Southerne, Thomas - Helga Drougge (essay date winter 1993-94)

Helga Drougge (essay date winter 1993-94)

SOURCE: Drougge, Helga. “Love, Death, and Mrs. Barry in Thomas Southerne's Plays.” Comparative Drama 27, no. 4 (winter 1993-94): 408-25.

[In the following essay, Drougge discusses the complex depiction of comic heroines in six of Southerne's plays.]

Thomas Southerne's tragedies were once held in great esteem. Sophocles might have profited if he could have heard the “moving Moan” of Isabella in The Fatal Marriage, wrote Elijah Fenton in 1711:

If Envy cou'd permit, he'd sure agree
To write by Nature were to Copy Thee:
So full, so fair thy Images are shown,
He by Thy Pencil might improve his own.(1)

A modified version of this view lasted a long time: Southerne's The Fatal Marriage: Or, The Innocent Adultery (1694) and Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave (1695) remained repertory plays into the nineteenth century.2 On the other hand, Fenton's...

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