublin, Ireland. His father, William Frank Beckett, worked in the construction business and his mother, Maria Jones Roe, was a nurse. Young Beckett attended Earlsfort House School in Dublin. At 14 years old, he went to Portora Royal School, the same school attended by Oscar Wilde. In 1927, he recieved his Bachelor's degree from Trinity college. During his childhood, he experienced severe depression keeping him in bed until mid-day. He said "I had little talent for happiness". This experience would later influence his writing. 

In 1931, Beckett embarked on a journey through Britain, France and Germany. He wrote poems, stories and did odd jobs to support himself. In 1937, Samuel Beckett settled in Paris. During the World War II, Beckett fought for resistance movement until 1942 when members of his group were arrested by the Gestapo. He fled to the unoccupied zone until the end of war. After the war, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery during his time in the French resistance. He settled in Paris and began his most prolific period as a writer. In 5 years, he wrote Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the novels Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Mercier et Camier, two books of short stories, and a book of criticism. 

Works by Samuel Beckett:

Samuel Beckett wrote both in French and English, but his most well-known works, written between WWII and the 1960s, were in French. Early on he realizd his writing had to be subjective and come from his own thoughts and experiences. His works are filled with allusions to other writers such as Dante, Rene Descartes, and James Joyce. Beckett's plays are not written along traditional lines with conventional plot, time, place and references. Instead, he focuses on essential elements of the human condition in dark humourous ways. This style of writing has been called "Theater of the Absurd" by Martin Esslin, referring to poet Albert Camus' concept of "the absurd". The play focus on human despair and the will to survive in a hopeless world that offers no help in understanding. 

The 1960s were a period of change for Samuel Beckett. He found great success with this plays across the world. Invitations came to attend rehearsals and performances which led to a career as a theatre director. Throughout 1970s and 80s, Beckett continued to write in a small house outside Paris. In 1969, he was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature, though he declined accepting it personally to avoid making a speech at the ceremony. By late 1980s, Beckett's health was deteriorating and had moved to a small nursing home. His life was confined in a small room where he receive visitors and write. He passed away on the 22th of December 1989 in a hospital in Paris due to respiratory problems.

4.

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on the 20th of March 1828 in Skien, Norway. His ancestors were sea captains and businessmen, while his father was a well-to-do merchant, dealing chiefly in lumber and his mother painted, played the piano and loved going to the theater. Ibsen himself showed interest in becoming an artist. The family was through poverty when Ibsen was 8 years old because of his father's business. Nearly all traces of their previous affluence had to be sold off to cover debts, and the family moved to a rundown farm near town. There, Ibsen spent much of his time reading, painting and performing magic tricks. At 15 years old, Ibsen stopped school and worked. He landed a position as an apprentice in an apothecary in Grimstad. Ibsen worked there for 6 years, using his limited free time to write poetry and paint. 

In 1849, he wrote his first play Catilina, a drama written in verse modeled after one of his great influences, William Shakespeare. In 1862, he was exiled to Italy, where he wrote the tragedy Brand. Two years later, Ibsen created one of his masterworks, Peer Gynt. In 1868, Ibsen moved to Germany where he wrote one of his famous works: the play A Doll's House. His next work, 1881's Ghosts stirred up even more controversy by tackling sensitive issues such as incest and venereal disease.

In 1890, he wrote Hedda Gabler, creating one of theater's most notorious characters. By 1891, Ibsen had returned to Norway a literary hero. Hedda, a general's daughter, is a newlywed who has come to loathe her scholarly husband, but yet she destroys a former love who stands in her husband's way academically. The character has sometimes be called the female Hamlet, after Shakespeare's famous tragic figure.

Works by Henrik Ibsen:

References:

1. biography.com
2. cliffnotes.com