Plot
The plot is traditional in regards to Restoration theatre and includes three female characters, three respectable males, three non-respectable males, and three side characters. Each respectable male meets their female counterpart three times, and each has a parallel incident with letters and an unmasking. The primary plot of the play deals with Wisemore and his pursuit of Lady Matchless. With the help of his friend Merital, Wisemore is able to overcome other lovers and various struggles in order to prove his worth to Matchless and win her love.
A secondary plot involves Merital and his desire to marry a woman named Helena, cousin to Matchless. He is kept from doing so externally by her uncle, Sir Positive Trap, by the workings of her aunt, and internally by themselves. Against her uncles wishes, Helena and Merital elope. Although Trap is angered by this, Lady Matchless steps in and defends the marriage by saying that she too will marry like her cousin. The play ends with a song about beauty, virtue, and lovers.
Read more about this topic: Love In Several Masques
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)