the.com/playwright
A god who builds entire universes, then hands them to actors to ruin nightly.
means A person who writes plays for the stage.
from A compound of "play" plus "wright" — and that second half is the surprise. A wright was a maker or builder, the same word lurking in "wheelwright," "shipwright," and "cartwright." It comes from Old English "wyrhta," a worker or craftsman, related to the verb "work." So a playwright isn't a play-writer at all (despite the homophone tempting everyone to spell it "playwrite") but a play-builder — someone who hammers and joins drama together like a carpenter assembling a chair. The coinage is fairly modern as English compounds go, an early-17th-century formation, and the craftsman framing was apparently meant as a bit of a jab, suggesting a mere maker of plays rather than a true poet.
- spelling trap
- Wright means maker, like cartwright, not writer
- ancient gig
- Greek playwrights competed for prizes at religious festivals
- shakespeare's output
- Roughly 37 plays before age 52
- dangerous job
- Some were jailed or exiled for offending kings
- invisible craft
- Audiences praise actors, rarely the words they speak
william shakespeare — english dramatist who wrote 37 plays including hamlet and macbeth, 1590-1613
anton chekhov — russian playwright who wrote the cherry orchard and uncle vanya, 1860-1904
august strindberg — swedish dramatist who wrote miss julie and the dance of death, 1849-1912