"In reading plays, however, it should always be remembered that any play, however great, loses much when not seen in action"
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A play on the page is a blueprint mistaken for a building. George P. Baker, writing as a scholar of drama in an era when theater was both mass entertainment and an emerging academic subject, is trying to correct a common literary habit: treating plays like novels with dialogue. His intent is practical and slightly admonitory. Read all you want, but don’t confuse the script with the thing itself.
The subtext is a defense of performance as the engine of meaning. A “great” play isn’t just plot and poetry; it’s timing, bodies in space, the chemistry of actors, the pressure of an audience, the way a pause can turn a line into a joke or a wound. On the page, you can admire craft, but you can’t fully feel consequence. Baker is quietly arguing that drama is an event, not merely a text, and that criticism that ignores staging is bound to miss the point.
Context matters here: early 20th-century American universities were busy canonizing literature, often by domesticating it into something teachable and silent. Baker (a Harvard drama professor and a key figure in formal theater education) is pushing back against that flattening. His “loses much” isn’t a romantic plea; it’s a methodological warning. If you want to understand why theater moves people, you have to account for the parts that can’t be footnoted: gesture, speed, breath, laughter, boredom, electricity. The line reads like common sense, but it’s also a challenge to the bookish instinct to believe the page is the highest court of art.
The subtext is a defense of performance as the engine of meaning. A “great” play isn’t just plot and poetry; it’s timing, bodies in space, the chemistry of actors, the pressure of an audience, the way a pause can turn a line into a joke or a wound. On the page, you can admire craft, but you can’t fully feel consequence. Baker is quietly arguing that drama is an event, not merely a text, and that criticism that ignores staging is bound to miss the point.
Context matters here: early 20th-century American universities were busy canonizing literature, often by domesticating it into something teachable and silent. Baker (a Harvard drama professor and a key figure in formal theater education) is pushing back against that flattening. His “loses much” isn’t a romantic plea; it’s a methodological warning. If you want to understand why theater moves people, you have to account for the parts that can’t be footnoted: gesture, speed, breath, laughter, boredom, electricity. The line reads like common sense, but it’s also a challenge to the bookish instinct to believe the page is the highest court of art.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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