How was Naturalism generated?

Question

How was Naturalism generated?

Answer 1

Naturalism kind of began to emerge in Shakespeare's era when theatre practitioners began looking for verisimilitude in their work. Shakespeare alludes to this in Hamlet when Hamlet tells the actors to "suit the action to the word, the word to the action".

The Russians, from their obession with Shakespeare, developed realism, with the plays of Chekhov and his contemporaries, who wanted every detail seen on stage to reflect real life.

But what we call naturalism really didn't become a genre until the twentieth century. Following on from the Russians, the British playwrights of the late 1800s and early 1900s sought to portray something like real life, but altered to make a point. So playwrights like Wilde and Shaw sought to portray something that could happen in real life, but with a more pointed message to it or something that would keep the audience interested.