Dramatic Technique

by George Pierce Baker

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. Knobloch 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 Æschylus 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 illustration 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 illustration 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 classical 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 Classicism 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 illustration 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 pass 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 space 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 manuscript 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. Listening to it, we cannot turn back, we cannot pause to reflect, for the play pushes steadily on to the close of each act. Evidently, then, here is another reason why a play must make its effects more swiftly than a novel. This needed swiftness requires methods of making effects more obviously and more emphatically than in the novel. In a play, then, while moving much more swiftly than in a novel, we must at any given moment be even clearer than in the novel. What the dramatist selects for presentation must be more productive of immediate effect than is the case with the novelist, for one swingeing blow must, with him, replace repeated strokes by the novelist.

In most novels, the reader is, so to speak, personally conducted, the author is our guide. In the drama, so far as the dramatist is concerned, we must travel alone. In the novel, the author describes, narrates, analyzes, and makes his personal comment on circumstance and character. We rather expect a novelist to reveal himself in his work. On the other hand, the greatest dramatists, such as Shakespeare and Molière, in their plays reveal singularly little of themselves. It is the poorer dramatists—Dryden, Jonson, Chapman—who, using their characters as mouthpieces, reveal their own personalities. Now that soliloquy and the aside have nearly gone out of use, the dramatist, when compared with the novelist, seems, at first thought, greatly hampered in his expression. He never can use description, narration, analysis, and personal comment as his own. He may use them only in the comparatively rare instances when they befit the character speaking. His mainstay is illustrative action appropriate to his characters, real or fictitious. Surely so great a difference will affect the technique of his art. The novel, then, may be, and often is, highly personal; the best drama is impersonal.

The theatre in which the play is presented also produces differences between the practice of the dramatist and that of the novelist. No matter how small the theatre or its stage, it cannot permit the intimacy of relation which exists between reader and book. A person reads a book to himself or to a small group. In most cases, he may choose the conditions under which he will read it, indoors or out, alone or with people about him, etc. In the theatre, according to the size of the auditorium, from one hundred to two thousand people watch the play, and under given conditions of light, heat, and ventilation. They are at a distance, in most cases, from the stage. It is shut off from them more than once in the performance by the fall of the curtain. The novel appeals to the mind and the emotions through the eye. The stage appeals to both eye and ear. Scenery, lighting, and costuming render unnecessary many descriptions absolutely required in the novel. The human voice quickens the imagination as the mere printed page cannot in most cases. These unlike conditions are bound to create differences in the presentation of the same material.