SOURCE: Introduction to 20th-century Plays in Synopsis, edited by Evert Sprinchorn, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1965, pp. 1-13.

In the excerpt that follows, Sprinchorn discusses the dramatic legacy of the well-made play and its transformation under the naturalism and symbolism that influenced later realistic drama.

… Well-made and Properly Motivated

By comparing plots, we can use them as cultural artifacts to tell us a great deal about changing mores. But in the present century even more enlightening than the change in audience response is a study of the playwright's attitude to the conception of plot itself. The classic view, as stated by Aristotle and maintained to the nineteenth century, held that plot was the most important element in a drama. By plot one meant the arrangement of incidents: the same story may be plotted in many different ways. When the Shakespearean theater disappeared and Paris became the cultural capital of...