George Pierce Baker Quotes

17 quotes in 264 categories

• Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence…
• But what is drama? Broadly speaking, it is whatever by imitative action rouses interest or gives pleasure.
• Drama read to oneself is never drama at its best, and is not even drama as it should be.
• Farce treats the improbable as probable, the impossible as possible.
• In all the great periods of the drama perfect freedom of choice and subject, perfect freedom of individual treatment, and an audience eager to give…
• In reading plays, however, it should always be remembered that any play, however great, loses much when not seen in action.
• In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move…
• No drama, however great, is entirely independent of the stage on which it is given.
• Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader…
• Rare is the human being, immature or mature, who has never felt an impulse to pretend he is some one or something else.
• Sensitive, responsive, eagerly welcomed everywhere, the drama, holding the mirror up to nature, by laughter and by tears reveals to mankind the world of men.
• The drama is a great revealer of life.
• The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate…
• There is no essential difference between the material of comedy and tragedy. All depends on the point of view of the dramatist, which, by clever…
• We do not kill the drama, we do not really limit its appeal by failing to encourage the best in it; but we do thereby…
• What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we…
• When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we…

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