Fifteen years ago, it was still possible to write that" Plot has no strong place in the pantheon of acceptable literary terms"(Dipple 1970, p. 1). Today, an assertion of this kind would be unthinkable. The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented development of formal narrative analysis as one of the strongest branches of poetics. Rival theories have blossomed, new concepts and methods have been created, and a good many analyses proposed. Still, more often than not, recent plot-analysis has operated on relatively simple literary artifacts, such as folktales, short stories, or small poems. The present study attempts to demonstrate the fruitfulness of formal analysis when applied to more sophisticated literary products.

Dramatic texts were the most obvious choice: more elaborate than folktales or short stories, dramatic plots are, by virtue of genre constraints, easier to analyze than the plot-structure of complex novels. They can thus provide for an intermediary stage between the texts that attracted the attention of classical structuralism, and the plots of more intricate narratives, probably still beyond our analytical means.