Aristotle, Archer and Lawson
Three venerable books on the subject of dramatic construction were of particular interest to Mackendrick, texts he urged students to read. In chronological order:
Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 BCE)
William Archer’s Play-Making: A Manual on Craftmanship (1912)
John Howard Lawson’s Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting (1949)
Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher. John Howard Lawson writes: “Aristotle, the encyclopedist of the ancient world, has exercised a vast influence on human thought. But in no field of thought has his domination been so complete and so unchallenged as in dramatic theory. What remains to us of the Poetics is only a fragment; but even in its fragmentary form Aristotle’s statement of the laws of play-writing is remarkable for its precision and breadth.”
William Archer (1856 – 1924) was a Scottish critic, playwright and theorist. A colleague of George Bernard Shaw, he was one of the first translators of Ibsen into English (see Project Gutenberg for these texts). He writes at the start of Play-Making: “Having admitted that there are no rules for dramatic composition, and that the quest of such rules is apt to result either in pedantry or quackery, why should I myself set forth upon so fruitless and foolhardy an enterprise? It is precisely because I am alive to its dangers that I have some hope of avoiding them. Rules there are none; but it does not follow that some of the thousands who are fascinated by the art of the playwright may not profit by having their attention called, in a plain and practical way, to some of its problems and possibilities.” This is an idea repeatedly echoed by Mackendrick throughout his own writings on the subject. More on Archer’s life and work here.
John Howard Lawson (1894 – 1977) was an American playwright, screenwriter and theorist. In 1933 he became the first president of the Screen Writer’s Guild, and fourteen years later was one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten. Author of numerous Broadway plays and Hollywood screenplays, his other publications include Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953) and Film: The Creative Process (1964). Avowedly left-wing (he was head of the Hollywood chapter of the Communist Party USA), Lawson writes in the introduction to Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting: “There is a considerable literature dealing with the technique of playwriting. It has comparatively slight practical value, because it rests on the false assumption that the playwright builds his play in a social vacuum. The student struggles with rules concerning structure, dialogue, characterization, rising action, falling action, climax. But the rules are abstractions, unrelated either to the history of the theatre or to the drama of human events from which the playwright must necessarily draw his material.” Note that Lawson cites both Aristotle and Archer in his book. More on Lawson’s life and work here.
All three texts are, to a certain extent, somewhat antiquated, using as they do examples of plays and films that many contemporary readers will not be familiar with. But at the same time they are expertly written pieces of prose that can be mined for useful guidance when it comes to the fundaments of dramatic writing.
Mackendrick knew most of his students would never read these books (however much he implored them to do so), which is why he prepared extensive notes on two of the three.
An edited version of Mackendrick’s Aristotle handout is here. Two translations of the complete text of Poetics are available online in copyright-free editions. Here for Butcher. Here for Bywater.
A version of Mackendrick’s Wiliam Archer handout is here (a footnoted version can be found in his book On Film-Making). Archer’s copyright-free book can be found in its entirety here and here.
A summary of John Howard Lawson’s ideas about dramatic construction, drawn from his book, is here.
Worth noting that Aristotle, Archer, Lawson, Mackendrick and – to add a more contemporary figure into the mix – screenwriter-playwright-director David Mamet (in his excellent books On Directing Film and Three Uses of the Knife, as well as numerous essays and interviews) basically say the same things. There is a compelling continuity of thought running through all these texts. Once absorbed and understood, there is surely no more written work on the subject of dramatic construction that needs to be read. One might even go so far as to paraphrase Alfred North Whitehead: all writings about dramatic construction are a series of footnotes to Aristotle. (Aside: though it seems to be fashionable to trash the work of Robert McKee, you can’t argue with many of the points he makes. After all, they come from Aristotle and Lawson, who are both cited in his bibliography. Here for an article about McKee.)
Aristotle, Archer and Lawson are continually referenced throughout the Mackendrick on Film workshop, alongside the work of various filmmakers and other theorists.