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Underplot   Listen
noun
Underplot  n.  
1.
A series of events in a play, proceeding collaterally with the main story, and subservient to it.
2.
A clandestine scheme; a trick.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Underplot" Quotes from Famous Books



... lawyers were keeping at work with commendable diligence, and Mr. Pennroyal was counting his chickens as hatched, and was as far as possible from suspecting the underplot which was going on around him. On the contrary, it seemed to him that he was becoming at last the assured favorite of fortune. For this gentleman's life had not been, in all respects, so prosperous as it appeared. To begin ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne

... between the lines of this and other compacts with evil powers; this is the point of Rossetti's departure from the scheme that forms the underplot of Goethe's Faust, and of Marlowe's Faustus, and was intended to constitute the plan of Coleridge's Michael Scott. It has been well said that the theme of the Faust is the consequence of a misology, or hatred of knowledge, resulting upon an original thirst for knowledge ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... family to sea on a party of pleasure, are taken prisoners by Carlos and his servants, disguised as Turks. They are carried to a country house, and made to believe they are in the Grand Turk's seraglio. There is also an underplot, in which Isabella, Francisco's proud and vain daughter, is courted by Guilion, a supposed Count, but in reality a chimney-sweep, whose hand she accepts. In the end everything is discovered, and Guilion comes to claim his wife in his ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere

... Chains there is not even this simple form of excitement and suspense. A city clerk, oppressed by the deadly monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to Australia—and doesn't go: that is the sum and substance of the action. Also, by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying a middle-aged widower—and doesn't do it. If any one had told the late Francisque Sarcey, or the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... clouded and obscured for the greater period of their working lives. Unobserved, they received, and made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid-Victorian novel—moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptive machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions, and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of Chuzzlewit, Pendennis, and Middlemarch. But they received the legacy in a totally different spirit. Mark Rutherford, after ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... circumstances in which the brothers stand to each other. Nevertheless, there is a calmness as well as superiority of intellect in Alvar which seem to justify, in some measure, the sort of attempt on his part, which, in fact, constitutes the theme of the play; and it must be admitted that the whole underplot of Isidore and Alhadra is lively and affecting in the highest degree. We particularly refer to the last scene between Ordonio and Isidore in the cavern, which we think genuine Shakespeare; and Alhadra's narrative of her discovery of her husband's murder is not ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson



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