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Plays/Films/Dramas — page 3
165 public-domain plays/films/dramas books, summarised. Page 3 of 4.
Ariadne in Mantua: A Romance in Five Acts
Vernon Lee
The Duke of Mantua, haunted by a past he cannot name, finds himself cured of a mysterious malaise by a musician’s song. Beneath this recovery, however, lies an agonizing secret of love and lost identity.
King of the Jews: A story of Christ's last days on Earth
W. T. (William Thomas) Stead
The human, vulnerable story of a teacher from Galilee unfolds against the stark backdrop of ancient Jerusalem’s shifting loyalties. It captures the final, harrowing days of a life that forever altered the world’s moral landscape.
The show must go on
Henry Slesar
The show must go on—literally—in a future where the line between entertainment and survival has vanished, and the price of a poor performance is death.
Gods of the lightning
Maxwell Anderson
This is a powerful, unflinching look at the clash between individual radicalism and the machinery of state power. It is a story of how truth and justice can be systematically dismantled when a society decides that certain people are already guilty of being different.
Past Redemption: A Drama in Four Acts
George M. (George Melville) Baker
The wreckage of a young man’s life, fueled by city vices and a predatory rival, finds its only hope for repair in the enduring, sacrificial love of the woman he left behind.
The Return of Peter Grimm
David Belasco
Bound by a well-meaning promise to a dying patriarch, a young woman faces a loveless marriage until an extraordinary spirit returns to undo his earthly mistakes.
Bethlehem: A Nativity Play
Laurence Housman
A quiet hillside filled with watchful shepherds, a star burning bright above the darkness, and a humble stable where earth and heaven meet frame this reverent, verse-driven retelling of the Nativity.
One Day More: A Play In One Act
Joseph Conrad
The return of a long-lost son is not a celebration, but a collision between a desperate father’s obsession and the harsh reality of a wanderer’s life. This brief, haunting drama captures the inevitable friction when the illusions we hold to survive meet the people we once were.
The Good Hope: (In "The Drama: A Quarterly Review of Dramatic Literature")
Herman Heijermans
A desperate Dutch fishing community is pushed to sea on an unseaworthy vessel, where corporate greed and the unrelenting ocean claim their lives.
"Der Tag"
J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie
A ruler weighs the fate of millions with a stroke of his pen, choosing global conquest over peace. When a vision of true ruined culture confronts him, the illusion of glory shatters, leaving only blood on his hands.
Bought and Paid For
Arthur Hornblow
Wealth and ambition collide with self-respect when a self-made titan marries a proud young telephone operator, setting off an ideological duel over whether affection can be bought or commanded.
Outward bound
Sutton Vane
A group of strangers finds themselves on a mysterious ocean liner, only to realize that their journey has already reached its final, inescapable destination.
Plotting the short story : a practical exposition of germ-plots, what they are and where to find them : the structure and development of the plot
Seymour Cunningham Chunn
A guide for the aspiring fiction writer, this work demystifies the mechanics of storytelling by breaking down the anatomy of a plot into a series of manageable, logical components.
The Noble Spanish Soldier
Thomas Dekker
A king breaks his promise, a discarded lover demands justice, and an old soldier refuses to sell his soul to the court.
The Romancers: A Comedy in Three Acts
Edmond Rostand
Two idealistic young neighbors fall in love across a garden wall, unaware that their fathers' bitter feud is a sham engineered to push them together.
Diminutive dramas
Maurice Baring
History’s most formidable figures bicker over lukewarm breakfasts, card-game tactics, and domestic slights in these razor-sharp theatrical miniatures.
Nevada
George M. (George Melville) Baker
In a remote mining camp, a forgotten identity and a lost vein of ore bind a band of rough prospectors, traveling women, and fugitive souls together.
The Buddha: A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes
Paul Carus
A royal heir abandons his throne, his wife, and his infant child to seek an answer to universal human suffering. His return as a spiritual teacher transforms not only his family, but the political fate of rival kingdoms.
Monsieur D'Or
John Louis Haney
Wealth serves as the ultimate test of human character, revealing whether an individual possesses the moral fortitude to use power for others or succumbs to the hollow isolation of material greed.
Makers of Madness: A Play in One Act and Three Scenes
Hermann Hagedorn
A handful of ambitious men meet behind closed doors to turn a peaceful diplomatic gesture into an aggressive challenge, driving two nations to war.
Karma: A Re-incarnation Play: In Prologue, Epilogue & Three Acts
Algernon Blackwood
This play explores the endurance of love across lifetimes, suggesting that our deepest human bonds are not merely accidents of the present but echoes of a shared, unfolding history. It is a quiet, contemplative work that trades high-octane drama for a mystical, reflective examination of personal growth and the…
How Robin Hood Once Was a Wait: A Miracle Play or Christmas Masque
Rowland Gibson Hazard
A band of forest outlaws finds their harsh code of silence challenged by the simple, enduring power of a Christmas carol. This short drama captures a moment where rugged defiance yields to the spirit of the season.
Two Mothers
John G. Neihardt
A mother’s boundless devotion meets chilling betrayal in two classical tragedies exploring the fierce, destructive bonds between parents and children.
Conquest
Marie Carmichael Stopes
Rejected by the military due to a limp and spurned by the woman he loves, a New Zealand sheep farmer travels to London to stop future wars and foils a disguised spy's assassination plot.
Hadda Pada
Guðmundur Kamban
A woman of fierce resolve faces the ruins of her romantic life, choosing a final, dramatic act of liberation that echoes the strength of ancient Icelandic legends.
Comrades: A Drama in Three Acts
George M. (George Melville) Baker
Two former soldiers struggle to reconcile their wartime bonds with the harsh realities of civilian life, secrets, and the social stigmas that threaten their domestic peace.
The sleeping beauty
Theodora Du Bois
This charming, lighthearted play breathes fresh, domestic humor into a timeless fairy tale, reimagining the royal court as a bickering family prone to petty grievances and social anxieties.
One Touch of Nature: A Petite Drama, in One Act
Benjamin Webster
An estranged father, working as a humble copyist, struggles to reconcile with his long-lost daughter through the artifice of the stage in this poignant nineteenth-century domestic drama.
The undercurrent
Fay Ehlert
This brief, searing drama reveals how a household’s internal tyranny pushes a vulnerable daughter toward ruin, and how only a compassionate stranger’s intervention can disrupt that cycle. It is a powerful, compact study of domestic cruelty and the desperate lengths required to survive it.
The Female Gamester: A Tragedy
Gorges Edmond Howard
The moral decay born of obsessive gambling leads a once-prosperous household to ruin, claiming lives and reputations in a downward spiral of secrecy and betrayal.
Read-Aloud Plays
Horace Holley
The search for artistic integrity in a culture obsessed with material success defines these conversations, where characters trade the comforts of convention for the risks of living fully.
The Fatal Jealousie (1673)
Payne, Henry Neville, active 1672-1710
A man’s corrosive suspicion destroys everything he holds dear, leading him into a web of manufactured deception that turns his marriage into a graveyard. This stark, violent tragedy maps the total eclipse of reason by unchecked passion.
A Thousand Years Ago: A Romance of the Orient
Percy MacKaye
HOOK A band of wandering Italian comedians attempts to save a lovelorn prince by staging an elaborate, magical charade within the gates of a fantasy China.
The secret woman
Eden Phillpotts
A man’s hidden life shatters his family’s peace, turning a quiet Dartmoor farm into a crucible of betrayal, moral reckoning, and tragic, irreversible justice.
Four plays
A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne
This collection offers a rare glimpse into the crisp, witty, and often wistful world of early twentieth-century British stagecraft. Through four distinct plays, the reader is invited to observe the elegant maneuvers of characters caught between social artifice and the ache of genuine human longing.
Miss Lulu Bett
Zona Gale
A woman long relegated to the status of a domestic servant in her own family’s home finally demands a life of her own, discovering that self-realization often requires leaving everything she has ever known behind.
The Vikings of Helgeland
Henrik Ibsen
This is a stark, bracing tragedy of the Viking age where honor is a debt paid in blood and the silence of the heart is a greater burden than the clash of steel. It is a story of two families whose fates are inextricably bound by past deceits, culminating in a winter of reckoning where the truth shatters the lives…
Virginia: A Tragedy, and Other Poems
Marion Forster Gilmore
The Roman Republic crumbles under the weight of an unhinged tyrant’s obsession, leaving a young woman to face a harrowing choice between her honor and her life.
Más vale maña que fuerza: Proverbio en un acto
Manuel Tamayo y Baus
A clever wife proves that domestic harmony is won not through force, but through subtle, gentle influence. This classic Spanish one-act play demonstrates that a soft touch often secures what harsh demands cannot.
Bird in hand
Laurence Housman
When a rigid, science-bound professor is visited by a mischievous green woodland creature, his absolute faith in objective reality undergoes a startling and bewildering test.
The Chinese lantern
Laurence Housman
In a dusty studio where academic painters argue over flat perspectives, a humble drudge discovers the living spark of true art by night.
The House of Rimmon: A Drama in Four Acts
Henry Van Dyke
A warrior returns from the battlefield only to face an enemy within his own house, finding that his greatest struggle is not against foreign armies, but against the suffocating grip of a corrupt religious order.
Modern Icelandic Plays: Eyvind of the Hills
Jóhann Sigurjónsson
These two plays offer a stark, unsparing window into the remote Icelandic landscape, where human resilience clashes with unforgiving nature and rigid social judgment. They capture the weight of isolation and the intensity of choices made in the shadow of the mountains.
A King's Daughter: A Tragedy in Verse
John Masefield
This tragedy captures the final hours of the legendary queen of Samaria, focusing on the intersection of political collapse, personal isolation, and the relentless, often brutal, march of history.
Minna and Myself
Maxwell Bodenheim
The seeker of beauty often finds that the object of their search is a mirror, reflecting only the hunger of their own soul. This collection of verse and poetic drama explores the thin veil between reality and the internal landscapes of the dreamers who inhabit them.
A Fairy Tale in Two Acts Taken from Shakespeare (1763)
William Shakespeare
A dispute in the forest world turns chaotic when a fairy king uses magic to make his queen fall desperately in love with an unsuspecting craftsman.
The lighting of the Christmas tree
Selma Lagerlöf
The Christmas season arrives at the Swedish manor of Lofdala, where a family’s desire for a perfect holiday leads to an unexpected confrontation with the spirit of charity. This play explores the thin line between protecting one’s home and hardening one’s heart.
The Passing of Mars: A Modern Morality Play
Marguerite Wilkinson
This modern morality play serves as a stark, rhythmic call to reclaim the collective spirit of humanity from the destructive, cyclical forces of war. It strips away the pretense of global conflict to reveal a struggle between human potential and the ancient, sleeping god of violence.