E-text prepared by Marius Masi, Jonathan Ingram,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
()
DRAMATIC TECHNIQUE
BY
GEORGE PIERCE BAKER
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND TECHNIQUE OF
THE DRAMA IN YALE UNIVERSITY
| “A good play is certainly the most rational and the highest Entertainment that Human Invention can produce.” COLLEY CIBBER |
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON · NEW YORK · CHICAGO · DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY GEORGE PIERCE BAKER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The author acknowledges courteous permission to
quote passages from copyright plays as credited
to various authors and publishers in the footnotes.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
PREFACE
“The dramatist is born, not made.” This common sayinggrants the dramatist at least one experience of other artists,namely, birth, but seeks to deny him the instruction in artgranted the architect, the painter, the sculptor, and the musician.Play-readers and producers, however, seem not sosure of this distinction, for they are often heard saying: “Theplays we receive divide into two classes: those competentlywritten, but trite in subject and treatment; those in someway fresh and interesting, but so badly written that theycannot be produced.” Some years ago, Mr. Savage, themanager, writing in The Bookman on “The United Statesof Playwrights,” said: “In answer to the question, ‘Do thegreat majority of these persons know anything at all of eventhe fundamentals of dramatic construction?’ the managersand agents who read the manuscripts unanimously agree inthe negative. Only in rare instances does a play arrive inthe daily mails that carries within it a vestige of the knowledgeof the science of drama-making. Almost all the plays,furthermore, are extremely artificial and utterly devoid ofthe quality known as human interest.” All this testimonyof managers and play-readers shows that there is somethingwhich 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 manuscript hasbeen returned to him but with favorable comment, askswhat he is to do to get rid of the faults in his work, bothevident to him and not evident, he is told to read widely inthe drama; to watch plays of all kinds; to write with endlesspatience and the resolution never to be discouraged.He is to keep submitting his plays till, by this somewhatindefinite method of training, he at last acquires the abilityto write so well that a manuscript is accepted. This is“The School of Experience.” Though a long and painfulmethod of training, it has had, undeniably, many distinguishedgraduates.
Why, however, is it impossible that some time should besaved a would-be dramatist by placing before him, not meretheories of play-writing, but the practice of the dramatists ofthe past, so th