ABSTRACT
There are two main ways to identify what playwrights write: as a particular type of literature, dramatic literature, and scripts. As dramatic literature, the written works that playwrights produce are conceived on a par with novels, short stories, travel essays, and dialogues, which are all literature in being written to be read in the sense that they are written to be appreciated in the reading. Some works are written both to be read and to be performed, both as dramatic literature and as script. The idea that non-dialogic features of a script should be kept to a minimum in order to meet the demands of literature is also tested by counter-examples in the form of good plays that have a great quantity of mundanely written stage direction and comparatively little dialogue. Aristotle and the New Critics may be seen as providing broadly theory-based considerations that have been used to bolster the view that plays are to be read as literature.
