[In this essay, Ham considers the early plays of Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee, when each experimented with heroic drama before moving on to other forms.]

Pouring forth Tears at such a lavish rate,
That were the World on fire, they might have drown'd
The Wrath of Heav'n, and quench't the mighty Ruin.

Lee, Mithridates

Before the curtain had finally descended upon the destruction wrought by Otway in his Alcibiades, Mrs. Mary Lee arose from the heroic dead to recite the epilogue. It was a masterpiece of sophistication:

Now who sayes Poets don't in blood delight?}
'Tis true, the varlets care not much to fight;
But 'faith, they claw it off when e're they write;
Are bully Rocks not of the common size;
Kill ye men faster than Domitian flyes.
Ours made such Havock, that the silly Rogue
Was forc't to make me rise for th' Epilogue.(1)

Otway was wise in his generation. This was a world of play tragedy, and it ended with the fall of the curtain. The heroic type, despite its lustful queens and lascivious kings, was entirely fantastic in its reversal of everyday morality. The sordid realism of Dryden and Wycherley in comedy found its relief in the preposterous nobility of the contemporary tragedy of Lee and Otway; and the unheroic reverses in field and bedchamber of the beaux of Whitehall were here glozed over in the undying bravery and chastity of Alcibiades and Hannibal.

Less than a year after Nero, in April, 1675, Lee's Sophonisba was given its première at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. The King was then at the heyday of his play-going activity, and found the tragedy so much to his taste that he or his entourage occupied the royal box upon the thirtieth, with revisits at least four times within the year.² This was the play that appeared so incongruously in the library of the Rev. Richard Lee at Hatfield. The abandoned old court preacher for the moment appears to have basked in the greatness of his son's profane success. It was truly a play from which the most confirmed Puritan might have risen unpolluted. On the other hand, the repeated attendance of Charles would seem to argue in him an amazing love of heroism, a supposition that would destroy all preconceived notions of the King. The truth of the matter is not far to seek. It is recorded that his melancholy queen was more devoted to this than to any other play of the period; and, as to the other ladies of the court, we have Lee's dedication to Portsmouth and his appended commentary:

If Sophonisba received some applause upon the stage, I arrogate nothing from the merit of the Poem, but, as I ought, with the humblest acknowledgements and profoundest gratitude, impute it to the favourable aspects of the Court-Stars. [To which he added with the exact inflection of French romance:] But above all, I must pay my adorations to your Grace, who as you are the most Beautiful, as well in the bright appearances of body, as in the immortal splendors of an elevated Soul, did shed mightier Influence, and darted on me a largess of glory answerable to your stock of Beams.³

By Langbaine's statement, “His Muse indeed seem'd destin'd for the Diversion of the Fair Sex; so soft and passionately moving are his scenes of Love written.”⁴ So we may conjecture that Charles was amiably disposed to attend, while his fair jades throbbed to the amorous discourse of Mohun and Hart and wept satisfying tears at the cruel trials in love of the divine Sophonisba.

Accustomed as was the court of Charles to surrender, it is no marvel that it lost its heart completely to the personages of Lee's tragedy. Hannibal “for a mistress gave the world away,” while Sophonisba in emulation challenged her foe to

Come on, with thy brave sword rip up my breast,
And fix my panting heart on thy proud Crest;
There let it hang, thy valours Trophy grown,
To all the wondring World let it be shown.(5)

They were heroes in arm and heart: beyond all example valiant, faithful to love in the conflict of great duties, tender, and dedicated to endless misfortune which they met with incredible heroism. In his second play Lee was less iconoclastic than in his first, since now he was in complete possession of his heroic formula. For the pit and gallery there was a royal feast, but for the fair despots of the boxes, infinite surrender of the most obdurate, oaths a thousand, and death to a holocaust of sighs.

Oh Sophonisba, Oh!

The plaint of King Massinissa so ravished the heart of his own generation that Lee was captivated to repeat himself in later plays:

Oh Bellamira, Oh!

and

Oh Athenais, Oh!

At which the sigh breathed down the century in half a score of imitators to

Oh Jemmy Thomson, Oh!

and to the prodigious lament of Tom Thumb,

Oh Huncamunca, Oh!

But if Lee won the impressionable heart of the century by his rapture, he failed lamentably to capitalize upon it. The world of heroism remained in its splendid isolation, while the world of crowns and pounds continued to function as usual. The rise of Lee's popularity was marked by the revulsion of Rochester, who shortly expressed his displeasure in the couplets already quoted:

When Lee makes temperate Scipio fret and rave
And Hannibal a whining, Amorous slave
I laugh, and wish the hot-brain'd Fustain Fool
In Busby's hands, to be well lasht at School.

And the age was no less capricious than Rochester. Dedicating his third play to Portsmouth, who appears not to have been displeased with the bestowal of his second, our poet wrote as follows: “Judge, then how unfit I am, blasted in my hopes and press'd in my growth by a most severe, if not unjust fortune.”⁶

We cannot guess the exact circumstances of his reversal, but if ever a man rendered himself liable by unexampled bombast, it was Lee in his tragedy of Gloriana; or, The Court of Augustus Caesar.⁷ This was one of the plays severely taken to task by Addison. He granted that no English poet was better turned to tragedy than its author, and then tempered the praise by adding that Lee's thoughts were “frequently lost in such a cloud of words that it is hard to see the beauty in them. There is an infinite fire in his words, but so involved in smoke that it does not appear with half its lustre.”⁸ So far as Lee's audience was concerned, this doubtless was no great loss. The same audience would have grown restive, had the dramatist ventured to be clear or rational.

In what Raptures [said Cibber], have I seen an Audience at the furious Fustain and turgid Rants in Nat. Lee's Alexander the Great! … When those flowing Numbers came from the Mouth of a Betterton, the Multitude no more desired Sense to them than our musical Connoisseurs think it essential in the celebrated Airs of an Italian Opera.⁹

The high technique of bombast and rapture was first developed not by Betterton but by Hart working in collusion chiefly with Dryden, and afterward, to his greater glory, with Lee. Alexander was Hart's rôle, as was Caesario, the son of Julius Caesar, in this earlier tragedy of Gloriana. And how congenial to the actor's art was the grandiloquence of Caesario may be readily understood from a single speech:

A Man! Araspes, I was always more.
When me in Swadling-bands the Nurses rock'd,
My soul was full with God-like courage stock'd;
The sounds which first my wondrous voice did move,
Were Father Julius, and Grandsire Jove:
Ev'n in my Childhood I was more than Man,
Bears in my Non-age flew, and Stags out-ran.
Leander thou remembrest who art old,
When yet nine Winters I had scarcely told,
A half-starv'd Lion in our chase I brav'd
And from his jaws my panting Mother sav'd.(10)

From the same Caesario we have a characterization of his potent sire, that might well stand as descriptive of this entire class of Restoration tragedy. It tells of Caesar's dalliance with the lovely Cleopatra,—a dalliance doubtless pleasant enough to Portsmouth, while the somber queen retreated behind her fan:

'Twas God-like and he imitated Jove,
Who with excessive thundring tir'd above
Comes down for ease, enjoys a Nymph, and then,
Mounts dreadful and to thundring goes again.(11)

In his efforts to drug the omnipresent realities of the Restoration court, Lee drew upon every known device. Rant was followed by turgid magnificence. The figure of Ovid was brought into the play, partly as a vehicle for eroticism, partly as an excuse for florid word pictures, recalling the effects of Rubens or La Calprenède rather than those of the author of the Metamorphoses. It is Ovid who thus chants the praise of Augustus:

Vast are the Glories, Caesar, thou hast won,
To make whose Triumphs up, the World's undone:
The Indians from the Eastern parts remote,
To thee the Treasure of their Shrines devote:
Whole Trees of Coral, which they div'd for low,}
That in the Walks of Neptune's Palace grow,
With Tritons trumpeting on ev'ry bough;
Pearls which the mourning Eyes of Thetis pay,
When her cool'd Lover bolts through waves away;
And Diamonds that the Sun each morning sheds,
Driving his Chariot o'er their sooty heads.(12)

This is by no means unique. Before Lee's fondness for exuberant color should be restrained, there were to be descriptions of naked loveliness vying with the effects of the Flemish weavers. Indeed one might suspect that The Rival Queens received its first inspiration from Le Brun's famous tapestry at Versailles of the tent of Alexander, wherein the daughters of Darius kneel in conquering beauty before the hero. But, even more perfectly, a quotation from his so-called “Lady's play”¹³ of Mithridates shows to what extent the relaxed sensuousness of the Renaissance had taken possession of the young poet:

Behold her then upon a Flowry Bank,
With her soft sorrows lull'd into a slumber,
The Summer's heat had, to her natural blush
Added a brighter and more tempting red;
The Beauties of her Neck and naked Breasts,
Lifted by inward starts, did rise and fall
With motion that might put a Soul in Statues:
The matchless whiteness of her foulded Arms,
That seem'd t'embrace the Body whence they grew,
Fix'd me to gaze o're all that Field of Love;
While to my ravish'd eyes officious winds,
Waving her Robes, display'd such handsome Limbs,
As Artists wou'd in Polish'd Marble give
The Wanton Goddess. …(14)

Lee was the child of the late Renaissance. In him magnificence inclined to the garish. Art reveled in sudden and startling ornament: nymphs and “soft” angels in gold leaf, twisted columns, and statuary by its very weight threatening the downfall of the building. The huge dome of St. Paul's, as well as the grandiloquence which reverberated beneath it, the vast embellished canvases of Rubens, the rhetoric and the creaking machinery of Lee were all parcel of the same tendency. It was a world in rivalry to build upon the scale of Versailles, but only upon rare occasions did it pass beyond mere pretentiousness. Of our own corner of this movement, the conscious insincerity was summarized by Dryden, the more notably as coming from one of the stage's greatest tricksters.

In a Play-house [he said], every thing contributes to impose upon the Judgment; the Lights, the Scenes, the Habits, and, above all, the Grace of Action, which is commonly the best where there is the most need of it, surprise the Audience, and cast the mist upon their Understandings: not unlike the cunning of a Juggler who is always staring us in the face, and overwhelming us with gibberish only that he may gain the opportunity of making the clean conveyance of his Trick.¹⁵

In the last phrase the artistic purpose was indicated of the greater part of baroque art. It was contingent upon a complete and conscious bewilderment of the critical faculties.

Glancing at only one development of the baroque, the ornate novels of the De Scudérys, Gomberville, and La Calprenède, we may be certain that rational criticism would have blighted their grand seigneurs beyond recognition. In course of time criticism would wipe away at a stroke the parallel growth of the pastoral as well as the court which delighted in it. Across the channel, the English found the unreality of heroic Almanzor and Alexander more to its fancy than that of sighing Strephon, and hence the pastoral was only intermittent in its appearance. But the process of criticism was amazingly slow in both countries. The age of reason was doomed to flourish for many years contemporaneously with these chief products of unreason.

In any treatment of Restoration tragedy the part played by the vast baroque novels of the French mid-seventeenth century should not be slighted. It is a caution that only a short while ago would have been needless. Under the rule of German and French scholarship the names De Scudéry and La Calprenède tended to appear upon every other page. But more recently there has been witnessed a complete reversal from this point of view, and now English and American scholars are equally vehement concerning the all-important contributions of the earlier English stage. The pendulum has perhaps swung far enough. It is fairly obvious that the vagabond court of Charles II, upon its return, came into a heritage of native plays and of actors drilled in the traditions of the older school, and that the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, the chief products of the earlier heroism, were for many years more popular with Restoration audiences than the plays of Shakespeare. It is evident that The Maid's Tragedy, Valentinian, and A King and No King were such mixtures of false sentiment and divine right as the courtiers of Charles might have composed, that D'Avenant plainly foreshadowed Dryden's later flights into heroism, and that Othello, probably the most popular of Shakespearean tragedies, in very many respects seemed to have been written to the Restoration code. We even find that Lee himself, in his dedication of Mithridates, clearly announced that he had endeavored in this tragedy “to mix Shakespear with Fletcher: the thoughts of the former, for Majesty and true Roman Greatness, and the softness and passionate expressions of the latter, which make up half the Beauties.”

I will love [he cried], the Man that shall trace me! … I desire to be found a Refiner on those admirable Writers; the Ground is theirs, and all that serves to make a rich Embroidery! I hope the World will do me the Justice to think, I have disguis'd it into another Fashion more suitable to the Age we live in.¹⁶

Yet a very considerable degree of resemblance between the earlier and later English stages may exist without canceling the debt to other sources. A simultaneous growth of the themes of love, honor, and divine right had proceeded in France, and one perhaps as familiar as the English to the dependents of Charles. The material was common property, a fact nowhere more plainly indicated than in the early tragedies of Lee and Otway. In the actual number of lines they borrowed and in pervasive spirit, the debt of the latter pair to the French romancers at least balanced that to the English playwrights, and was greater, if we set aside the wholesale plundering and romanticizing of material out of Shakespeare. There is but slight evidence that either dramatist composed tragedy with the folios of the Jacobeans open before him. There is ample evidence, on the other hand, that their use of the ponderous romances was first hand.

The theater, here as elsewhere, was but the reflection of its audience. Diaries, letters, and endless translations attest the popularity of French romance. It was le dernier cri of a court dedicated to all things French. The fashion chronicled by Dorothy Osborne in 1654 and Pepys in 1668¹⁷ entered into the theater and took possession. How essential it was to the playwright's equipment may be observed in any source list of Restoration drama. The Sophonisba of Lee was heavy debtor to Orrery's novel of Parthenissa¹⁸—a seven-decker so completely in the Gallic tradition that it might have been laid down across the channel; Gloriana was equally obliged to the Cléopâtre of La Calprenède; and now The Rival Queens, the fourth play of Lee, turned to the same author's Cassandre.¹⁹

Lee nevertheless toned up his flaccid source material by liberal drafts from history—of the sort to be found in his father's library at Hatfield—and the effect was altogether bracing. Those portions of The Rival Queens derived from Curtius were more restrained and generally more powerful than those where La Calprenède ran undefiled. Thus the scenes between Clytus and Alexander in the fourth act, which were transferred in spirit and sometimes in word from the Latin, form a striking contrast in style to the preceding scenes between Lysimachus and Alexander, in their turn taken almost directly from the romance. The dialogue of the former anticipated by several years the Livian brevity of the poet's Lucius Junius Brutus. In The Rival Queens, however, the Roman accent was only fitful:

CLYT.
Your Father Philip,—I have seen him March,
And fought beneath his dreadful Banner, where
The stoutest at this Table would ha' trembl'd.
Nay frown not, Sir, you cannot look me dead.
When Greeks joyn'd Greeks, then was the tug of War,
The labour'd Battle sweat, and Conquest bled.
Why shou'd I fear to speak a truth more noble,
Then e're your Father Jupiter Ammon told you;
Philip fought men, but Alexander women.(20)

By contrast to this, we may discover how completely the garrulous accent of La Calprenède could enter into the speech of Lee from examination of the latter's account of the victory of Lysimachus over the lion. It may be said that the French writer gives the account to the hero himself, where Lee allows greater modesty by putting it in the mouth of Clytus. Otherwise this is little more than a versified paragraph out of the Cassandre, a perfect example of the heroic-romantic manner:

Then walking forward, the large Beast discry'd
His prey, and with a roar that made us pale,
Flew fiercely on him; but the active Prince
Starting aside, avoiding his first shock,
With a slight hurt, and as the Lyon turn'd,
Thrust Gauntlet, Arm and all, into his throat,
And with Herculean Force tore forth by th' roots
The foaming bloudy tongue; and while the Savage,
Faint with that loss, sunk to the blushing Earth
To plough it with his teeth, your conqu'ring Souldier
Leap'd on his back, and dash'd his skull to pieces.(21)

Or, as La Calprenède remarked no less nobly: “The Lion lost all his strength by the extreamity of that pain, and discharging the rest of his rage against the Earth, which he digg'd up with his teeth, and watred with his blood, he gave me the leisure to beat his skull in pieces with my Gauntlets.”²² So likewise with the lover's jargon. “'Tis only my passion,” we read in the novel, “the purest, the most perfect that ever was that intercedes to you now in favour of me. …”²³ Lee versified it thus:

But Love and I bring such a perfect Passion,
So nobly pure, 'tis worthy of her Eyes,
Which without blushing she may justly prize.(24)

As we read this language we may understand perfectly whence came the inflated dedications of the time. Dryden and Lee merely carried over to their epistles what every lady and wit accepted as the polite speech of literature. Had they been addressed otherwise it would have been taken as bald and indecent.

But the ruling principles of this language could hardly remain obscure to the more enlightened critics. It was repeatedly noted that Alexander was the idol of the fair sex, and such he was to remain for many years to come. Thus around 1700 Powell was sounding upon the same instrument that had served earlier for Hart, Goodman, and Betterton:

Big as the Voice of War he mouths his Roll,
Each Accent twangs majestically full
When Alexander dies, he gives the fair
Tortures as great as those he seems to bear.(25)

The Elizabethans, it may be added, were rarely able to deflect Lee from his inflated sentiment and action. Though there was considerable reminiscence, especially in his Rival Queens, of lines from Shakespeare's Roman plays, they were rendered turgid by his alteration; and what virtue remained was more than vitiated by his further addition of all the Shakespearean claptrap of ghosts, signs and portents, and universal destruction at the end. He might take over for his Alexander hints for a struggle between the base and noble elements of man's nature, but he was unable to borrow, because he was incapable of understanding, the lyric love of Juliet or the quiet tragedy of Hermione. It all needed to be sentimental or colossal, so that even the “heroic Shakespeare” of Othello and Julius Caesar became hoarse when given utterance through the mouth of mad Nat. Lee.

Some years later two of his surviving contemporaries engaged in a discussion of the principles of Lee's success. It all turned upon the apparent necessity of violent action in any taking plot:

Let the Action be good or bad, it will keep the Attention of the Audience, and the more constant and violent the Action is, the more it will be attended by them; wherever there is Passion, there must necessarily be Action; those Tragedies therefore, that have a perpetual Succession of Passion, can never miscarry. It is this Quality that has preserv'd and still keeps up the Tragedy of Alexander the Great, which Mr. Crown found fault with, in a Discourse with me one Day, because, it was continually on the fret, as he call'd it, from the Beginning to the End; that is, the Passions were lively and strong through the whole Piece, which so took up the Audience, that they had no Leisure or Interval of Quiet to grow weary and be disgusted.²⁶

But there were forces in Lee at this time operative toward quiet and naturalism. Chief of these was his desertion of the couplet. In itself the couplet was far from being the hall mark of heroic tragedy; nevertheless, by its heavy tread it seemed inexorably to suggest unrestrained hyperbole and colossal periods. Three years earlier Lee had turned certain scenes of his Nero into blank verse, some little time before Dryden penned his famous bill of divorcement from rhyme. Hence Nero was of a different substance from Gloriana and Sophonisba, where surrender to the couplet had been complete. Now, with its final dismissal, a closer imitation of Elizabethan drama became possible; and Lee, along with English drama, settled to the rediscovery of a certain calm, long since departed.

The break from ranting heroism was not so immediate with Lee as it was with Otway, for which various reasons may be advanced. First there was to be observed a clear divergence between the acting traditions of the two playhouses. The actors of His Majesty's Theatre in Drury Lane, who declaimed the lines of Lee, were closer to the French and English heroic manner than those of Dorset Garden, who performed Otway. Hart and Mohun, of the former, had risen to their full stature simultaneously with and by the aid of the early tragedy of Dryden. Mohun had been partly trained in France,²⁷ while Hart came out of the school that obtained prior to the closing of the theaters. Each was a very great artist after his kind, and fully capable of dominating the work of any but the greatest playwright. Hart by many was deemed a finer tragedian than Betterton,²⁸ which may merely signify that he was more florid. His successor “Scum” Goodman was later held incomparable as Alexander, but his mastery of the rôle appears to have chiefly consisted in following Hart's example.²⁹ Betterton himself is reported to have rewarded a player handsomely for giving him Hart's exact intonation of certain lines.³⁰ The latter's greatest successes were florid; and such were the rôles written for him at the time by Lee. Concerning the actresses of the Theatre Royal, there may be some legitimate doubt. It is questionable whether either Boutell or Marshall³¹ gave any great encouragement to the dramatist who should attempt to write into their lines any of the subtleties of passion. They were both so secure in their province of declamatory tragedy that they seem to have lured no playwright into the creation of the less robustious parts. It is true that Dryden wrote his Cleopatra for Boutell, but there is little evidence that Boutell achieved any startling success in the character. Hers was a school entirely upon the large. It had already passed its grand climacteric, and offered slight inspiration to the growing playwright. The best proof of the potent influence of the Drury Lane school of acting rests in the marked change that came over the style of Nat. Lee, once he had shifted to the newer and more restrained artists of the theater in Dorset Garden.

The difference becomes conclusive when we look at Otway. Out of the oppressive glare of Dryden and the heroic actors, he had dared attempt in his first play an imitation of Shakespeare. In his second he ventured farther. Don Carlos was a better play than any hitherto composed by his young rival, albeit one somewhat less characteristic of the age. A heroic tragedy, as it was termed by its author, in reality it either subordinated or made a decisive break with all the more notable machinery of heroism, save only the tag of rhyme. Otway was encouraged in his revolution by a company which for the most part was still in its early youth and filled with the spirit of adventure. He dared turn for his source material to a new sort of novel: one purporting to be history, the hero of which lived in a land near by and at a recent time, instead of some ancient and mysterious kingdom of the distant east or west. It is immaterial whether Saint-Réal perverted history out of all recognition, in making the half-insane Carlos a figure of romance; Carlos was convincing, as the heroes of La Calprenède were not, and moved in conflict with an actual world.

The character and the plot of the novel gave Otway his perfect lead. It was history delicately shaded off from the heroic, with a hero curious in doing nothing at all and conventional in talking superbly. Nor was the omission of action perhaps evident either to Otway or the heroic talkers of the court of Charles. Furthermore, Saint-Réal's was a story of frustrate love, infinite in its capacity for tears, even if but tentatively developed to that end. In recasting it Otway was able to retain very many useful devices of heroic tragedy, and to add something of the relaxed sentimentality that was to mark the English stage for a century and a half. Where Lee, following the mode of double-decked romance, had struck heavily at the sense of wonder, Otway, after Saint-Réal, sought to conquer by playing chiefly upon the sentiments.³²

We may wonder whether the playwright did not first discover his dramatic formula in this obscure historical novel. It would almost seem so, for Saint-Réal anticipated both Otwavian subject and construction. By contrast to the intricate narrative of La Calprenède, his was the bare account of a great central passion, with its minor plots properly linked and subordinated. His example of comparative simplicity, reinforced as we shall see by that of Racine, was to move Otway into close liaison with the form of French classical tragedy, and to make him in spirit as nearly French as it was possible for an English heroic-sentimentalist to be. He was to be called the English Racine, perhaps improperly enough.³³ But at any rate, it came about that early in the next century Otway was considered to have had at once a tenderness and structure the most satisfactory of any of his rivals and contemporaries.

While Otway today perhaps might not satisfy the demands of classical criticism, in his own time he more than supplied the witlings with matter for favorable comment. He was most attentive in his observance of the more obvious rules of pseudo-classicism. The plot of Don Carlos, as it existed in Saint-Réal, gave him the pattern; he went farther by trimming it to the simplest lines. Briefly, the plot was one of a royal father who wedded the betrothed bride of his son. The mingled fears, jealousies, and love of father and son were one half the story; the grief, and the divided love and duty of the queen, the other. Saint-Réal had unity, but not the unity of a play. Those complexities of the history—the inquisition, the intrigues of the palace, and its various amours—all were renounced by Otway whenever they did not contribute directly to the central interest. There was more doing and less talking than upon the French stage, more fury of incident and a greater welter of blood at the climax. Yet, to understand what a masterpiece of compression it was, one must contrast it to the prolixity of the novel. Being granted the scope of history, or pseudo-history, the novelist compassed time enough to bring to the queen a matter of three children, space to move through half the kingdoms of Europe, and action to divide interest between Don Carlos and Don John, not to mention a flock of generals, a queen or two, and a mysterious Juan Miques. Time, Otway compressed to thirty-six hours, thus eliminating those children so abhorrent to a squeamish audience; place, to the palace and its garden; action, to the triangle and its contributory friends and foes. One scene made an act, a very bold invention upon the stage of the Duke's Theatre, where lavish and variegated decoration was the rule. The interest was more exactly centered than in the book upon the three major characters; and from their passions rather than from external accident Otway sought to develop his plot. It was a direction quite different from that which would have been taken by Lee. Even though Otway's intuitive and highly emotional nature did not permit him to attain the delicate analysis of Racine; nevertheless, in his efforts to make the action flow naturally from the characters, he clearly answered the challenge of the French master. He strove to eliminate the purely fortuitous, and to achieve that simplicity of which toute l'invention consiste à faire quelque chose de rien.³⁴

It was not solely by his just observance of the canons of taste that Otway won his spurs. Indeed at first glance he seems to have temporized with the heroic tradition, and in several other respects than that of the rhyme. Our hero, Smith, forgetful of classic simplicity, confronted our king, Betterton, with heaven-storming words. To be sure, he was unusual in that he perpetrated no heroic deeds, but in this he was precursor to a long line of romantic heroes possessing infinite capacity for greatness that unhappily was forever to be forestalled by callous fortune. Don Carlos had a soul foredoomed to misunderstanding by the world. Could he but reach Flanders, where his mighty ambition could be given freedom! But love, rage, loyalty, friendship, justice—in short all the motivation of the old-time heroic tragedy and the new-time romantic tragedy—strain him in unending conflict with himself. It is an internal battle beyond any contemplated by heroism, ending only as Carlos goes down to darkness triumphant in spirit, if completely negative in results. And Philip, the original villain of Saint-Réal's narrative, is another Carlos, filled with the same ineradicable pity for himself. Unlike Hamlet, and very much like Otway himself, the heroes of our dramatist were constitutionally incapable of facing their errors. Romantic sentimentalism had come in; and the audience was no longer to reason, but to be carried away upon floods of damp emotion.

One might be tempted to say that Otway's art was wholly intuitive, if he were to be judged by his critical utterances. His prefaces, dedications, prologues, epilogues, so far as they speak at all, are devoted to but one subject: the struggles of Otway and his joys and sorrows. His rejection of the customary critical approach, however, was a conscious choice. As early as Don Carlos he had manifested a marked distaste for the over-use of these by-products of playwriting. “'Tis not that I have any great affection to scribling,” he remarked, “that I pester thee with a Preface, for amongst friends, 'tis almost as poor a Trade with Poets as it is with those that write Hackney under Attorneys.”³⁵ From his unwillingness to speak upon any other subject than his own emotions, it followed that his works were virtually devoid of those pronunciamentos so indispensable to a dilettante generation, and so much a part of Dryden, Crowne, and Shadwell. The mark of wit, in fact, was in one's ability to edge a fine critical distinction as much as to turn off a bon mot.³⁶ In both Otway was barren. He was too subjective, too much the child of emotion. The portrait of his muse, in The Poet's Complaint, is a perfect bit of self-revelation:

          No fair Deceiver ever us'd such Charms,
          T' ensnare a tender Youth, and win his Heart:
                    Or when she had him in her Arms,
                    Secur'd his love with greater Art.
I fansy'd, or I dream'd, (as Poets always do)
          No Beauty with my Muse's might compare.
Lofty she seem'd, and on her Front sate a majestick ayr,
                    Awfull, yet kind; severe, yet fair.
                    Upon her Head a Crown she bore
          Of Laurell, which she told me should be mine. …
          Nay, by my Muse too I was [often] blest
          With Off-springs of the choicest kinds,
          Such as have pleased the noblest minds,
          And been approved by Judgements of the best.(37)

It is all a naïve pleasure in his past triumphs—of which Don Carlos appears to have been the happiest memory—but of critical understanding of the mood and purpose of his muse, there is here no enlightenment.

One example will suffice to show the near futility of Otway as a critic. The nadir of repartee was reached at this time in his response to Dryden's gibes upon Don Carlos. Here, if ever, Otway was presented with an opportunity to point the direction in which his art was tending, with perhaps some inadvertent reference to the misdirection of earlier tragedy. Instead he set down the following:

A certain Writer that shall be nameless (but you may guess at him by what follows) being ask't his opinion of this Play, very gravely Cock't, and cry'd I gad he knew not a line in it he would be Author of; but he is a fine Facetious witty Person, as my Friend Sir Formal has it; and to be even with him I know a Comedy of his, that has not so much as a Quibble in it which I would be Author of; and so Reader I bid him and thee Farewell.³⁸

It is somewhat surprising to discover that Otway was even vaguely aware of the tendencies of his art, or that he wrote other than by instinct. But as early as early as Don Carlos it may be noted that he was reading Racine, when the rest of critical England was for the most part unaware of the great sentimentalist's existence, and reading him with a fair degree of understanding. “This I may modestly boast of,” he said, “which the author of the French Bernice has done before me in his Preface to that Play, that it never fail'd to draw Tears from the Eyes of the Auditors, I mean those whose Souls were capable of so Noble a pleasure.”³⁹ The last four words, uttered in conjunction with his own praise, are worth volumes of preface for the true appraisal of Otway and his followers. The glorification of the tear was to transform English drama. The new tragedy was created by an age incapable of comprehending the difficult doctrine of tragic catharsis. It was an age dedicated to diversion, and tears were a delight. The poet, without any great critical verbiage, was nevertheless understood by the women of his audience; and ravished away by “so noble a pleasure,” they were granted endless opportunity to weep. The men, moved somehow despite their natures, could attribute the emotion without further ado to the tragic catharsis approved by antiquity.

In the evolution of Otway's tragédie larmoyante, English elements reinforced French. More than a touch of Shakespeare was added to give body to the play; and as usual it was the influence of Othello that was most evident. In fact, as we study Restoration tragedy, it becomes increasingly obvious that the attack of Rymer upon Shakespeare's masterpiece was but a tribute to its popularity. The villain of Don Carlos was again patterned after Iago, and more obviously than in Alcibiades dealt with another Othello in Philip. There were significant deviations, it is true, between the two plots, deviations enforced by the age. Thus, the Spaniard of Otway was easily jealous—as all Restoration gentlemen descending to imminent cuckoldom would seem to have had good reason to be. Furthermore, he was made a weathercock to his every emotion, proving himself thereby a worthy descendant to the race of Almanzor. It is notable also that in the management of the incriminating letter, substituted here for Desdemona's handkerchief, Otway forestalled Rymer's criticism that Shakespeare leaned too heavily upon mere coincidence. We may add that the heroine of Don Carlos everywhere temporized with virtue, in a manner undreamed by Desdemona. Where the love of the latter involved higher laws, in Otway's generation there were allowed no higher laws than those of love. But it is to be credited to the account of Otway that the very faults of the queen made her and her successors far more dynamic to the movement of tragedy than were the faultless Ophelia and Desdemona. The wonder is that Otway did not perceive the implications and forestall future practice by naming his tragedy after the heroine.

Suffice it that the applause bestowed so liberally upon Don Carlos came to the ears of its author most pleasantly. In the preface he remarked: “I dare not presume to take to my self what a great many and those I am sure of good Judgement too, have been so kind to afford me, (viz.) That it is the best Heroick Play that has been written of late; for I thank Heaven I am not yet so vain.”⁴⁰ His disclaimer was not received as current coin by Dryden, nor by Elkanah Settle, both of whom took to themselves some trifling credit in the field of heroics. After reading the modest boast of our poet, Elkanah discharged his bile in quantities of doggerel, with two couplets immediately to the point:

Tom Otway came next, Tom Shadwell's dear Zany
And swears for Heroicks, he writes best of any:
Don Carlos his Pockets so amply had fill'd,
That his Mange was quite cur'd, and his Lice were all kill'd.(41)

The lines so enraged our playwright that he found relief shortly by way of the sword, where it appears he returned an overwhelming reply.

Notes

1. Alcibiades (1675), Epilogue.

2. L. C. Warrants, Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama 1660-1700 (Cambridge, 1928), p. 307.

3. Sophonisba, Epist. Ded.

4. Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), p. 321.

5. Sophonisba (1676), Act IV, sc. i, p. 50.

6. Gloriana (1676), Epist. Ded.

7. For the relations of this play to its source, the Cléopâtre of La Calprenède, cf. Auer, Ueber einige Dramen Nathaniel Lee's (Berlin, 1904).

8. The Spectator, ed. G. A. Aitken (London, 1898), I, 202-203.

9. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, ed. Lowe (1889), I, 105-106.

10. Gloriana, Act II, sc. i, p. 10.

11. Ibid., Act IV, sc. i, p. 39.

12. Ibid., Act I, sc. i, p. 1.

13. Prologue.

14. Mithridates (1678), Act III, sc. ii, pp. 30-31.

15. The Spanish Fryar (1681), Epist. Ded. Dryden qualifies his statement by adding that these are not the true beauties of drama.

16. Mithridates, Epist. Ded. The sources in Shakespeare have been traced to Richard III, Titus Andronicus, and Julius Caesar (Haupt, Quellenstudien zu Lee's “Mithridates, King of Pontus” [Kiel, 1916]).

17. Cf. H. W. Hill, La Calprenède's Romances and the Restoration Drama (Diss., Univ. of Chicago), pp. 53-54.

18. Parthenissa, That most Fam'd Romance. Composed by The Right Honorable The Earl of Orrery (London, 1676). Cf. pp. 197 ff. For earlier editions cf. Esdaile.

19. Lee's Theodosius was indebted to La Calprenède's Pharamond; Lucius Junius Brutus, to Mlle de Scudéry's Clélie; The Princess of Cleve, to Mme de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves. For translations cf. Esdaile, and for the indebtedness of other playwrights to French romance, Nicoll, pp. 86-87.

20. The Rival Queens (1677), Act IV, pp. 48-49. Cf. Curtius, trans. Digby (1725), II, 61: “As for my part, I believe what your Unkle said in Italy to be true, that he had to do with Men, and you with Women.”

21. Rival Queens, Act IV, p. 45.

22. Cassandra (London, 1652), Pt. II, Bk. II, p. 219. For other parallels cf. Hill, op. cit., pp. 103-115.

23. Cassandra, Pt. II, Bk. I, p. 207.

24. Rival Queens, Act I, sc. i, p. 4.

25. “The Stage,” A Collection of Original Poems (1714), p. 27.

26. Miscellanea Aurea (London, 1720), pp. 37-38. Attributed to T. Killigrew, who was a minor contributor. The main body of the work I find has numerous resemblances to that of J. Dennis.

27. H. McAfee, Pepys on the Restoration Stage (New Haven, 1916), pp. 229-230.

28. Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, ed. Malone (London, 1820), p. 174.

29. Of Hart, in the rôle of Alexander, a courtier remarked: “Hart might Teach any King on Earth how to Comport himself” (John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Knight [1886], p. 16).

30. Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies (1784), III, 161.

31. A story is told of the rivalry of Barry and Boutell in the two leading parts of Roxana and Statira and the near extinction of Boutell by the dagger of Barry. This episode might have taken place in some unrecorded performance after the union of 1682, or it may have been Marshall who was confused with Barry (History of the Stage [1741], 21).

32. An interesting line of research is revealed in the work of Lowenberg, Ueber Otway's und Schiller's Don Carlos (Lippstadt, 1886).

33. “Otway and Racine Compared,” British Magazine (1760), I, 462. Cf. Lounsbury, Shakespeare and Voltaire (London, 1902), pp. 182-183, 193, for the irritation of Voltaire at this comparison.

34. Racine, Oeuvres, ed. Mesnard (Paris, 1890), II, 367.

35. Don Carlos, Preface.

36. A fairly heavy piece of Otway's wit is recounted in Walford's Old and New London (London, 1873-78), I, 102, the original source of which is in obscurity: how Otway calling several times without avail at Dryden's lodgings in Fetter Lane where he had been invited to breakfast finally out of patience scribbled over his door, “Here lives Dryden a poet and a wit,” and how Dryden recognized the hand and looking across at Otway's lodgings added, “This was written by Otway, opposite.” According to the story Otway, the next morning, saw the rhyme, “and being a man of rather petulant disposition told Dryden, that he was welcome to keep his wit and his breakfast to himself.” Another anecdote that lends little more credit to Otway's reputation as a wit is told in The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown (1711), IV, 18. It need not be retold.

37. The Poet's Complaint of His Muse; or, A Satyr Against Libells (London, 1680), pp. 4-6.

38. Don Carlos, Preface. Sir Formal Trifle was a character in Shadwell's Virtuoso; I'gad, the characteristic exclamation of Bayes in The Rehearsal. Otway in his Epilogue referred to an actress turning nun, a rather obvious cast at the recent action of Dryden's mistress, Mrs. Reeve.

39. Don Carlos, Preface.

40. Ibid. Booth the actor had it from Betterton that “Don Carlos was more applauded and drew better houses for many years than either The Orphan or Venice Preserved” (Letter to A. Hill, dated June 19, 1732, cited by Cunningham in his edition of Johnson's Lives [London, 1854], I, 213). Cf. Rosc. Angl., p. 36: “all the Parts being admirably Acted, it lasted successively 10 Days; it got more Money than any preceding Modern Tragedy.”

41. The Works of Buckingham (1704), p. 44.