play three technical terms are frequently used: quiproquo – (derived from post-classical Latin quid pro quo: literally, "something for something"): two or more characters interpret a word, a situation or a person's identity in different ways, all the time assuming that their interpretations are the same. peripeteia – used in this context as meaning the greatest in a series of mishaps suffered by the hero. scène à faire (the "obligatory" scene) – a term invented by the 19th-century critic Francisque Sarcey – a scene in which the outcome the audience expects and ardently desires comes to pass or is clearly signalled. Background Before the late-18th century, French theatre had been neoclassical in style, with strict forms reflecting contemporary interpretations of the theatrical laws propounded by Aristotle in his Poetics, written some 1,500 years earlier. The prevailing doctrine was "verisimilitude", or the appearance of a plausible truth, as the aesthetic goal of a play. In 1638 the Académie Française codified a system by which dramatists should achieve verisimilitude, and the monarchy enforced the standards of French neoclassicism by licensing and subsidising a limited number of approved theatre companies, chief of which was the Comédie Française. Corneille and Racine were regarded as successors to the ancient Greek tragedians, and Molière as that of Plautus and Terence in comedy. Small companies performing simple plays at local fairs were tolerated, and by the middle of the 18th century some were playing in Paris in the Boulevard du Temple, bringing before the public works not constrained by neoclassical formulas. Scribe The dramatist and opera librettist Eugène Scribe was born in 1791, at a time when the conventions and forms of the traditional European literature and theatre of the neoclassical Enlightenment were giving way to the unrestrained and less structured works of Romanticism. In his 1967 book The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play, John Russell Taylor writes that what Scribe set out to do "was not to tame and discipline Romantic extravagance, but to devise a mould into which any sort of material, however extravagant and seemingly uncontrollable, could be poured". Writing with collaborators as a rule, Scribe produced some 500 stage works between 1815 and his death in 1861. His development of a form that could be used repeatedly to turn out new material met the demands of a growing middle class theatre audience, and made him a rich man. Many of Scribe's