Life & Wisdom Quote by George P. Baker

Baker draws a hard line between theater that merely happens and theater that knows what it is doing. His standard for "dramatic literature" isn’t prestige language or elevated themes; it’s craft disciplined into insight. "Revelation of human conduct" frames characterization as an instrument of exposure: not just a believable person onstage, but a designed lens that lets the audience recognize patterns of desire, self-deception, power, and consequence. The play becomes a kind of behavioral X-ray, entertaining in the moment while quietly rearranging what we think we know about ourselves.

The second requirement is almost more stringent: dialogue must "characterize yet pleases for itself". Baker is warning against two common failures. One is dialogue that functions like plot scaffolding, purely utilitarian, nobody’s voice but the playwright’s. The other is the opposite vice: pretty talk that dazzles but doesn’t reveal character, the theatrical equivalent of decorative prose. He argues for a double duty line-by-line: speech that tastes good in the mouth and also carries identity, conflict, and social position.

Context matters. Baker, a major American drama teacher and critic in the early 20th century, was trying to professionalize playwriting in a culture still suspicious of theater as disposable entertainment. His phrasing reads like a workshop rubric, but the subtext is bigger: art earns its keep when pleasure and diagnosis are inseparable. The audience laughs, listens, leans in, and only afterward realizes they’ve been studied.