I am trying to think of any other playwright whose work is treated as literature and I am failing. OK maybe the Greeks.
I think you are going to have a hard time convincing English Lit teachers round the world that Shakespeare belongs exclusively under Theater.
My own thoughts are that if the example is about a production that would fit under Theater. And if it is about the text that would fit under Literature.
^^ They didn't experience him as literature, they experienced a play script and and their English teacher didn't go around calling them the books of Shakespeare. It's not like the fact that he wrote for the theatre is a hidden fact or even not the very first thing you learn. Shakespeare wrote plays, he was influenced by plays and his work propagated as plays and his tropes are theatrical tropes. Putting it in literature is a falsehood and a degradation of information. If we are going to tell someone something, tell them the truth.
Theatre was the original media, so Shakespeare's publication as literature would be an adaptation of sorts. The way we normally handle adaptations is that examples are listed under the original media, and the adaptation is only listed if its use of the trope differs from the original.
edited 28th Nov '10 10:49:18 AM by MetaFour
Hmmmm, the scripts on the page are static and unchanging. What happens with the scripts once a director and a cast have at it is something different. Yes, the original form was performed, but what codified Shakespeare's work was publication.
I don't suppose we can make an exception for one of those flaming talents that transcend time and place and have his work be one or the either depending on the example?
Shakespeare is still performed as often as it's read. Even in my English classes that covered it we read it aloud. Reading the script of a movie doesn't make it suddenly not film. We require The Book of the Film for that. I don't see why we should shove Shakespeare into a category even my most militant English teachers would say he doesn't fall into. They're still plays. Even when read.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick^^They were originally scripts for a play. You said yourself they weren't adapted at all.
It's much more practical to divide by the media that a given story was originally published in, than to divide by the media that most people these days experience it in. The latter requires us to go out and survey to get real data on the numbers of people who read Shakespeare in high school lit class vs the number who attend theaters. It means we'd be more prone to myopic individuals assuming that everyone experiences Shakespeare in exactly the same way they did and petitioning to have the examples moved. It means that, if in 2012 the public suddenly and inexplicably had renewed interest in staging Timon Of Athens, we'd have to move all those examples back to theater, and then move them back to literature in 2014 when the fad dies down.

In some cases (e.g. Country Matters), examples of Shakespeare have been placed in Literature, rather than Theatre.
I think this is just plain incorrect. Can I move these entries?