Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist (Part 2)

by Kirk Woodward 

[In the conclusion of “Shakespeare’s Development as a Dramatist,” below, Kirk Woodward continues his explication of George Pierce Baker’s analysis of the Bard’s growth as a playwright in his 1907 book, The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist.  

[I gave a brief run-down of Baker’s career as a teacher in the Harvard English department and his introduction of practical courses in theater arts in my introduction to Part 1.  For readers who are just logging onto Rick On Theater, I recommend going back to the first installment of “Shakespeare’s Development” before reading Part 2.]

Baker next examines A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96), Romeo and Juliet (1591-95), and The Merchant of Venice (1596-98). In each of these Baker looks to find

some central purpose to act as a kind of magnet to draw to itself unerringly and swiftly the filaments of illustrative incident, selected for some definite purpose, whether mere story-telling, study of character, or tragic import.

To do their job properly, these elements must be

proportioned and moulded till they tell a unified story with perfect clearness and with just the emphasis on each part which the artistic purpose of the author requires.

Midsummer, Baker believes, was either written or revised for some special occasion, possibly at court, probably a wedding, and he demonstrates how confidently Shakespeare handles the requirements that such a situation poses – audience-pleasing, references to the hosts at the beginning and end but not too much in the middle, and so on.

But Shakespeare’s growth is best shown, Baker says, by his subordinate characters, who I think all would agree are superior to those in, say, Love’s Labour’s Lost. The reason, Baker points out, is that

They are real, and not caricatures; they are amusing not only for what they say, but for what they do. Moreover, both what they say and what they do in every case adds to the clearness of their characterization.

In Romeo and Juliet Baker also finds advances in Shakespeare’s ability to provide dramatic motivations for his characters in ways that are not found in his source material.

By the way he also offers an answer to the question of why the two lovers are so young. Juliet, 14 in the play, is 16 and 18 in the earlier versions, and people in Shakespeare’s day married at an average of 25 years old and often did not marry at all – none of Shakespeare’s three brothers, for example, ever married.

The answer, Baker suggests, is that because the time frame of the play must be radically condensed from the original sources, the lovers must have a reason to be so headlong in their passion, so the younger, the better.

Shakespeare makes many similar changes in his treatment of the story’s sources, all of them designed to increase the acceptability of the motivation of the characters.

Baker makes another point that is essential in understanding what dramatists do. He says:

Whether the dialogue be narrating, describing, expounding character, or seemingly indulging in beauty for beauty’s own sake, its phrase shall, first of all, be in character.

When we try to understand what Shakespeare means by what he writes, or for that matter when we try to understand what Shakespeare was “like,” we have to remember that dramatists express themselves not directly but through what their characters say and do.

This is true even of a writer like Shaw, who claims to be promoting his ideas for social change, but who in his plays cannot help embodying his plots in characters who think and say what their nature compels them to (if more articulately than they might in “real life”).

As Baker says, “quick and well-trained sympathy makes it possible for the dramatist to lose himself in his characters.” If this is true of Shaw, it is certainly true of Shakespeare. This is one of many reasons why using his plays in an attempt to establish his identity is a waste of time. His identity is that of a playwright who uses a playwright’s tools.

The Merchant of Venice is credited by Baker with

the art of interweaving in his narrative many different strands of interest [so] that if the sources were not known, no one would suspect him of bringing together incidents and episodes not originally connected.

Again, Shakespeare, like his fellow playwrights, was in many ways a “rewrite man,” and one of extraordinary skill.

Baker I think makes much more sense of Shakespeare’s relationship with the public than do remarks that his audience was ignorant and primitive. Shakespeare’s plays were not written for dolts, though of course not for crowds of college professors either. Instead:

He dared to lift his audience far beyond its usual level by his constant, incisive touches of characterization, his thoughtful comment on life, and by splendid passages of poetry. Is there not here a perfect illustration of the right relation of the dramatist to his public?

Considering his audience, regarding it, Shakespeare moulded his material so that while it delighted them as much or more than the work of his contemporaries, he yet accomplished in characterization what most interested him, and by poetry, philosophic comment, and ideality lifted his audience to an unwonted level of artistic appreciation.

So is Shylock in Merchant a tragic or a comic figure, sympathetic or off-putting? The answer surely is that Shakespeare was capable of handling more than one idea at a time. We’re the ones who demand a single answer, not Shakespeare.

Shakespeare has shown that whether working with a single strand or with many, he can develop a firm plot of compelling interest.

Baker summarizes the result of Shakespeare’s development in this way:

In the first place, each new story which he had to tell he apparently undertook with no rigid preconception as to what a play must be. That is, he was totally without hampering preconceptions in regard to dramatic forms. On the other hand, he understood perfectly the conditions of the stage for which he was writing, and his relation to his audience was also one of sympathetic and kindly understanding. He faced each play as a special problem in technique.

The phrase “special problem in technique” illustrates the fact that the traditional categories of melodrama, farce, tragedy, and comedy, apply only approximately to Shakespeare.

Baker, then, observes the principles of drama as described in the Poetics of Aristotle (384-322 BC), but not in a mechanical way, and neither did the playwrights of Shakespeare’s time, including Shakespeare himself, follow them slavishly. Baker notes that

Aristotle’s incisive distinctions, in his Poetics, as to tragedy in his own day have so much truth that they have fairly hypnotized later generations into talking as if the tragedy and the comedy of their own days could be ultimately analyzed and described in terms of Aristotle.

[But] drama depends not merely on the dramatist, but also on his public, whose ideals may be vastly different from those of the Greek public. Even if the dramatist derives his inspiration from the past, he must so express it that it shall not be wholly foreign to the instincts and ideals of his audiences.

The comic in general as distinguished from the tragic is a matter of the point of view from which the dramatist looks at his material and the emphasis he gives it. The comic depends on the view of the writer.

We realize the truth of what he says when we compare characters such as, for example, Rosalind and Viola (in As You Like It [1599] and Twelfth Night [1601-02]) with definitions about comedy such as Aristotle’s that “comedy is an imitation of characters of a lower type.” In terms of Shakespeare’s work that misses the mark entirely.

There simply are different kinds of comedy. For example, Baker points out:

High comedy in contrast to low comedy rests then fundamentally on thoughtful appreciation, contrasted with unthinking, spontaneous laughter. Low comedy rightly produces only the latter, and always verges on the exaggeration of farce. The comedy of manners is a link: it may be low and run into farce; it may rise into high comedy; and we shall often find comedies which range from low to high if they have, as Shakespeare’s have, two or more strands of plot.

And crucially “the characters grew even as the audience watched the development of the play.” Shakespeare’s characterization at its best is not static but continually on the move.

What’s more, “Shakespeare does not deal in local types, nor even in English men and women. They remain so true to human nature that they delight strange audiences in foreign lands.”

This statement seemed debatable to me when I first read it, but I believe it’s true, evidenced by our embrace of his characters even today. Baker contrasts this aspect of Shakespeare’s work with that of his contemporary playwright and friend Ben Jonson (1572-1637), who “drew with photographic accuracy the people he saw in the taverns, the theatres, and the streets of the London of 1600-1616,” but whose plays have limited appeal today.

The accepting response to Shakespeare’s characters does not extend to every aspect of his plays, of course, and it is the local allusions that are most often cut in performances today, since they make little sense to us without footnotes. But people are people and generally speaking Shakespeare’s people are life studies, not types.

Baker makes the important observation that in many, perhaps most, of Shakespeare’s great plays he uses more than one source – his plots are “chock full.”

He who cares most for story finds his satisfaction; he who delights in character may enjoy his fill; he who is pleased by witty and characterizing dialogue is not disappointed; and even he who loves poetry for its own sake is provided for. What wonder, [that] these plays also please the actor!

Baker distinguishes between “tragic” – anything that’s “mournful, cruel, calamitous, bloody” – and “tragedy” – “a struggle between an individual and his environment in the sense of the working of the unseen forces of nature which govern life and death.” The tragic is an incident; tragedy is a process, “a sequence of serious episodes leading to a catastrophe and all causally related.”

Baker makes the interesting suggestion that

It is doubtful whether the greater part of Shakespeare’s audience, in seeing the tragedies I have in mind, felt it was seeing anything whatever except specially interesting specimens of the chronicle plays which dealt not with English kings and nobles of relatively recent times, but of foreign lands or of a period so remote as almost to be mythical.

He believes that Shakespeare’s chief preoccupation was with story, which his audiences loved – “the situations and the incidents of the stories so gripped their imaginations that they placed themselves in them, deducing rules of conduct.” He points out that Shakespeare’s stage makes possible a fluidity of action, an ability to “keep things moving,” that might turn plays like King Lear (possibly 1603-06) from solemn occasions to breathless adventures, from studies of character to headlong action.

An Elizabethan audience, as long as in the space of two hours and a half an interesting story revealed itself in interesting scenes, did not prefer characterization to incident, did not bother itself at all about act divisions, and worried neither itself nor the dramatist over climactic movement, but was content to let the story double back on itself or even offer an excursus if the dramatist so willed. But be the scene essential or an excursus, it must be interesting.

My own belief is, that certainly not till Shakespeare had written most of his tragedies, did he have any theory of tragedy whatever, but rather that his tragedies are a perfectly natural and normal development from the serious side of the chronicle plays.

Instead of working from a theory, Baker feels,

he must have felt free simply to give himself to his desire to understand complicated human nature in intense situations and to working out the problems of dramatic presentation it offered. That is exactly what I believe he did. Characterization must be set in an illustrative story of strong dramatic action. By crowding his plays with story, he strove to keep his audience attentive even as his scenes developed states of mind in some central figure or figures. And those states of mind he pictured by action.

On the other hand,

When any attempt is made to distinguish between Shakespearian tragedy and the tragedy of the Greeks, one finds critics indulging in large generalizations or shading off into vagueness.

Shakespeare seems not to have had a single theory of tragedy. Certainly his work involves “a struggle, a clash of wills,” but whose wills, and against what? We may be asking questions and posing theories about tragedy that Shakespeare would have found irrelevant.

Each new play was to him a fresh problem to be separately conquered, though of course every preceding conquest made his judgment surer and his hand firmer.

This statement is particularly important as Baker considers the experimentation we see in Coriolanus (1605-08), Cymbeline (likely 1610), The Winter’s Tale (possibly 1610-11), and The Tempest (probably 1610-11), all late plays of Shakespeare’s. There are puzzles here, for example:

Why should a man as thoughtful as Shakespeare heretofore of his audience, so far forget it as often to write without lucidity and in phrases extremely difficult to deliver? . . . Shakespeare’s steadily increasing interest in characterization becomes so absorbing as to make him forget that for the bulk of his audience the action of his scene is still of prime importance.

Consistent with his thesis that a playwright’s work strongly relates to its audience’s expectation, Baker suggests that

About 1608 the English public evidently experienced one of those revulsions from dramatic scrutiny of the graver or grimmer sides of life such as the public knows periodically.

And, looking at Shakespeare’s late plays, Baker asserts that

Shakespeare does not really change: like the perfect host, he merely tries to subdue his mood to that of his guests.

As Baker sees it, Shakespeare does not abandon his attention to plot, which remains complex and compelling; but he is not entirely comfortable with the demand of the audience for romance and for simple happy-mindedness, and he meets those demands with dramas that may be romantic but are also deeply serious-minded. The result is, from our point of view, experimentation.

Shakespeare may have seen, as a result of the way society and playwriting were going, that

so far as popular acclaim was concerned, he could satisfy his standards of characterization with far less deft structure and pervasive artistry . . . a little more personal in phrase, and somewhat careless as to the minute details of technique which had helped to give him his supreme position.

After all, for the playwrights of Shakespeare’s time,

The drama was the art of the story-teller, not of the characterizer or of the poet except in a secondary degree.

In summary,

Mere fable, story, is not enough in play-writing. For the best results there must be clear exposition, which depends on underlying unity, – which in turn depends on carefully considered structure. That structure, in its turn, rests on proportion and emphasis. The fable or story before it can become, dramatically speaking, plot must be so proportioned as to tell itself clearly and effectively within the space of two or two and a half hours; and this exposition must be emphasized with regard to the tastes and prejudices of the audience . . . .

In regard to the underlying principles of dramatic composition a play succeeds best when a central figure or group of figures, or a unifying idea, focusses the attention of the spectator. Shakespeare’s experience shows, moreover, that a play must have movement, gained by initial swift, clear exposition and a skilful [sic] use of suspense and climax. Characterization is the ladder by which we mount from lower to higher in the so-called forms [comedy, tragedy, melodrama, farce], and a predetermined point of view is the means by which the dramatist so emphasizes his material as to differentiate it in form.

In nothing does Shakespeare proclaim his genius more than in his repeated winning of popular acclaim for fulfilment of his artistic desires.

There is much more in this splendid book than I have reported here. A couple of additional observations may be appropriate.

Early in the book Baker writes, “The drama just before Shakespeare . . . did not differentiate clearly, indeed, hardly at all, between what we know as different dramatic forms.”

Baker states this as a criticism, but whether it was actually a deficiency is debatable, particularly today when theatrical genres split and merge continually. In fact, Baker goes on to demonstrate that Shakespeare himself had little interest in dramatic forms as such; his basic concern was for story as an embodiment of characterization.

Baker doesn’t spend a great deal of time on Shakespeare’s language, so it may be worth noting that a considerable part of Shakespeare’s poetry has a purpose of spelling out the locale and the action, making sure the audience understands what is happening.

A friend of mine, reading his plays for the first time, said, “It’s all stage directions!” A sensitive reading of his words will often make clear what is physically happening on the stage.

Baker knows this, of course. “Dramatic dialogue must first of all expound, making the story clear; if it fails to do that, no amount of characterization or cleverness in itself will compensate. In addition, even as dialogue expounds plot, it should expound it in character for speakers.”

This is so, and therefore a director can often find clues for “blocking” the actors’ moves by what the characters say. And, of course, it’s also true that “dialogue, in addition to its work in characterization and exposition, might give pleasure in and of itself for its ingenuity, its wit, and its beauty and style.” The two aspects of dialogue – technical and artistic – can complement each other.

Shakespeare’s chronicle plays strike us today as having a more unified vision than they did to Baker, based on more recent productions that have brought out their coherence. An excellent introduction to this phenomenon is the chapter in the 1953 book In Search of Theater by Eric Bentley (1916-2020) entitled “Doing Shakespeare Wrong.”

Professor Baker must have been quite a teacher. There is much to learn from him.

[As I noted in Part 1, the dates following the titles of Shakespeare’s plays above are the generally accepted, but approximate years in which they were composed.  If we’re going to look at the chronological development of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, I asserted, it’s helpful to have an idea when the plays cited as examples of each stage of his growth appeared.  (I also pointed out that dates of publication, frequently cited in analyses of the plays, was often years after the play was written and the dates of the performance premières aren't always known.)

[In both Parts 1 and 2 of “Shakespeare’s Development as a Dramatist,” Kirk makes points about Shakespeare’s dramaturgy that caused me to think of something related.  Sometimes it’s on point, an expansion of Kirk’s or Baker’s idea, and sometimes it’s tangential.  As I wrote in another post on this blog, “That's a good thing, I think.”  To quote myself (possibly the pinnacle of egotism):

When I used to teach writing in college, I told my students that writing, especially essay-writing, was a sort of conversation between the writer and the reader(s).  It’s what an essay is supposed to do: make the reader think, look at something from a fresh angle, ask questions.  In an extended version, the “reader” would write another essay in response (the other side of the conversation), then the original writer or another essayist would chime in, and so on.  Books sometimes respond to other books, too (though the process is longer).  Well, this is a perfect example of that, and this [afterword] will be my contribution to the conversation.

[So, here are some of my thoughts:

[In Part 1, Kirk points out that Baker began his analysis of the playwright’s dramaturgy by looking at “the environment out of which Shakespeare emerged.”  This led Kirk to remark,

Many of our images of Shakespeare see him as a sort of playwriting monolith, always great and somehow greater than ordinary mortals. This has led to silliness like the idea that someone other than the “man from Stratford” wrote “Shakespeare’s” plays – “How could a simple actor have written these plays, since they are so ineffably great?”

[The argument is that William Shakespeare didn’t write the plays attributed to him because he wasn’t equipped to write them.  The son of a provincial glover with a local grammar school education could not have developed the skills and knowledge to have created such artistic triumphs. 

[This reasoning clearly shows how shortsighted was the classist view of society the Elizabethans (and European cultures in general) had then and even held into modern times.  There’s no allowance for self-education and the reach of a curious and exceptional intellect, not to mention innate talent.  Oddly, as I observed to Kirk, this was an issue which my dad had to confront in Germany in the 1960s.  A version of it still operated in Europe even 400 years later. 

[What I was thinking of was a matter that came up during my father’s tenure as a Foreign Service Officer with the United States Information Agency (1962-67; see An American Teen in Germany, 9 and 12 March 2013).  Part of Dad’s job was to explain America to the Germans, and, at the time of the Wirtschaftswunder (‘economic miracle’; ca. 1950s-70s) burgeoning across West Germany, the business leaders in particular had a question that reflected the entrenched corporate class system.

[These corporate heads and industrialists couldn’t understand how U.S. businesses managed to spot and promote talented workers and employees from all over their work forces.  No matter how they tried, they always seemed to come up with the same candidates, from the same societal echelons and career paths.

[What they didn’t see, until Dad and other USIA officers in other districts got them together with American business executives in similar industries and company sizes, was the concept of lateral promotions—taking talented and accomplished employees from one line of work and moving them into another line.  

[The established career lines were so rigid and inviolable for so long that it never occurred to the executives to break with the traditional career tracks.  These leaders couldn’t see it, just as the scholars and academics couldn’t (and still can’t) see that a William Shakespeare could have broken with the expectations and accomplished the great works he did despite his background and social standing.

[Then, a paragraph or so later in Part 1, Kirk writes that Baker points out “that the greatest in an art is almost never the pioneer in the art as well.”  Kirk, a great fan of the Beatles, makes a parallel with the Fab Four who “didn’t invent rock ‘n’ roll, the Motown sound, or any of the numerous other influences they incorporated into their music.”

[I thought of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), considered the godfather of dramatic Realism.  But Ibsen didn't start writing his Realistic plays until after he'd seen the work of the Court Theater of the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen in Germany.  This little theater introduced the modern stage director to European theater, and under the direction of Duke Georg II (1826-1914; reigned 1866-1914) and his Intendant (‘manager,’ or what we might call today, ‘artistic director’) Ludwig Chronegk (1837-91), presented plays with the beginnings of stage Realism in movement costuming, scenery, and, especially, crowd scenes.

[Ibsen was also first influenced by Émile Zola's (French; 1840-1902) novels (Thérèse Raquin, 1873) and the work of English naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin (1809-82) and Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).  The Norwegian dramatist, himself, went on to influence the work of generations of playwrights, arguably most notably, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).

[Baker attributes much of Shakespeare’s progress as a dramatist to the fact that he was, first, an actor (from about 1585, years before he wrote his first play).  Most scholars agree that he was also his own first “director” as well, which must also have helped him and his fellow writers not only “visualize their material not merely as dramatists but also as actors,” but as a director, that is, see it as a staged work of theater, as well.

[We’ve seen that the modern director of a theatrical performance wasn’t conceived until the late 19th century, but before the “Theater Duke” and Chronegk worked their magic with the Meininger, as the troupe was called, a leading actor would make the staging decisions.  For the Bard’s plays, that would have been the author, himself.

[Now, as I noted in my introduction to Part 1 of Kirk’s report, what Baker believed the nascent playwrights learned from producing their plays in the 47 Workshop were the same lessons William Shakespeare learned that helped him grow as a dramatist: experiencing the work coming to three-dimensional life on stage and seeing how it all works—or doesn’t.

[When Kirk reports that “Richard III is a hero – a dynamic central character – although of a perverse sort,” I mused that perhaps that makes him the first anti-hero.  Kirk agreed.

[In Part 2, Kirk states that Shaw’s characters speak more articulately than they might in “real life.”  This relates to something I've been trying to say about Tennessee Williams (1911-83) and some other playwrights, like Arthur Miller (1915-2005), Ibsen, and Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), who are usually labeled Realists or Naturalists. 

[I maintain that these writers, along with some others, write dialogue that sounds like natural speech, that we accept as ordinary conversation—but if we read or listen carefully, we can see/hear that it’s really not.  It’s more articulate, more meaningful, more resonant than anyone would utter unless they prepared beforehand, selected the best words and phrases for what they wanted to convey.  It’s really poetry that sounds like prose. 

[One of the critic/analysts that I read when I was working on a Tennessee Williams project—Roger Boxill (1928-2015) in Tennessee Williams (St. Martin’s Press, 1987)—made the distinction between “theater poets” and “poets in the theater” and Williams and those others were “theater poets.” 

[The difference is that “poets in the theater” write actual poetry—not necessarily verse, but deliberate prose poetry or street poetry (August Wilson, 1945-2005).   Williams writes prose that verges on poetry, that’s more lyrical than ordinary speech—not in the sense of “musical,” but in the sense that it has to convey more in the way song lyrics have to because they’re constrained by the music’s parameters.  Shakespeare was a sort of hybrid or a bridge, sometimes a “theater poet” and sometimes a “poet in the theater.”

[Kirk quotes Baker above on Shakespeare’s "popular acclaim" and I wondered if there was really any extant evidence of that from his time.  Is there any record of how viewers responded to William Shakespeare's plays? 

[Newspapers were just beginning in the 17th century, and the first successful English daily didn’t appear until 1702, 86 years after Shakespeare’s death.  There were no such things as professional “reviewers” or “critics” for another 200-250 years.  So, did anyone record what Elizabethan audience responses were?  How do we know, aside from the fact that the plays lasted till now, that William Shakespeare actually won “public acclaim”?

[Kirk informed me that there isn’t a lot of documentation, which is what I suspected.  “So it's mostly a matter of deduction from two sources” that we have a record of the playwright’s popular success.

[The first is which play texts were printed and sold.  There were over 50 editions of Shakespeare’s plays, so it seems clear that he was “marketable” in his day.  Of course, this is problematic since only the literate would be buying books, excluding pretty much all the “groundlings” in the audiences.  Books were also expensive, so only those who could afford them would be counted.

[“References in letters, poems, plays (yes!), and so on, to Shakespeare by people at the time” were a second source, added Kirk.  I was surprised when he said that there exist a large number of writings by tourists, Oxford students, and so on, “making it clear that he was top of the line.”

[It was really this kind of written record of which I was thinking—though that, too, only includes the literate and educated.  (Those groundlings would mostly have been illiterate.)  I'm surprised to hear, though, that there’s a lot of that extant. 

[I asked if anyone had compiled that record into an “Elizabethan Theatergoers’ Response to Shakespeare’s Plays”—thinking it could be interesting.  Kirk responded by sending me a link to a website from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., home of the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare-related material, which, he noted, indicates there may be more such material around.

Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist (Part 1)

by Kirk Woodward 

[A little over two weeks ago, my friend and a generous contributor to Rick On Theater, Kirk Woodward, e-mailed me.  “I’m working on another piece for [the blog],” he wrote.  “It involves reading and writing about a particular book, so it will take a while, but I’m trying.”  He didn’t tell me the book’s title or subject, and I replied, “I’m looking forward to your hint about something new a-brewing.  I gather you don’t want me to know what the book is yet.  I’m very curious!”

[Up to the time Kirk sent me his typescript and I read it, all he’d told me was that the “book was written over a hundred years ago.”  I responded that I found that “intriguing” in and of itself.  That was when Kirk sent me his final draft of the new submission, and I discovered that the book was The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (118 years old) and that the author was George Pierce Baker, who, in his later book, Dramatic Technique (106 years old), codified the principles of drama.

[Baker was an 1887 Harvard College graduate who returned a year later to teach in the English department, as Kirk notes below.  He eventually taught playwriting, first in 1904 at Radcliffe College, the women’s undergraduate institution of Harvard University, then at Harvard College, the men’s undergraduate school.

[Baker was hired primarily to teach rhetoric, or argumentation, but he taught a normal range of English department classes, including literature.  One if those classes was English 39, The History of the Drama from 1642 to the Present Day—a study of dramatic literature, as theater wasn’t considered worthy of study as an academic subject at that time. 

[A thesis was required in Baker’s English 39 and around 1901, some students asked if they could write a play for that requirement.  Baker readily agreed, and in 1904, he started teaching playwriting at Radcliffe.  In 1906, the playwriting course was admitted to the Harvard curriculum as English 47 and, shortly afterwards, 47A. 

[Admission to English 47 was by submission of samples of the applicants’ dramatic writing.  To pass on to English 47A, the students competed by submitting one-act plays for Baker’s judgment and the winning student dramatists were admitted to the second-year class.

[In 1908, students from Baker’s classes formed the Harvard Dramatic Club and began staging the one-act plays composed in the dramatic writing classes.  This became the 47 Workshop; the first production of the Workshop occurred in 1913. 

[Baker believed that the faults and weaknesses of a script would be more clearly revealed only by seeing it on stage and that student dramatists would learn more about playwriting from the experience of seeing their words brought to three-dimensional life on a stage—and how that comes to happen.  (We’ll see that Baker’s analysis of William Shakespeare’s development as a playwright put considerable emphasis on his experience as an actor and his own “director” with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.)

[When we finished editing his article, Kirk remarked about George Pierce Baker that “as far as U.S. theater was concerned, he really was a pioneer in all this.”  I don’t know if any other U.S. college or university started teaching the arts of theater—as distinguished from dramatic literature—earlier than Harvard, but Baker’s English 47 quickly became the most famous college course in the U.S. 

[Baker was certainly the best known advocate of theater education in institutes of higher learning.  When he moved over to Yale, he oversaw the expansion of the Department of Drama in the School of Fine Arts to include instruction in directing, design, and other theatrical arts, forming the basis for creating the Yale School of Drama in 1955.  (As a measure of the prestige his work had, Baker’s playwriting course at Yale bore the same now-famous number that it had in Cambridge: English 47.  Harvard, at the same time, made its first act upon Baker’s departure, dropping his drama courses from the curriculum.)

[It’s notable, however, that, like the playwriting course itself, the Workshop had been student-initiated.  Baker's genius, his perspicacity, was to take up the impulse and nurture it.  Baker ostensively left Harvard when the university administration wouldn’t approve a degree in dramatic writing. 

[He went down to Yale because, ironically, in addition to offering the degree, the New Haven university agreed to build him a theater, without which, he said, he couldn’t continue the progress the Workshop promised.  The facilities he’d had to use at Harvard—he had to hop from one space to another, on both Harvard's campus and Radcliffe's, depending on what was available at that time—were woefully inadequate, but his requests for a purpose-built facility were repeatedly rejected.

[Kirk’s discussion of George Pierce Baker’s Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist will be published in two installments.  The first, of course, is below, and the second will appear in three days, 2 March 2025.]

George Pierce Baker (1866-1935) taught in the English Department at Harvard University from 1888 to 1924, focusing at first on rhetoric (argumentation), English composition, and British and American -literature.  In 1905, he started teaching a famous dramatic writing class, English 47. (Baker formally offered English 47: The Technique of the Drama for the first time in 1908-09.) 

In 1912, he launched the 47 Workshop, the performance program, to present the one-act plays composed in the playwriting course; the first production came in January 1913. (Subsequently Baker founded Yale University’s Department of Drama in the School of Fine Arts in 1924, which, in 1955, became the Yale School of Drama [renamed the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University in 2021].)

The Harvard class was actually two years’ worth, designated in the school catalog as English 47 and 47A. To get from the first to the second, students submitted one-act plays, and the students who were selected had their plays produced by the class in the second year.

An astounding number of Baker’s students went on to notable careers in the theater and the arts, including:

• Abbott (1887-1995), playwright and extremely successful director over many decades.

• Faith Baldwin (1893-1978), widely read author of romantic novels.

• Philip Barry (1896-1949), The Philadelphia Story (1939) and other plays.

• S. N. Behrman (1893-1973), playwright and biographer.

• John Mason Brown (1900-1969), influential New York theater reviewer.

• Hallie Flanagan (1889-1969), director of the Federal Theatre Project (see “The Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939),” 30 October 2024 on this blog).

• Ben Hecht (1894-1964), The Front Page (1928; with Charles MacArthur) and numerous notable screenplays

• Sidney Howard (1891-1939), They Knew What They Wanted (1924; musicalized by Frank Loesser in 1956 as the Broadway musical The Most Happy Fella).

• Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), generally regarded as the first significant American playwright.

• Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), Look Homeward Angel (1929; dramatized by Ketti Frings in 1957) and other novels.

• Stark Young (1881-1963), for many years the theater reviewer for the New Republic and translator of the plays of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904).

Baker is not well known today, mentioned usually in connection with O’Neill, who said he learned more from Baker’s personality than from his classes. (Baker spoke well of O’Neill.) Baker was supportive to his students.

One does however get the impression that he was definite and intimidatingly knowledgeable – not necessarily a chum, but certainly a mentor. Baker writes with authority – one would be cautious arguing with him. His writing style is a bit old-fashioned, and I have occasionally made minor changes in quotations with that in mind.

He is credited with introducing many developments in European theater to the United States through lectures and writing, and his book Dramatic Technique (1919) is still in print. However, the book title that caught my attention was his The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907), out of print today, and that’s what I want to write about here.

I can’t remember where I first found a reference to Baker’s book, but it sounded both important and neglected, because, of all the angles from which one can observe the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), surely his progression as a dramatist is one of the most interesting, and potentially one of the most revealing.

He begins his book, not with Shakespeare, but with the environment out of which Shakespeare emerged, and one sees immediately how sensible this is.

Many of our images of Shakespeare see him as a sort of playwriting monolith, always great and somehow greater than ordinary mortals. This has led to silliness like the idea that someone other than the “man from Stratford” wrote “Shakespeare’s” plays – “How could a simple actor have written these plays, since they are so ineffably great?”

He was certainly great, but as Baker points out, he emerged out of a specific environment and was influenced by that environment throughout his career.

Baker begins by noting that the greatest in an art is almost never the pioneer in the art as well. The Beatles, for example, wonderful as they were, didn’t invent rock ‘n’ roll, the Motown sound, or any of the numerous other influences they incorporated into their music.

The idea of greatness as a sort of gift dropped from heaven also ignores the work necessary if the artist is to mature and grow. “Shakespeare mellowed even in the powers with which he was originally endowed,” Baker says, while at the same time he “moulded his material, not merely to accord with public taste of his time, but so as to satisfy some inner standards drawn from his own increasing experience.” Artists do both.

Baker therefore attacks “the idea that there are certain standards by which the plays of any period may be declared good or bad without regard for the time in which a play was written [italics mine], the public for which it was written, or the stage on which it was acted.”

“That we find delight in Shakespeare’s plays to-day does not alter the fact that had he written for us he could not have written exactly as he did for the Elizabethans,” Baker writes, and unquestionably this is true, although frequently ignored by people like George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) in his attacks on Shakespeare.

“Drama cannot at any time wholly break away from the prejudices, tastes, and ideals of the public for which it is written.” “Any play,” he concludes, “derives a large part of its immediate value from the closeness of its relation to the audience it addresses.” (Note: its immediate value.)

I believe there is great danger in generalizing as to Shakespeare’s plays unless we first determine, so far as we can, both his purpose in writing a particular play and his relation in it to his audience.

On the other hand, Baker says, there are fundamentals of drama that do pertain regardless of their period. “The fundamentals of playwriting,” he says, are “selective compression, the unification of material which makes plot, characterization including motivation, and dramatic dialogue” (we might say, dialogue based on tension or on conflict).

You shall not scatter the interest of your audiences, but shall so order your details that at the end your purpose, if any, is clear, or that your story, at least, develops clearly and interestingly from start to finish.

As for the public for which Shakespeare’s plays are written, Baker notes that it was relatively small – for comparison, Baker says, “He wrote for Birmingham rather than London or Liverpool, for Providence or Detroit rather than New York or Chicago.” He provides an excellent, vividly descriptive tour through the London of Shakespeare’s day (little of which still physically exists today, partly because of the great fire of 1666).

Shakespeare’s audience had few avenues besides the stage for public discussion – “only in the theater could they gain much of the information without which to-day we seem to find it impossible to exist.” Londoners, Baker asserts, were hungry for information.

For example, “in Shakespeare’s day building after building intimately associated with the reigns of the kings who figure in the Chronicle Plays stimulated curiosity in the passer-by as to their lives and deaths,” curiosity that Shakespeare would go a long way toward satisfying.

Popular education had only just begun to spread. Consequently, as has often been pointed out, the theatre filled not only the place it occupies now, but the place of the magazine, illustrated histories, biographies, and books of travel and even of the yellow journal [that is, the tabloid press].

Baker also points out that Shakespeare’s audiences came to the theater with fresher minds than we do – performances typically began in the early afternoon, not at night after dinner!  (We do have matinee performances; sometimes those are sluggish too.)

“No less stimulating were the stories of adventure, discovery and conquest told by the English voyagers who came sailing homeward from all the known and unknown seas.”

The mood of the Elizabethan theatre-goer was delightfully childlike. He came, as a child comes, saying practically, “Tell me a story,” and he cared not at all, provided the story was interestingly told, if he had heard another tell it before. . . . What they demanded first of all in a play was story. [This] permitted everybody, since there was no law of copyright, to plagiarize with impunity, and, if the results were really artistic, with acclaim.

As a result, Baker points out, much early Elizabethan drama was crude and sensational, and characterization was not as important as plot.

At the same time, the audience was not jaded by what it saw on stage, since theaters had to change their bills every day or so. Therefore “apparently few of the Elizabethans at first wrote independently.” Playwrights wrote at bewildering speed (as demonstrated by extant contracts between theaters and playwrights).

Collaboration among writers kept things moving. Baker doesn’t make the following comparison, but the playwrights of Shakespeare’s time were more like screenwriters of the early days of movies than like the solo playwrights of today such as Arthur Miller (1915-2005) or Edward Albee (1928-2016).

An example would be Herman Mankiewicz (1897-1953), who frequently co-wrote with other screenwriters. He was the first of ten writers who contributed to the script of The Wizard of Oz in 1938. The playwrights of Shakespeare’s day would have found such a situation familiar to them.

Also importantly, rewriting earlier plays was common (Shakespeare himself, as far as we know, used only three basically “original” plots). “Much of the time of a young dramatist in Shakespeare’s day went to making over plays now popular, but out of date.” The result, “collaboration and adaptation of old plays to new social and intellectual conditions, [was] very favorable to swift and large development of a man with inborn dramatic instincts.”

And Baker makes one more point about the early Elizabethan playwrights: they

really lived in the theaters. Many of them did act; and therefore they could visualize their material not merely as dramatists but also as actors. The immense importance of that double power we shall realize as we watch the development of Shakespeare, himself an actor.

The theaters of the day, Baker suggests, were “much like a large family, or, perhaps better, a club of Bohemians. From year’s end to year’s end they wrote, talked, and lived drama.”

He suggests, interestingly, borrowing a suggestion from the playwright Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934), that the early Elizabethan playwrights were better at “strategy” than at “tactics” – at the overall structure of their plays (such as working for the maximum suspense in a scene), rather than the details within them (such as keeping the most dangerous character off the stage until the last possible moment).

Baker also feels it likely that the use of the physical stage in Shakespeare’s time was considerably more developed and flexible than we imagine:

Any close study of Elizabethan and Jacobean stage directions should convince the student that dramatists of those days never thought of their stage as rigid, but as supremely plastic, and calmly planned for whatever they desired, trusting to skilled carpenters and mother wit to create what they had planned.

Baker then moves from what Shakespeare developed from to what he developed to. An obvious question here is which plays Shakespeare wrote first. The answers based on documentary evidence are not always clear, and it is unlikely that we have everything Shakespeare wrote, or in the form that he would have liked us to have it.

Baker begins with Love’s Labour’s Lost (written 1594-95), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1589-93), Titus Andronicus (1588-93), and The Comedy of Errors (1589-94) based on a frequent dating of these plays as written before 1594, but more importantly on the basis of their dramaturgy.

In Labour he sees a willingness to appeal to popular audiences, combined with weak and erratic storytelling, and much of its characterization is equally unrobust. (Having recently worked on a production of the play, I can testify to these things firsthand; see “Performance Diary, Part 1,” 25 August 2024].)

On the other hand, Baker maintains, while Shakespeare was deeply influenced by, in particular, the plays of John Lyly (1553 or 4 - 1606), he emphasizes love stories that Lyly essentially smothers in flowery language.

We have our first specimen of a play in which the love story is of prime importance and all else is arranged merely to set it off or make it more appealing to the public . . . written with a keen sense of literary effect and much poetic vigor.

In Two Gentlemen of Verona, Baker says, Shakespeare’s advance in technique is not great, but it is there, and much less dependent on extravagant dialogue. This demonstrates, he says, that “the Elizabethan audience of the public theatres liked a crowded and complicated story,” a point he will return to frequently.

Shakespeare in Gentlemen accordingly added material to the source story, but ponderously and unevenly, so that “the last scene fails to do everything for which we have been looking” – “the momentary effect, the start of surprise, mean far more to [Shakespeare at this point] than truth to life and probability.”

I have seen one production of the blood-drenched Titus Andronicus (in London) and I loathed the play. Baker states the plain truth that “the Elizabethans had stronger tastes and tougher nerves than ours,” and suggests that the first audiences saw the play, not as what we today would call a tragedy, but as a melodrama – “only a play.”

It is also a rewrite job, probably combining two plays into one, and Shakespeare demonstrates increasing skill in economy and pacing, which makes possible “the extremely large amount of incident, the constant use of suspense, the strong feeling for climax, and the relative unity of the plot.”

Although I will be happy never to see the play again, I do see what Baker means about Shakespeare’s rapidly increasing dexterity as a playwright. The Comedy of Errors is another adaptation by Shakespeare, and Baker singles out

the far greater complication in story than in the Latin originals; the skill with which the story is adapted to the tastes of the immediate public; and the ingenuity combined with sureness with which Shakespeare handles his many threads of plot.

Once again, “the Elizabethan audience liked a play crowded to the utmost with incident and complication.” Shakespeare also continued to bring the “love story” element of his work to the forefront, to the obvious delight of his audience.

The characterization in the play is not particularly strong but, as Baker says, one play can’t do everything; in a play where plot is by far the most important element, characterization has to take second place to economical plotting and farcical energy.

Once again, Baker emphasizes that Shakespeare is working on adaptations – and showing rapidly increasing skill in how he handles them.

Around the same time Shakespeare was working in another dramatic form, the “chronicle plays,” “plays which drew their material from national history.” The form is loose – “it simply applied to lay history the methods of dramatic narrative already practiced by the miracle plays for some centuries with secular material.”

The chronicle play, Baker points out, became a big item in the wake of the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588), when patriotism was at its peak. It was the most popular kind of play in England for about ten years, and every leading playwright tried to write at least one of them. Baker calls the chronicle play a transitional form; once it had reached its peak, it really had no way left to develop further.

In fact, Baker points out, aside from the representation of historical events, which is more or less based on how events actually occurred, as a dramatic form the only ways the chronicle play could change would be in increasingly effective characterization and in more riveting incidents, and Shakespeare’s craft developed in both areas.

Richard III (ca. 1592-94) is by far Shakespeare’s most performed chronicle play, and Baker says the reason is that it is most dramatic in its shape, whereas the Henry VI (1591) plays, for example, by necessity are basically a series of events.

Richard III has a central figure, frequently in view of the audience, and his story has a dramatic beginning, middle, and end. The same is true of Henry V (ca. 1599). On the other hand, Richard II (ca. 1595), Baker points out, really has no hero, while Richard III is a hero – a dynamic central character – although of a perverse sort.

Baker notes that Shakespeare can be seen to appreciate increasingly the value of comedy even in dark material – “the comic is desirable for contrast and it may relax tense emotion till a hearer may again be wrought upon with effect.” We see Shakespeare use this principle many times in his later work.

Similarly, in the chronical plays Shakespeare can be seen to be realizing the value of “love interests” and love scenes in plays. Baker cites the example of Hotspur’s intimate moments with his wife in Henry IV Part 1 (≤ 1597).

The chronicle play, Baker suggests, was not a great form for a dramatist to work in, although it gave Shakespeare the opportunity to grow in his ability to structure scenes in effective ways. The fact of history itself was a limitation, with events occurring in a fairly fixed order, and in many cases the characterization in the stories was a given, forcing playwrights to practice their craft on the details.

[The dates following the titles of Shakespeare’s plays above are the generally accepted, but approximate years in which they were composed.  If we’re going to look at the chronological development of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, it’s helpful to have an idea when the plays cited as examples of each stage of his growth appeared.  (Dates of publication, frequently cited in analyses of the plays, was often years after the play was written and the dates of the performance premières aren't always known.)

[In 1966, Robert Brustein (1927-2023), theatrical critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator, became Dean of the Yale School of Drama; that same year, he founded the Yale Repertory Theatre, which has become one of the most distinguished regional theaters in the country. 

[In 1979, Brustein left Yale for Harvard University, where he founded the American Repertory Theater (ART) and, in 1987, the Institute for Advanced Theater Training.  Thus was the circle of Harvard-Yale theater, begun by George Pierce Baker shortly after the turn of the 20th century, closed.  (Brustein retired as artistic director of ART in 2002, but remained on the faculty of the Institute until his death in 2023.)

[The second part of Kirk Woodward’s “Shakespeare’s Development as a Dramatist” will be posted on Sunday, 2 March.  Be sure to return to Rick On Theater then to read the conclusion to Kirk’s examination of George Pierce Baker’s Shakespearean analysis.]

Two Restorations

 

 “CONSERVATORS SHINE NEW LIGHT ON IRREPLACEABLE ART”
by Jared Bowen

[This segment was broadcast on PBS NewsHour [now PBS News Hour] on 26 December 2014.  A series of paintings created by Mark Rothko for Harvard University was thought irreparably damaged by years of sun exposure and removed from view.  Thirty-five years later, the paintings have returned, thanks to art historians and curators using digital projection, which offers viewers the appearance of restoration for works too fragile to touch. The segment was produced by Boston’s WGBH.] 

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now: an art restoration breakthrough.

An international team of art historians and curators have developed a new technique to restore works of art without ever touching them. It’s being used for the first time on a Mark Rothko mural.

Jared Bowen from WGBH in Boston has this report.

JARED BOWEN: Even in 1960, it was a coup, when Harvard University landed Mark Rothko [1903-70; born in Dvinsk, Russian Empire, now part of Latvia] to paint a series of murals for its new penthouse dining room. Rothko was already considered one of the country’s greatest artist[s], and this was to be among his biggest commissions.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR, Senior Conservation Scientist, Harvard Art Museums: He really wanted you to be up close and surrounded by his work so that you could feel the — feel the painting.

JARED BOWEN: Rothko paint[ed] panels to envelop the space. They and the studies and sketches he produced in planning them are now on view in the newly renovated Harvard Art Museum’s first special exhibition [16 November 2014-26 July 2015, Special Exhibitions Gallery].

They were robustly read [red?], says curator Mary Schneider Enriquez.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ, Associate Curator, Harvard Art Museum: He had been focusing on these kind[s] of purples and crimson, as we like to say, of course, at Harvard. [Harvard’s school color is crimson and it is also the university’s frequent nickname.]

The ground of crimson or purple is then set off with these extraordinary contrasts of this red that is just incredible. As you look at any of his paintings, the play of color and contrast blending and then working against and with each other has always been essential to his work.

JARED BOWEN: The panels were officially installed in 1964, but were in steep competition with the room’s Harvard Yard views. The penthouse shades were rarely drawn and the light-sensitive murals suffered substantial damage.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: As the sun would traverse the sky, the paintings became faded, and in an uneven way because of the geometry of the room, so some parts were shadowed. Some parts received more sunlight. The paintings changed. And so what started off as a unified whole slowly drifted apart.

JARED BOWEN: By 1979, Harvard realized the murals were irreparably damaged and removed them from their dining room perch. And the series, one of only three ever painted by Rothko, was placed into storage and, aside from a few exhibitions, had largely disappeared from public view and memory.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: It’s been an extremely sad thing that this extraordinary work of art has not been included in the art history of Rothko. So it’s been a real priority for all of us to bring these works back to our — back to a place in which we can study them and recognize the achievement in th[ese] extraordinary paintings.

JARED BOWEN: Thirty-five years after removal, Rothko’s murals are once again on view, hung in the same configuration in a room with the same dimensions and against walls painted the same olive mustard Rothko himself chose.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: This really brings them back and puts them in the middle of his entire history in a major way.

JARED BOWEN: But they had to be hung without touching the canvasses, says conservation scientist Narayan Khandekar. It turns out Rothko mixed his own paint, which inadvertently left the canvases overly susceptible to ruin and far too fragile for physical touch-ups. [See my post “Conserving Modern Art,” 11 December 2018, on Rick On Theater.]

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: Rothko used this binding medium, glue-size, which is — gives a very porous surface. And if you put any kind of isolating varnish over that, it would saturate the paint. It would change the color relationships. Everything that we do as a conservation approach also has to be reversible.

JARED BOWEN: How to restore the Rothkos to their original glory without ever touching them? To achieve that, Harvard collaborated with art historians and conservation teams from MIT and the University of Basel in Switzerland. They devised a software program that replicates Rothko’s original paintings pixel by pixel, color by color.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: We were able to have access to an alternate panel that had been shipped up to Cambridge, but not installed, and which had unfaded sections on it, and were able to use those to make the final adjustments on the digital image of what the paintings looked like.

JARED BOWEN: The digital recreation is projected with nonthreatening low light onto the canvas.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: It’s about 2.07 million pixels. So, we have to calculate the color and the intensity for each of these pixels and then shine it in exactly the right spot.

The color that’s on the painting, plus the compensation image, gives the viewer the impression of what the paintings looked like in 1964. We’re very, very confident that we’re as close as can be for this project.

JARED BOWEN: The technology is a game-changer, museum officials say, but it also raises questions about whether conservation in the digital age fundamentally changes the art. Rothko’s color is back, but no longer by his own hand.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: One of the key questions is, where is the line between what is the original work of art and the art that has the projection system on it? I mean, have we changed what he has done? No, we haven’t changed his canvases.

JARED BOWEN: But they have changed the possibility that damaged masterpieces the world over can once again see the light of day with the elaborately configured light of a projector.

I’m Jared Bowen for the “NewsHour” in Boston.

[Jared Bowen is the Host and Executive Arts Editor at public media company GBH.  (GBH is the trade name of the WGBH Educational Foundation, a public broadcasting group based in Boston, Massachusetts, and some of its public media outlets)  

[He is host of the daily radio program/podcast The Culture Show, is a regular guest host on Boston Public Radio, and a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour.  He’s also the moderator of the sold-out Boston Speakers Series at Symphony Hall.]

*  *  *  *
“HITCHCOCK’S FASCINATION WITH DANCE”
by Sarah Kaufman 

[Sarah Kaufman’s report on the restoration of Hitchcock’s first known directorial work on a feature film ran in the Washington Post on 4 August 2013 (sec. E [“Arts”]).]

Of Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic obsessions, the moving body is one of the most remarkable. He lingered on bodies in motion with a choreographer’s eye to show us panic, passion and the fragile nature of sanity. Now, in a newly restored version of Hitchcock’s first film, a 1925 silent movie called “The Pleasure Garden,” we can see the roots of that fascination. It all started with dancers.

“The Pleasure Garden,” which will be screened Sunday [4 August 2013] at the National Gallery of Art, is a tale of greed, betrayal and murder centered on a pair of chorus girls. One remains a backup dancer but the other becomes a star, because she shows more leg. Their friendship frays as Jill [Carmelita Geraghty (1901-66)], the starlet, throws off her fiance to be a prince’s mistress, while hard-working, naive Patsy [Virginia Valli (1896-1968)] marries a schemer with loose morals and a looser grip on reality.

The action sweeps from London to Lake Como and on to Dakar, where Patsy finds herself in a battle for her life that had me holding my breath. I think I was gasping. And I was just watching a press screener on my computer, with no music. (The National Gallery will have live accompaniment [a new score was commissioned for the restoration by British composer Daniel Patrick Cohen (b. 1988)].)

Hitchcock [1899-1980], master of suspense — even in the infancy of his career.

On top of that, he delivers the sisterly camaraderie, ephemeral glamour, drudgery and creepiness of London’s nightclub scene — and the strong backbone surviving in it demands, as seen in the film’s plucky heroine — with verve and a surprising depth of insight.

“What every chorus girl knows,” reads one of the inter-titles, and next we see a dancer elbow-deep in soapsuds, washing her tights.

Yet it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the British filmmaker had a soft spot for dancers. Think of his nonverbal finesse, his precise and fluid way of blocking scenes and isolating gestures, as in a work of dance-theater. He put his actors in motion with a kinetic charge that was simple, direct and emotionally powerful — Cary Grant running for his life in “North by Northwest” [1959], and earlier in the film, striding down a hall in a way that told us what kind of man he was. And recall the dizzying grace of Grant and Ingrid Bergman’s slow-dance kiss in “Notorious” [1946] as the camera swirls around them.

“The Pleasure Garden” was restored by the British Film Institute National Archive in a three-year project to refurbish the nine silent Hitchcock movies that still exist. Produced between 1925 and 1929, they suffered varying degrees of damage over the years. Now cleaned and pieced back to near-original form, the films have been on an international tour. “The Hitchcock 9” has been presented here by the AFI Silver Theatre [Silver Spring, Maryland] and the National Gallery. “The Pleasure Garden” is last in the series.

Of the nine, “The Pleasure Garden” has a double significance. It proves, astonishingly, that the seeds of many Hitchcockisms were planted at the start: his love of motion, but also his fondness for voyeurism, staircases, binoculars, ominous beverages and dirty jokes. Here, right off the bat, Hitchcock is Hitchcock, almost fully formed. At 26.

The very fact that we can marvel at the director’s early ease is a result of “The Pleasure Garden’s” second point of interest: This film was in the worst shape, and is now the crowning glory of the restoration project.

It is “the standout example of how restoration can affect the viewing of the film,” Kieron Webb, the BFI’s film conservation manager, said in a recent phone interview. The film had previously been known only in incomplete copies, with what appeared to be two different versions in circulation, Webb said, and both were missing footage. With the restoration, an extra 20 minutes was added. Missing bits of one section were found on a Dutch print; a lost scene was added from an original nitrate print preserved at Southern Methodist University [University Park, Texas]. The tints and tones were corrected to better match the setting and mood. Finally, the film was cleaned of dirt and mold, and scratches and tears were digitally repaired.

If you see “The Pleasure Garden,” though, you won’t be thinking about the hundreds of hours technicians spent sprucing it up. You’ll be making mental notes of the symbols and images that Hitchcock returned to later in his career. The film opens with a snaking line of dancers clattering down a spiral staircase (“Vertigo” [1958] alert!) into the bowels of the theater, taking us down to an underworld where it’s not artistry that counts, but how much skin you show.

Hitchcock may have been thinking of [Edgar] Degas [French Impressionist painter and sculptor; 1834-1917], whose top-hatted dandies peering at ballerinas didn’t have art on their minds either. The next scene is like something out of a Degas painting: A long tracking shot takes us across a row of finely dressed gentlemen in the audience leering at the dancers with predatory enthusiasm. One gent is peering through binoculars, and we see, “Rear Window”-style [1954], exactly the extent of the flesh he’s ogling.

At one point, Patsy is having tea, and the camera zooms in on her cup, where a couple of tea leaves are floating. It calls to mind that eerie glass of milk, glowing supernaturally in Cary Grant’s hand as he carried it up to Joan Fontaine in “Suspicion” [1941], and the frame-filling shot of the coffee cup that is poisoning Bergman in “Notorious.”

But what’s so special about the tea? Webb explains it’s a Britishism that would have resonated with audiences at the time. The leaves represent “an omen about a stranger approaching,” he said, and at that moment Patsy meets the handsome villain who will talk her into marrying him.

Thanks to the BFI’s restoration, we’re treated to a sly little shot pertaining to that marriage that had been lost. It was discovered at SMU, and it offers a telling bit of Hitchcock’s humor. Remember, this is a man who liked to punctuate a love scene with a bawdy punch line — the train entering a tunnel after a kiss in “North by Northwest,” fireworks exploding after a cuddle in “To Catch a Thief” [1955]. So as the pretty young dancer wakes up from her wedding night, beaming, the director gives us a close-up of a bitten apple.

Not subtle, but then again, kid Hitchcock was scarcely out of his teens.

[Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, author, journalist, and educator.  For more than 30 years, she has focused on the union of art and everyday living.  As the chief dance critic and senior arts writer of the Washington Post from 1996-2022, she wrote about the performing arts, pop culture, sports, science and personal expression.

[Kaufman’s work has been featured on national radio and television, including NBC News, CNBC, the PBS NewsHour, and On Point with Tom Ashbrook.  

[The screenplay for The Pleasure Garden was written by Eliot Stannard (1888-1944), based on the 1925 novel of the same name by Oliver Sandys (pseudonym of Marguerite Florence Laura Jarvis; 1886-1964).  The movie was a British-German production, shot in Italy and Germany in 1925.  It was released briefly in the United Kingdom in 1926, but withdrawn and rereleased officially in 1927, becoming a huge hit.

[The restored Pleasure Garden, with the new score, has not been released on video due to a lack of funding to record it adequately.  Available DVD releases contain a poor quality and badly edited version of the film, and there are bootlegged copies on the market as well.  As of 2021, The Pleasure Garden has become the first Hitchcock film to enter the public domain.

[“The Hitchcock 9” restoration was started in 2012 and took three years to complete.  The other eight films were: Blackmail (1929), Champagne (1928), Downhill (1927), Easy Virtue (1927), The Farmer’s Wife (1927), The Lodger (1927), The Manxman (1929), and The Ring (1927).]