ABSTRACT
‘Action’ is ambiguous, and must include what is actually happpening at any given time in the play. But it is also the whole play, considered as that to which any given moment, situation or speech is to be related in order to be fully understood. There are considerable dangers in abstracting the ‘action’ as a whole from a consideration of those relationships. There have been many attempts to distinguish between ‘action’ and ‘plot’. But plot seems to be used in common parlance to indicate a consecutive account of the events of the play which is abstracted as far as possible from the significance of those events. ‘Structure’ belongs more clearly under the general heading of technique, and refers to the identifiable means by which a dramatist relates the parts of the play to each other and to the whole, and keeps before our attention what is most central to the action.
