What factors contributed to the rise of the modern-day director?

The idea of the director, as we know it today, began to take shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe. An increasing interest in natural behavior and in scientific precision resulted in a growing dissatisfaction with artificial acting style and the lack of a coherent approach to performance. As the plays of Emile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov begin to examine the social and biological forces that determine human interaction, the generic settings of the past were now insufficient for understanding characters within their own dramatic worlds and theatre practitioners saw the need to create specific environments for particular plays and the need for an artistic eyea director to unify the stage elements with the play text.