Do you count plays as literature or something else entirely?

Fairness has nothing to do with it but yes it is retarded to pit any writer against another, literature is not a competition.

>>9464844
Of course plays are literature you dense newbie

Plays- yes
Poetry- no

>>9464917
But they are intended to be watched, not read, which is why people say everything out loud.

>>9464844
I've only seen Dostoevsky rated on 4chan

>>9464921
>plays aren't read

What

>>9464921
Up until fairly recently all books were recited aloud. The difference between written books and plays is performance. It was, however, very common for people that could buy books to buy play books for the purpose of reading them privately.

They can count as literature, but they really are something else entirely. So both.

>Shakespeare>Dostoevsky>Joyce

I'm not sure I count ALL plays as literature, but Shakespeare is an extremely special case. The amount of poetic and storytelling skill at work in his plays is so incredible that they deserve to be counted as literature even if most plays don't.

It's be like comparing a novelist to a poet. It's not comparable to other forms of literature.

>>9464844
>is it fair
Tbh it isn't fair to pit Shakespeare against any human beings other than St Paul, Darwin, Dante Alighieri, Euler and de Maistre.

>>9464844
>Do you count plays as literature or something else entirely?
Yes they are literature but also something else too
>In terms of authorship is it fair to pit Shakespeare up against Joyce or Dostoevsky?
No, because Joyce's and Dostoyevsky's authorship of their works are not in dispute like Shakespeare's are

>>9465564
>placing Darwin on that list

holy lel.

>>9464865
>comparing writers is a bad thing
How else are you going to be able to estimate the worth of writers? Or are you a fag/woman who thinks that if you like it it's good?

>>9464844
Shakespeare can be easily read privately, otherwise no one would have bothered to publish them. If you only watch the plays you'll miss a lot of depth.

Also t b h Shakespeare has been a curse for all dramatists since him, everybody who ever wrote plays since his time has had to wrestle with his ghost. A novelist or poet doesn't have these concerns and so can read and borrow from Shakespeare freely.

>>9465749
Darwin's sheer impact on biology beats Newton's on Physics, he gets a place.

>>9465793
Darwin influenced evolutionary biology, which is a branch of an already meme-tier science only useful for its medical applications (where it is more chemistry than biology, anyway)

>>9464921
Intention is nonsense
Also people read plays all the God damn time. I think it's fair to say they are read far more than watched.