underplot

The underplot about a 9/11 death unfolds skillfully but feels out of place.

Canning, she wrote, was 'always having some dirty underplot'.

"Jonsonian Elements in the Comic Underplot of Twelfth Night."

Underplot is piled upon underplot (the very word is a paradox), and all to no purpose- to no end.

He had said nothing; but the brown eyes were eloquent, and there was an unconscious underplot to all the little plays he and Alice Heath acted so well together.

The piece is based on Mrs Aphra Behn's The History of the Nun, with the addition of a comic underplot.

The King in the Country, a two-act piece, 1789, is an alteration of the underplot of Thomas Heywood's King Edward the Fourth.

Why is the underplot of KING LEAR in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's ARCADIA and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?

The main plot is the same as in the Spanish pieces; but there runs through it a tragic underplot of the loves of Rodrigo and Dona Clara, which is taken from another tale of Cervantes, La Fuerza de la Sangre.

There is scarcely a scene in which is not to be found the germ of an underplot- a germ, however, which seldom proceeds beyond the condition of a bud, or, if so fortunate as to swell into a flower, arrives, in no single instance, at the dignity of fruit.

The comic underplot, in which Costard and others attempt to stage a play (rather like that of the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream, though with more pretensions to learning) is severely curtailed, as is the boasting of the Spaniard, Don Armado.