Part 1 (1/2)
Dramatic Technique.
by George Pierce Baker.
PREFACE
”The dramatist is born, not made.” This common saying grants the dramatist at least one experience of other artists, namely, birth, but seeks to deny him the instruction in art granted the architect, the painter, the sculptor, and the musician. Play-readers and producers, however, seem not so sure of this distinction, for they are often heard saying: ”The plays we receive divide into two cla.s.ses: those competently written, but trite in subject and treatment; those in some way fresh and interesting, but so badly written that they cannot be produced.” Some years ago, Mr. Savage, the manager, writing in _The Bookman_ on ”The United States of Playwrights,” said: ”In answer to the question, 'Do the great majority of these persons know anything at all of even the fundamentals of dramatic construction?' the managers and agents who read the ma.n.u.scripts unanimously agree in the negative. Only in rare instances does a play arrive in the daily mails that carries within it a vestige of the knowledge of the science of drama-making. Almost all the plays, furthermore, are extremely artificial and utterly devoid of the quality known as human interest.” All this testimony of managers and play-readers shows that there is something which the dramatist has not as a birthright, but must learn. Where? Usually he is told, ”In the School of Hard Experience.” When the young playwright whose ma.n.u.script has been returned to him but with favorable comment, asks what he is to do to get rid of the faults in his work, both evident to him and not evident, he is told to read widely in the drama; to watch plays of all kinds; to write with endless patience and the resolution never to be discouraged. He is to keep submitting his plays till, by this somewhat indefinite method of training, he at last acquires the ability to write so well that a ma.n.u.script is accepted. This is ”The School of Experience.” Though a long and painful method of training, it has had, undeniably, many distinguished graduates.
Why, however, is it impossible that some time should be saved a would-be dramatist by placing before him, not mere theories of play-writing, but the practice of the dramatists of the past, so that what they have shared in common, and where their practice has differed, may be clear to him? That is all this book attempts. To create a dramatist would be a modern miracle. To develop theories of the drama apart from the practice of recent and remoter dramatists of different countries would be visionary. This book tries in the light of historical practice merely to distinguish the permanent from the impermanent in technique. It endeavors, by showing the inexperienced dramatist how experienced dramatists have solved problems similar to his own, to shorten a little his time of apprentices.h.i.+p. The limitations of any such attempt I fully recognize. This book is the result of almost daily discussion for some years with cla.s.ses of the ideas contained in it, but in that discussion there was a chance to treat with each individual the many exceptions, apparent or real, which he could raise to any principle enunciated. Such full discussion is impossible in a book the size of this one. Therefore I must seem to favor an instruction far more dogmatic than my pupils know from me. No textbook can do away with the value of proper cla.s.sroom work. The practice of the past provides satisfactory principles for students of ordinary endowment. A person of long experience or unusually endowed, however, after grasping these principles, must at times break from them if he is to do his best work. The cla.s.sroom permits a teacher such adaptations of existing usage. Such special needs no textbook can forestall. This book, then, is meant, not to replace wise cla.s.sroom instruction, but to supplement it or to offer what it can when such instruction is impossible.
The contents of this book were originally brought together from notes for the cla.s.sroom as eight lectures delivered before the Lowell Inst.i.tute, Boston, in the winter of 1913. They were carefully reworked for later lectures before audiences in Brooklyn and Philadelphia.
Indeed, both in and out of the cla.s.sroom they have been slowly revised in the intervening five years. Detailed consideration of the one-act play has been reserved for later special treatment. Otherwise the book attempts to treat helpfully the many problems which the would-be dramatist must face in learning the fundamentals of a very difficult but fascinating art.
I have written for the person who cannot be content except when writing plays. I wish it distinctly understood that I have not written for the person seeking methods of conducting a course in dramatic technique. I view with some alarm the recent mushroom growth of such courses throughout the country. I gravely doubt the advisability of such courses for undergraduates. Dramatic technique is the means of expressing, for the stage, one's ideas and emotions. Except in rare instances, undergraduates are better employed in filling their minds with general knowledge than in trying to phrase for the stage thoughts or emotions not yet mature. In the main I believe instruction in the writing of plays should be for graduate students. Nor do I believe that it should be given except by persons who have had experience in acting, producing, and even writing plays, and who have read and seen the drama of different countries and times. Mere lectures, no matter how good, will not make the students productive. The teacher who is not widely eclectic in his tastes will at best produce writers with an easily recognizable stamp. In all creative courses the problem is not, ”What can we make these students take from us, the teachers?” but, ”Which of these students has any creative power that is individual? Just what is it? How may it be given its quickest and fullest development?” Complete freedom of choice in subject and complete freedom in treatment so that the individuality of the artist may have its best expression are indispensable in the development of great art. At first untrained and groping blindly for the means to his ends, he moves to a technique based on study of successful dramatists who have preceded him. From that he should move to a technique that is his own, a mingling of much out of the past and an adaptation of past practice to his own needs. This book will help the development from blind groping to the acquirement of a technique based on the practice of others. It can do something, but only a little, to develop the technique that is highly individual. The instruction which most helps to that must be done, not by books, not by lectures, but in frequent consultation of pupil and teacher. The man who grows from a technique which permits him to write a good play because it accords with historical practice to the technique which makes possible for him a play which no one else could have written, must work under three great Masters: Constant Practice, Exacting Scrutiny of the Work, and, above all, Time. Only when he has stood the tests of these Masters is he the matured artist.
GEO. P. BAKER
DRAMATIC TECHNIQUE
CHAPTER I
TECHNIQUE IN DRAMA: WHAT IT IS. THE DRAMA AS AN INDEPENDENT ART
This book treats drama which has been tested before the public or which was written to be so tested. It does not concern itself with plays, past or present, intended primarily to be read--closet drama. It does not deal with theories of what the drama, present or future, might or should be. It aims to show what successful drama has been in different countries, at different periods, as written by men of highly individual gifts.
The technique of any dramatist may be defined, roughly, as his ways, methods, and devices for getting his desired ends. No dramatist has this technique as a gift at birth, nor does he acquire it merely by writing plays. He reads and sees past and present plays, probably in large numbers. If he is like most young dramatists, for example Shakespeare on the one hand and Ibsen on the other, he works imitatively at first. He, too, has his _Love's Labor's Lost_, or _Feast at Solhaug_. Even if his choice of topic be fresh, the young dramatist inevitably studies the dramatic practice just preceding his time, or that of some remoter period which attracts him, for models on which to shape the play he has in mind. Often, in whole-hearted admiration, he gives himself to close imitation of Shakespeare, one of the great Greek dramatists, Ibsen, Shaw, or Brieux. For the moment the better the imitation, the better he is satisfied; but shortly he discovers that somehow the managers or the public, if his play gets by the managers, seem to have very little taste for great dramatists at second hand. Yet the history of the drama has shown again and again that a dramatist may owe something to the plays of a preceding period and achieve success. The influence of the Greek drama on _The Servant in the House_ is unmistakable. _Kismet_, Mr.
k.n.o.bloch frankly states, was modeled on the loosely constructed Elizabethan plays intended primarily to tell a story of varied and exciting incident. Where lies the difficulty? Just here. Too many people do not recognize that dramatic technique--methods and devices for gaining in the theatre a dramatist's desired ends--is historically of three kinds: universal, special, and individual. First there are certain essentials which all good plays, from aeschylus to Lord Dunsany, share at least in part. They are the qualities which make a play a play. These the tyro must study and may copy. To the discussion and ill.u.s.tration of them the larger part of this book is devoted. Secondly, there is the special technique of a period, such as the Elizabethan, the Restoration, the period of Scribe and his influence, etc. A good ill.u.s.tration of this kind of technique is the difference in treatment of the Antony and Cleopatra story by Shakespeare in his play of that name, and by John Dryden in _All For Love_. Each dramatist worked sincerely, believing the technique that he used would give him best, with the public he had in mind, his desired effects. The public of Shakespeare would not have cared for Dryden's treatment: the Restoration found Shakespeare barbaric until reshaped by dramatists whose touch today often seems that of a vandal facing work the real beauty of which he does not understand. The technique of the plays of Corneille and Racine, even though they base their dramatic theory on cla.s.sical practice, differs from the Greek and from Seneca. In turn the drama which aimed to copy them, the so-called Heroic Plays of England from 1660 to 1700, differed. That is, a story dramatized before when re-presented to the stage must share with the drama of the past certain characteristics if it is to be a play at all, but to some extent it must be presented differently. Why? Because, first, the dramatist is using a stage different from that of his forebears, and, secondly, because he is writing for a public of different standards in morals and art. Comparison for a moment of the stage of the Greeks with the stage of the Elizabethans, the Restoration, or of today shows the truth of the first statement. Comparison of the religious and social ideals of the Greeks with those of Shakespeare's audience, Congreve's public, Tom Robertson's, or the public of today shows the truth of the second. That is, the drama of any past time, if studied carefully, must reveal the essentials of the drama throughout time. It must reveal, too, methods and devices effective for the public of its time, but not effective at present. It is doubtless true that usually a young dramatist may gain most light as to the technique of the period on which he is entering from the practice of the playwrights just preceding him, but this does not always follow. Witness the sharp revolt, particularly in France and Germany, in the early nineteenth century, from Cla.s.sicism to Romanticism. Witness, too, the change late in that century from the widespread influence of Scribe to the almost equally widespread influence of Ibsen.
The chief gift of the drama of the past to the young playwright, then, is ill.u.s.tration of what is essential in drama. This he safely copies.
Study of the technique of a special period, if the temper of his public closely resembles the interests, prejudices, and ideals of the period he studies, may give him even larger results. Such close resemblance, however, is rare. Each period demands in part its own technique. What in that technique is added to the basal practice of the past may even be to some extent the contribution of the young dramatist in question.
Resting on what he knows of the elements common to all good drama, alert to the significance of the hints which the special practice of any period may give him, he thinks his way to new methods and devices for getting with his public his desired effects. Many or most of these the other dramatists of his day discover with him. These, which make the special usage of his time, become the technique of his period.
Perhaps, however, he has added something in technique particularly his own, to be found in the plays of no other man. This, the third sort of technique, is to be seen specially in the work of the great dramatists.
Usually, it is peculiarly inimitable and elusive because the result of a particular temperament working on problems of the drama peculiar to a special time. Imitation of this individual technique in most instances results, like wearing the tailor-made clothes of a friend, in a palpable misfit.
It is just because the enthusiast copies, not simply what is of universal significance in the practice of some past period, but with equal closeness what is special to the time and individual to the dramatist, that his play fails. He has produced something stamped as not of his time nor by him, but as at best a successful literary exercise in imitation. Of the three kinds of technique, then,--universal, special, and individual,--a would-be dramatist should know the first thoroughly.
Recognizing the limitations of the second and third, he should study them for suggestions rather than for models. When he has mastered the first technique, and from the second has made his own what he finds useful in it, he is likely to pa.s.s to the third, his individual additions.
Why, however, should men or women who have already written stories long or short declared by competent people to be ”dramatic,” make any special study of the technique of plays? Like the dramatist, they must understand characterization and dialogue or they could not have written successful stories. Evidently, too, they must know something about structure. Above all, they must have shown ability so to represent people in emotion as to arouse emotional response in their readers, or their work would not be called dramatic. Why, then, should they not write at will either in the form of stories or of plays? It is certainly undeniable that many novels seem in material and at moments in treatment, as dramatic as plays on similar subjects. In each, something is said or done which moves the reader or hearer as the author wishes.
These facts account for the widespread and deeply-rooted belief that any novelist or writer of short stories should write successful plays if he wishes, particularly if adapting his own work for the stage. The facts account, too, for the repeated efforts in the past to put popular novels on the stage as little changed as possible. Is it not odd that most adaptations of successful stories and most novelizations of successful plays are failures? The fact that the drama had had for centuries in England and elsewhere a fecund history before the novel as a form took shape at all would intimate that the drama is a different and independent art from that of the novel or the short story. When novelists and would-be playwrights recognize that it is, has been, and ought to be an independent art, we shall be spared many bad plays.
It is undeniable that the novelist and the dramatist start with common elements--the story, the characters, and the dialogue. If their common ability to discern in their story or characters possible emotional interests for other people, their so-called ”dramatic sense,” is ”to achieve success on the stage it must be developed into theatrical talent by hard study and generally by long practice. For theatrical talent consists in the power of making your characters not only tell a story by means of dialogue but tell it in such skilfully devised form and order as shall, within the limits of an ordinary theatrical representation, give rise to the greatest possible amount of that peculiar kind of emotional effect, the production of which is the one great function of the theatre.”[1] Certain underlying differences between the relation of the novelist to his reader and that of the dramatist to his audience reveal why the art of each must be different.
The relative s.p.a.ce granted novelist and dramatist is the first condition which differentiates their technique. A play of three acts, say forty pages each of ordinary typewriter paper, will take in action approximately a hundred and fifty minutes, or two hours and a half. When allowance is made for waits between the acts, the ma.n.u.script should probably be somewhat shorter. A novel runs from two hundred and fifty to six hundred pages. Obviously such difference between the length of play and novel means different methods of handling material. The dramatist, if he tries for the same results as the novelist, must work more concisely. This demands very skilful selection among his materials to gain his desired effects in the quickest possible ways.
A novel we read at one or a half-dozen sittings, as we please. When we so wish, we can pause to consider what we have just read, or can re-read it. In the theatre, a play must be seen as a whole and at once.