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Dramatic Technique
by George Pierce Baker
(1919)
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 classes: 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 manuscripts 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 manuscript has been returned to him but with favorable
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
. P. Baker
CONTENTS
I. Technique in Drama: What it is. The Drama as an Independent Art 1
II. The Essentials of Drama: Action and Emotion 16
III. From Subject to Plot. Clearing the Way 47
IV. From Subject through Story to Plot. Clearness through Wise Selection 73
V. From Subject to Plot: Proportioning the Material: Number and Length of Acts 117
VI. From Subject to Plot: Arrangement for Clearness, Emphasis, Movement 154
VII. Characterization 234
VIII. Dialogue 309
IX. Making a Scenario 420
X. The Dramatist and his Public 509
Index 523
About the Author
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