Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A plot subordinate to another plot, as in a play or a novel.
- noun An underhand scheme; a trick.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A series of events in a play, proceeding collaterally with the main story, and subservient to it.
- noun A clandestine scheme; a trick.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
subplot ; aplot that is not the main plot of a story.
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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As the underplot is the shortest, I may as well dispose of that first.
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In other respects, however, it is certainly a great advance on its predecessors, especially in its underplot, which is for the first time connected satisfactorily with the main argument.
John Lyly John Dover Wilson 1925
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The play, of course, has a farcical underplot which is only connected very slightly with the main story by Sir Tophas 'ridiculous passion for Dipsas.
John Lyly John Dover Wilson 1925
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The cartoonists grasped easily, as the commentators did not, the underplot of male dominance and pliable submission.
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His editors are letting his tendency to underplot and overdialog go unchallenged, because it means they can continue to spin out a two-issue storyline into a six-issue trade paperback.
Has Bendis’ Work Changed Dramatically? | Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources 2008
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The characters would dropped into an environment imagined as a rhizome rather than in the hierarcic structure of plot and underplot, and the tension or exitment of the game is created more through potential than through dramatic structure.
thinking with my fingers Torill 2002
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By my version I really introduce a most interesting underplot, which, in my opinion, is equally pleasing and quite as defensible as Mr. BEERBOHM TREE's business with _Ophelia_.
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, February 6, 1892 Various
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Gentlemen, as it is the smallest part of the case, I will take up that part upon which you were addressed last this morning, by my learned friend Mr. Serjeant Pell, which has been denominated in this transaction the underplot.
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_ Now my Lord I am going to what I have stated as the underplot, respecting M'Rae, Sandom, Lyte, and Holloway.
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It was indispensable that the tragic underplot of the play should never be known to either Bellamy or Brammel, and the only safe way of concealing it from them, was to communicate it unreservedly to their common partner, and his peculiar _protégé_.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 339, January, 1844 Various
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