Dramatic Technique

by George Pierce Baker

Act III of Mrs. Dane’s Defence[29] is just equally divided between preparatory material and the great scene which ebbs and flows about the following situation. Mrs. Dane, in love with Lionel, the adopted son of Sir Daniel Carteret, at the opening of the scene has lied so successfully about her past that Sir Daniel, who has been suspicious of her, has been entirely convinced of her innocence. Eager to help her set herself right, he asks in the kindest way for information which may aid him. Trying not to commit herself, Mrs. Dane slips once or twice and all the old suspicions of Sir Daniel are rearoused. He cross-examines her so rigidly that ultimately she breaks down and confesses. Handled by the inexperienced that situation might have been good for four or five pages. As treated by Mr. H.A. Jones, it makes a scene of twenty pages of finest suspense and climax. The situation is well held because every reaction upon it by the two characters has been worked out.

One would hardly think two quarrelsome inmates of a poorhouse, visited by a relative of one of them who wishes to take him away to manage her place, likely to produce a masterpiece of comic drama. Yet it does with Lady Gregory in The Workhouse Ward,[30] for she knows Irish character and speech so intimately that minor situation after minor situation develops, through the characters, from the original situation.

Indeed, much of our so-called new drama is but a prolonged holding of a situation stated as the play opens, or clearly before us at the end of Act I. Chains[31] of Miss Elizabeth Baker in Act I puts this double situation before us. A young married man without children, though happy enough in his marriage, is so weary of the sordidness of his small means and limited opportunities that he longs to break away, go out to Australia, and when he has made a career for himself, send for his wife. His sister-in-law, a shop girl, equally weary of her life, is weakly thinking of marrying a man she does not love, but who really loves her, in order to escape the grayness of her life. At the end of the play these two are accepting the situations in which we found them. Yet the three acts of the play are full of varied interest for an audience, so admirably does the writer discern the situations which her characters will develop from the original situation. Hindle Wakes,[32] the best play of Stanley Houghton, is really a study of the way in which a situation which took place before the play began affects three families.

Surely it must now be evident that if a dramatist should in the first place understand perfectly that illustrative action is the core of drama, and must be carefully selected; and secondly that he must, among possible illustrative actions, select those which quickest will produce the largest emotional results; he must also recognize that till he has searched and probed his situations by means of the characters, in the first place he cannot know which are his strongest, and in the second place cannot hope to hold the situations chosen.

Another complaint from the inexperienced dramatist when shaping up his story is that though he sees the big moments in his play, he does not see his way from one to another. That is, transitional scenes are lacking. They will not worry him long, however, if he follows the methods just stated for holding a situation. Let him watch the people who have come into his imagination, first simply as people. Who and what are they? Secondly, what are they feeling and thinking in the situations which have occurred to him? He can’t long consider this without deciding what people they must have been in order to be in the situations in question. Hard upon this comes the question: “What will people who have been like these and have passed through this experience do immediately, and thereafter?” In the answer to the question, “What have they been?” he finds the transitional scenes which take him back into an earlier episode; in the answer to “What will they become?” the transitional scenes that carry him forward. In the scene cited from Richard II the main moments are the home-coming, the discovery of the traitorous paper, and the departure of the Duke and Duchess of York. How is the transition from one to the other to be gained? Through knowledge of the characters, as the analysis showed. What applies here to transition within a scene from dramatic moment to dramatic moment applies equally in transition from scene to scene. Suppose that Sir Arthur Pinero had as the starting-point of the third act of The Magistrate the idea that Mrs. Posket should be arrested under such conditions that she must appear in the court of her husband when he is as guilty as she. Sir Arthur has decided that they must be in some place like the Hotel des Princes when it is raided. He has in mind episodes which will bring them all together at that place. He already sees clearly the scene of the raid and the arrest. But the place cannot be raided till late in the evening, and Agatha Posket is too jealous of her reputation thoughtlessly to stay late in such a place. What are to be the transitional “scenes” which, in the first place, shall make us feel that considerable time has passed since Mrs. Posket came to the hotel, and secondly shall keep us amused? Sir Arthur finds them through the characters. It is the hunger of self-indulgent Charlotte which motivates the staying and gives us the supper “scene.” It is the character of Vale which gives us his quarrel with Lukyn. The love making of Charlotte and Vale provides another transitional “scene.” In other words, whether one is looking for more episodes or for transitions from one chosen episode to another, one should not go far afield hunting episodes as episodes, but should become acquainted with the characters as closely as possible. They will solve the difficulties.

All this lengthy consideration of selection makes for unity of action in the story resulting. Some unity of action, whether the story be slight or complicated, there must be. Of the three great unities over which there has been endless discussion, Action, Place, and Time, the modern dramatists, as we shall see, treat Place with the greatest freedom, and are constantly inventing devices to avoid the Time difficulty. With the dramatists of the present, as with the dramatists of the past, however, what they write must be a whole, a unit. Some central idea, plan, purpose, whatever we choose to call it, must give the play organic structure. Story is the first step to this. Which gives most pleasure,—a string of disconnected anecdotes and jests; or a series of them given some unity because they concern some man of note, for instance, Abraham Lincoln; or the same series edited till, taken all together, they make Abraham Lincoln, in one or more of his characteristics, clearer than ever before? Does not a large part of our pleasure in biography come from the way in which it co-ordinates and interprets episodes and incidents hitherto not properly inter-related in our minds? Unity of action is, then, of first importance in story.

There is, however, another kind of unity which has not been enough considered,—what may, perhaps, be called artistic unity. Why is it that a play which begins seriously and for most of its course so develops, only to end farcically, or which begins lightly only to become tragic, leaves us dissatisfied? Because the audience finds it difficult to readjust its mood as swiftly as does the author. The Climbers[33] and The Girl With the Green Eyes[34] of Clyde Fitch are examples in point. The first begins with such dignity and mysteriousness that its lighter moods, after Act I, seem almost trivial. In the second play the very tragic scene of the attempted suicide, after the light comedy touch of the preceding parts, is distinctly jarring. A recent play which for two acts or more seemingly had been dealing with but slightly disguised figures of the political world had a late scene in which one of these politicians, like Manson in The Servant in the House,[35] or The Stranger in The Passing of the Third Floor Back,[36] shadowed the figure of Christ himself. The effect was jarring, unpleasant, and confusing, mainly because of its suddenness. It will be noted that in both the plays mentioned, Manson and The Stranger carry their suggestion from the start. Should we know how to take Percinet and Sylvette in The Romancers[37] of Rostand did not that opening scene, when these two, in love with being in love, read Romeo and Juliet together, prepare us for all the later fantasy? A dramatist will do well, then, to know clearly before he begins to write whether he wishes his story to be melodrama, tragedy, farce, or comedy of character or intrigue. Unless he does and in consequence selects his illustrative material so that he may give it artistic unity, he is likely to produce a play of so mixed a genre as to be confusing.

“Just what is tragi-comedy, then?” a reader may ask. The Elizabethan dramatist frequently offered one serious and one comic plot, running parallel except when brought together in the last scene of the play. Technically, however, tragi-comedy is a form which, although it may contain tragic elements, is throughout given a general emphasis as comedy and ends in comedy. We do not have good tragi-comedy when most of the play is comedy or tragedy, and one scene or act is distinctly the opposite. Therefore not only unity of action but artistic unity, unity of genre, should be sought by the dramatist shaping up his story.

How much story does a play require? This is a difficult point to settle, but first of all let us clearly understand that there are great differences in audiences as far as plotting is concerned. Some periods require more plot than others. Today we do not demand, as did the audience of Shakespeare’s time, plays containing two or more stories, sometimes scarcely at all connected, sometimes neatly interwoven. Middleton’s The Changeling[38] contains two almost independent stories. This is nearly as true of The Coxcomb[39] by Beaumont and Fletcher. On the other hand, in Much Ado About Nothing the Hero-Claudio story, the Beatrice-Benedict story, and the Dogberry-Verges story are so deftly interwoven that they are, to all appearances, a unit. Even as late as thirty years ago one found in many plays a group of characters for the serious interest and another for the comic values. Gradually, however, dramatists have come to get their comic values from people essential to the serious story, or from a comic emphasis they place on certain aspects of the serious figures of the play. Today is the time of the single story rather than the interwoven story. Yet even now, so far as the public of the United States is concerned, a writer may easily go too far in simplicity, or rather scantiness of story, trusting too much to admirable characterization. That is why that delightful play, The Mollusc,[40] failed in this country. Many people, among them the intelligent, declared the play too thin to give them pleasure. That is, apparently we of the United States care more in our plays for elaborate stories than do our English cousins.

Indeed, national taste differs as to the amount of plot desirable. Both Americans and English care more for plot than do most of the Continental nations, which are often satisfied with plays of slight story-value but admirable characterization. Nor is the difference a new one. Writing of Wycherley’s arrangement of Molière’s Misanthrope in his Plain Dealer, Voltaire said, “The English author has corrected the only fault of Molière’s piece, lack of plot.”[41] In the same Letter on Comedy, Voltaire brings out clearly what any student of English drama knows, that all through its greatest period it depended far more on complicated story than did the drama of the Continent. Lessing in his Hamburg Dramaturgy, speaking of Colman’s The English Merchant, says it has not action enough for the English critics. “Curiosity is not sufficiently fostered, the whole complication is visible in the first act. We Germans are well content that the action is not richer and more complex. The English taste on this point distracts and fatigues us, we love a simple plot that can be grasped at once. The English are forced to insert episodes into French plays if they are to please on their stage. In like manner we have to weed episodes out of the English plays if we want to introduce them to our stage. The best comedies of Congreve and Wycherley would seem intolerable to us without this excision. We manage better with their tragedies. In part these are not so complex and many of them have succeeded well amongst us without the least alteration, which is more than I could say for any of their comedies.”[42]