Dramatic Clerihews
(Selected from  A Theatrical Cleri-Who's Who of Playwrights throughout History)

Thespis
committed grievous cultural trespass
taking a perfectly satisfactory artistic genre like a choric song and ruining it for millennia by introducing a single new complicating factor:
the first actor.
 
Susarion
lived 2500 years before the first Carry On...
but all subsequent comedians owe him their loyalties
and probably a few million in royalties.

The plays of Euripides
run longer than Pheidippides
and, far from being dull, if anything they’re perhaps a little too exciting,
unless you think someone being decapitated onstage is lackluster writing.
 
Aristophanes
mocks contemporaries so often he’s
accused of being a major contribution
to Socrates’s execution.
 
Voltaire
with pounce in his hair
and a silk robe de chambre
was serious, but never somber.

Oscar Wilde
from Victorian society exiled
but revered today;
his writing has aged better than Dorian Gray.

Luigi Pirandell-o
quivered like Jell-o
when while in search of six characters for a new play he discovered, behind the scrim,
they were also looking for him.

Bertold Brecht
may have been upright and honest and echt
but no one ever checked
because of his Verfremdungseffekt.
 
Samuel Beckett
thought it would wreck it
if the titular Godot
would actually show.

Dario Fo
Chuckled, “Oh ho!
Ain’t that swell!
I’m the first and only comedian ever to win a Nobel!”

Lin Manuel-Miranda
is able to pander
to theatre nerds and civics nerds alike by rapping with passion and verve
about the Federal Reserve.

Daniel Galef

If you have any thoughts on these clerihews (or about the whole - much larger - project of which they are only a part), Daniel Galef  would be pleased to hear them.