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.]