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 one of the questions they had, among the business leaders in particular, at this time of the Wirtschaftswunder (‘economic miracle’; c. 1950s-70s), burgeoning across West Germany.
[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, and they learned the concept of lateral promotions—taking a talented and accomplished employee from one line of work and moving him (and maybe a decade later, her) 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.
