of Otway’s language, Munns resorts to New Historicist and Marxist arguments that focus on theories of how repressive states manipulate contradictions to achieve containment. She can thus admit that Otway’s politics support royal power but nevertheless “go beyond party politics to constitute a critique of the very systems of power and representation the ideology purports and the dramas probably mean to sustain.”

Earlier in the Restoration period, the ideals of honor, love, and friendship were given heroic affirmation in the plays of John Dryden and Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery. Even in his later tragedies, so formally different from these heroic plays, Otway typically does not take the position of denying that these ideals are worthy of desire—indeed, the pathos of his plays would be lost if he did—but instead casts doubt on their power to determine actions. The influence of the heroic tradition on Otway persists to the last of his serious plays in the tendency to conceive of dramatic character as representing the radical expression of human possibility, but, instead of being employed to glorify human potential, this mode of characterization is used to indicate human beings’ pathetic inability to realize their aspirations. Further, Otway was able to rely on the continued urgency of the heroic play’s thematic concerns to direct attention, in a dramatically concise and forceful manner, to his own iconoclasm. The writing of comedy in no way lightened Otway’s vision of the human situation, but, because the world represented is closer to the mean of everyday experience, the substance of his comedies may seem trivial in comparison with his heroic plays and tragedies. A comparison of The Orphan with Friendship in Fashion, however, would also serve to indicate the presence in the comedy of the two thematic motifs, friendship and love, which are the dominant concerns of the later tragedy, and the power of Friendship in Fashion to disturb the most commonly held notions of Restoration comedy suggests that Otway approached the conventions of the comedy of manners not with delight but with something close to moral repugnance. Otway, then, looks to a common area of experience in both dramatic modes, exploiting alike the forms and conventions of comic and serious plays.

The high road of the Restoration heroic play is that represented in John Dryden’s proselytizing of a dramatic practice based on an epic analogy. His two-part drama produced between 1670 and 1671, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, has been considered the apotheosis of his theory of the heroic play, but his earlier play, Tyrannic Love: Or, The Royal Martyr (pr. 1669), was more remarkable for its extravagance of language, character, and situation and its accompanying use of theatrical spectacle than for any truly epic qualities. Elkanah Settle’s extraordinarily successful 1671 production, The Empress of Morocco, and Nathaniel Lee’s The Tragedy of Nero, Emperor of Rome (pr. 1674, pb. 1675) resemble both of Dryden’s plays in the use of rhymed couplets as their basic verse form and in the portrayal of “heroic” love, but they exploit the theatrical values of Tyrannic Love rather than the epic tendencies of The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards. The Tragedy of Nero, Emperor of Rome is of particular interest in regard to Alcibiades, and not merely because it was Lee’s own initial dramatic effort: The choice of classical subject, the fictional elaboration on the facts of history, and the indiscriminate letting of the blood of both protagonists and villains in a manner reminiscent of the Jacobean theater are common to the two plays. Both the plays make use of dramatic sensationalism; The Empress of Morocco had previously shown that theatric capital could be made of a blatantly melodramatic approach to the heroic play in which action was forwarded by villainy and lust.

Alcibiades

Viewed against the perspective supplied by the repertory of Restoration playhouses, the plot of Alcibiades contains no surprises. The plot is built on a single incident drawn from Plutarch—Alcibiades’ expulsion from Athens following a night of drunken sacrilege—but the action of the play begins not with the event itself but with its report to the woman to whom he is betrothed, Timandra. This brief scene of exposition concludes with Timandra’s rejection of the love of Theramnes, the man who supplanted Alcibiades as Athenian general. The remaining action of the play takes place about the camp of the king of Sparta, where Alcibiades had taken himself on his expulsion from Athens. There, the Spartan king’s granting of the title of general to Alcibiades; the secret resentment and desire for revenge of Tissaphernes, the Spartan he replaces; the Spartan queen’s sudden, violent passion for Alcibiades; the appearance of Timandra; the victory over the Athenians; and the capture of Theramnes supply more than the necessary means of spasmodically forwarding the action of the play toward its bloody conclusion, in which the only major character left alive is Patroclus, who is the son of Tissaphernes but nevertheless a loyal friend of Alcibiades. Jessica Munns emphasized the depiction of Tissaphernes as “a perverse and vampiric creation who seeks to regain youth through shedding blood . . . ,” thereby making him the first exhibit in her gallery of Otway’s “dreadful fathers.”

Little can be said for the artistic merit of Alcibiades. In part, the weakness of its dramatic organization might be simply explained by Otway’s failure to amalgamate those materials he had freely and rather too copiously borrowed; nevertheless, Alcibiades yet has something of the characteristic tenor of the later plays, and it is possible to find in it an anticipation of the sorts of problems of form and characterization with which Otway, by the very nature of the kind of drama that he was attempting to write, was later forced to confront.

The titular character of Alcibiades is a major dramatic liability. The historical character from Plutarch is almost completely lost from sight, and Otway never quite squares his presentation of Alcibiades the martial figure with Alcibiades the sensitive lover. Further, the character of Alcibiades is weakened not merely by the disjunction of his characterization but also by his situation within the plot. Although he is at the center of all the various actions of the play, he is a character more acted on than acting. His military triumph over Athens and Theramnes and the killing of his rival in the act of ravishing Timandra were obviously intended to establish his heroic credibility, but the latter action serves only to precipitate the catastrophe of the play—the murder of the king and of Timandra and the suicide of Alcibiades. It is by the forces of lust, deceit, and revenge that the two lovers, Alcibiades and Timandra, are made vulnerable (although it is not as a necessary consequence that they are doomed). That Timandra’s vulnerability seems more emphatic and compelling has much to do with contemporary dramatic and social stereotypes of feminine behavior; from the first scene, however, her articulation of the vulnerability of love places her closer to the realities of the play than is Alcibiades.

The burden of these fears is realized not only in Alcibiades but also in later plays by Otway: Loyalty and love cannot survive the way of the world. She and her lover serve as exemplars of this fact. There is, however, a definite irony, one that Otway may not have fully intended, in the situation that forces Alcibiades to suicide: The “heroic” self-absorption that prevents his admitting any real danger to himself, even when Tissaphernes’ designs are revealed by Patroclus, also renders him incapable of recognizing the peril to Timandra represented by the queen. The force of his love seems rather too summarily expressed by his suicide. Timandra, on the other hand, has only one role, that of the loved one, and from this role the expression of her fears seems naturally to follow. Moreover, her anticipation of the sad worldly fate of her love for Alcibiades is joined in a corrupt Neoplatonic manner to the belief that their love will find its true reward in an afterlife together. The unusual prominence given to this notion in Alcibiades, even as it diminishes its tragic effect, constitutes the most powerful formal demand for the sacrifice of the lovers.

Don Carlos, Prince of Spain

The villainy of Tissaphernes and of Deidama, the queen of Sparta, although in the end self-defeating, is nevertheless efficient in its decimation of the dramatis personae of Alcibiades, and the characterization of Deidama is a gesture in the direction of the heroic fashion of sensually motivated villainesses. Some traces of this dramatic type remain in the duchess of Eboli in Don Carlos, Prince of Spain. Yet even though she aids in the machinations against the prince, it is her husband, Rui-Gomez, who is clearly the central figure in the plot. Reflection on the role of Rui-Gomez suggests some of the changes in dramatic conception that, in the streamlining of the heroic apparatus, made Don Carlos, Prince of Spain a markedly better play than Alcibiades. The action of Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, like that of Alcibiades, entails the pursuit of revenge; in the earlier play, however, there exists another major motivating force, the queen’s desire for Alcibiades. Although Tissaphernes and the queen are brought together in the murder of the king, the need for some coordination or subordination of their purposes is realized too late in the play. In Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, the malevolence of Rui-Gomez, even as it exploits and infects the other characters, is used to concentrate and direct the play’s action. Because Rui-Gomez does not attempt anything so crude as assassination, there is no need for him to follow Tissaphernes’ almost ludicrous course of failed attempts at murder in order that his revenge might be protracted to the length of the play. Rather, because the revenge of Rui-Gomez is to be effected through the jealousy of King Philip, each stay in his scheme seems only to increase its potential yield, until only the death of his son and wife can satisfy the king’s maddened sense of injury.

This concurrent dilation and intensification of the act of revenge resembles the action of William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604), as Rui-Gomez resembles Iago. Iago may have also had a part in the conception of Tissaphernes, but the earlier character is so much an epitome of villainy that any particular touches drawn from Shakespeare are lost in generality. The influence of Iago on the characterization of Rui-Gomez is sharply rendered; the effect is to draw the character into a more particular and probable dramatic world than that inhabited by Tissaphernes. J. C. Ghosh overstated the case for Don Carlos, Prince of Spain when, in the introduction to his edition of the works of Otway, he said that “the characters are not the bloated abstractions of the heroic play, but real flesh and blood”; yet within the dramatic limits of the heroic form, Otway managed to give his characters touches of life that were absent from Alcibiades. The action of Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, however, does not approach the dramatic and moral concentration of Othello. The focus of the play is not so much on the victim of jealousy, the king, as on those characters who suffer on account of his jealousy—his son, Don Carlos, and his recently married queen. The result would be analogous to an Othello more concerned with the fate of Desdemona than with the victimizing of the Moor. As a consequence of the play’s design, none of the characters is allowed the intense moral and psychological regard that is given to Othello.

The love of Carlos and the queen, moreover, is represented not as wrong but as unfortunate, and moral evaluation in the play does not depend so much on the nature of particular actions as on their association with the almost schematically opposed guilt and innocence of Rui-Gomez and the queen. Thus, the king, once he is made to realize the treachery of Rui-Gomez’s counsel, must be allowed the full weight of the forgiveness by his dying queen and his son, allowing him a share in the pathetic emotions of the play’s conclusion. Even the anomalous moral position of Don Juan, whose naturalism is reminiscent of Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606) and near to the contemporary libertinism of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is accommodated more by his allegiance to Don Carlos than by his representation as an honnête homme. (It must be noticed, however, that the blunt sexuality of his relationship with Eboli, which is not disguised by the preciosity of its expression, serves as a negative counterpoint to the ideal quality of the love of Carlos and the queen.) Don Carlos himself is not so absolute a paragon as the queen. The method in which the vacillation of Carlos’s sense of filial duty is made external in his design to defect to the rebels in Flanders adds a hint of moral complexity that aids in forwarding the plot yet, in the end, does not inhibit the pathetic capability of his character. Carlos’s plan to go to Flanders ultimately condemns him in the eyes of his father. It is also an indication of his heroic aspirations, but, most important, it is an attempt to escape the emotional agony of his passion for the queen. The catastrophe of the play follows almost the same destructive pattern as does that of Alcibiades. That Otway could boast in his preface to Don Carlos, Prince of Spain that the play “never fail’d to draw Tears from the Eyes of the Auditors” is a result of his ability to enunciate fully the pity of a love that does not capitulate to the accidents of fate but is destroyed by them.

Adaptations and Borrowings

In his prefatory discussion of the pathos of Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, Otway made reference to Jean Racine’s Bérénice (pr. 1670; English translation, 1676), and in 1676, his adaptations of this play and of Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin (pr., pb. 1671; The Cheats of Scapin, 1701) were combined in a single night’s entertainment at the Duke’s Theatre. Otway’s three acts of Titus and Berenice, although faithful to Racine’s plot and the tendency of his language, are nevertheless an extremely compressed redaction of the original. While the alternation of emotional states remains, the adaptation’s compression short-circuits the sustained dramatic logic of Racine’s play, and yet, considering the remarkable efficiency of the heroic couplets of Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, Otway’s verses seem slack in comparison with Racine’s French Alexandrines. Otway’s Titus and Berenice is similar to the shortened versions of Shakespeare that were produced in the eighteenth century: It supplies the bare bones of the action but little of the quality of the original.

The History and Fall of Caius Marius

Otway, in fact, made use of Shakespearean materials in The History and Fall of Caius Marius, the first of his plays produced after his return from Flanders. Otway openly admitted his Shakespearean borrowings in the prologue to the play, and, until 1744, The History and Fall of Caius Marius replaced Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (pr. c. 1595-1596) in the repertory of the London theaters. Indeed, what little modern critical interest there has been in The History and Fall of Caius Marius has tended to concentrate on its indebtedness to Romeo and Juliet, but a refashioning of Shakespeare’s love story constitutes only a part of Otway’s drama. A more various use of Shakespearean techniques is evident in that portion of the play that represents a historical parallel to current political events in England. Otway’s lovers are separated and ultimately destroyed not as a result of the private feuding of their families but because of their fathers’ engagement in the political antagonisms of the Marian civil war.

Even though Otway employed Plutarch with more integrity than in Alcibiades, his purpose was not simply to dramatize episodes from the life of Caius Marius. Similarly, although his dramatic prologues and epilogues, along with The Poet’s Complaint of His Muse, proclaim his staunch allegiance to the duke of York, he did not simply allegorize the events of the Exclusion Crisis from a Royalist perspective. Rather, the play uses its historical materials to portray the miseries of civil war, a condition seen by many Royalists as the inevitable consequence of the attempt to exclude the Catholic duke from succession to the English throne. Monarchy could not, without blatant anachronism, be introduced into a treatment of the Marian civil war, but the sort of stabilizing, ordering influence that Royalists credited the monarchy as having on the social economy of England is conspicuously absent from the dramatic world of the play. In The History and Fall of Caius Marius, political ambition and factional strife are allowed free play in a Hobbesian nightmare of naked self-interest. Caius Marius himself establishes the keynote of the play when he expresses his desire “to be Great, unequall’d, and alone.” His ambition functions without regard for the Roman commonwealth or for those human values that are evident in his son’s love for Lavinia, the daughter of his political rival. In exposing the hypocrisy of his patriotism, Otway no doubt intended that it should count against those politicians, the first to be called “Whigs,” who claimed that their support of Exclusion was in the best interest of the nation, but that The History and Fall of Caius Marius was a play of narrow political regard and application is denied by its continued theatrical production in the changed political circumstances of the years following the accession of William and Mary.

In such a dramatic context, for which Shakespeare’s history plays, English and Roman, seem a model, the claustrophobic intensity of Shakespeare’s treatment of the ill-fated love of Romeo and Juliet was impossible. Instead, Otway used the story as a counter in which the destruction of the love of Marius’s son and Metullus’s daughter, insofar as it is a symbol of social collapse, serves a wider function than do the similar catastrophes of Alcibiades and Don Carlos, Prince of Spain. The History and Fall of Caius Marius should perhaps be considered a play that marks a transition in Otway’s dramatic work. While the use of blank verse in The History and Fall of Caius Marius (and of prose in its comic sections) is suggestive of other of Otway’s departures from the practice of his heroic plays, the extended focus of the play is nothing like that of the painfully constricted tragedy The Orphan, which followed within a year.

Friendship in Fashion

Although Otway’s first full-length comedy, Friendship in Fashion, is recognizably a product of its dramatic environment, it cannot be made to sit comfortably with William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (pr., pb. 1675) or Sir George Etherege’s The Man of Mode: Or, Sir Fopling Flutter (pr., pb. 1676) as a comedy of manners. It is neither a matter of subject—the title of Otway’s play accurately describes its social focus, and sex was as much at the forefront of its action as in the two plays of Etherege and Wycherley—nor a matter of dramatic form so much as of emphasis, a different attitude taken to the form as it existed. Otway exploits its satiric potential at the expense of that comic brilliance of surface, which at times has been considered the Restoration comedy of manners’s only claim to critical redemption. Friendship in Fashion, in fact, has as much (if not more) in common with Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (pr. 1676), a play that has been similarly resistant to narrowly prescriptive notions of the comedy of manners, as with his earlier The Country Wife (although Otway borrows a character, or at least a name, Mrs. Squeamish, from that play). Yet even The Plain Dealer, while pointing in the satiric direction of Friendship in Fashion, does not go as far. Both plays are concerned with the betrayal of trust, but Otway does not allow a figure such as Fidelia or the reminiscence of the romantic pattern of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (pr. c. 1600-1602) to obstruct his indictment of love and friendship in its current fashion. The misanthropy of Manly is shown by Wycherley to be in excess of the whole of the play’s facts; an unstable but nevertheless a crucial distance is thus established between Manly’s perspective and that of the play. There is no such figure as Manly in Otway’s play, and there is no ground for ambiguity in its meaning. Friendship in Fashion offers the grim sort of entertainment that a Manly might have found in having his views affirmed.

In Friendship in Fashion, the cynical, manipulative rake figure was not displaced from the center of the play’s action, as he had been in Wycherley’s last comedy. Rather, Otway removed the rake both from his position of social power and from his dominant dramatic status. Friendship in Fashion seems an almost precise inversion of the dramatic pattern of The Man of Mode: The action of the play represents the progressive loss of control of Otway’s rake, Goodvile, over his social domain. Goodvile’s attempt to combine a rake’s career with marriage makes him vulnerable, but it is, significantly, Goodvile’s violation of his friendships that is made to seem the effective cause of his cuckoldry, which, in turn, is made palatable by Otway’s complete degradation of his rake. Goodvile not only is morally unattractive but also lacks charm and wit. Indeed, the other major characters of the play are responded to, not on account of their personal characteristics or in terms of their adherence to more or less ideal social or amatory values, but almost purely in respect to their opposition to Goodvile and their frustration of his designs. The play obviously pursues dramatic unity in the compression of its events; there is a coordinate compression, or collapse, of social values.

The Soldier’s Fortune

Just as Friendship in Fashion depended on the comedy of manners, The Soldier’s Fortune refined and enlarged the pattern of contemporary farce. The play contains the constitutive figures of sexual farce—the lover, the boorish husband, and the willing wife—and its action depicts the frustration and delay of the sexual engagement of the soldier, Beaugard, with Lady Dunce, but both in characterization and in the tenor of its action, The Soldier’s Fortune exceeds the limits of farce. The play is heavily weighted with matters that retard a blithe depiction of cuckoldry. Otway is concerned with the subject of unhappy marriage here, as in his other comedies, as something more than grist for the mill of comic invention. The disaffection of Lady Dunce for her husband, Sir Davy, is not represented simply as the pettish response of a willful, sexually frustrated young woman to confinement by an old and unattractive husband, as it would have been in farce. On the contrary, Otway does much to elevate the character of Lady Dunce—she is shown to be clever, discerning, even sensitive—and the fact that her emotional involvement with Beaugard antedated her enforced marriage to Sir Davy extenuates her pursuit of Beaugard and her adultery. In short, her incompatibility with Sir Davy is more than sexual, and her marriage is made to seem a form of injustice.

A sense of injustice is also evident in Beaugard’s complaints against his fortune. Forced to leave London (and Lady Dunce) to become a soldier, he is still almost beggared after his departure. The grievances of Beaugard and his military companion Courtine take them into the position of being outsiders on the scene of London, and, from the beginning, The Soldier’s Fortune is leavened by their acerbic commentary. In this commentary, which distends the dramatic shape of the play, it is tempting to see a reflection of Otway’s own experience and attitudes; nevertheless, it is made to serve a dramatic purpose, reinforcing, for example, the apposition of Beaugard and Sir Davy. Beaugard’s unrewarded loyalty is in complete contrast with the prosperity of Sir Davy’s disaffection with the king. Indeed, the political context in which the play was written exerted a forceful, albeit intermittent, influence. Sir Davy’s plan to murder Beaugard and his subsequent disposal of Beaugard’s body have a parodic relationship to the Whig version of the events of the Popish Plot, and, fueled by prior allusions to Shakespeare’s Macbeth (pr. c. 1605-1606), the obsessiveness, the frenzy, and the utter disregard for even the comic conventions of human behavior at the play’s conclusion are in apparent similitude to the contemporary state of England.

At the end, when Beaugard has finally obtained sexual possession of Lady Dunce, there is little sense of either delight or permanence in the arrangement. Throughout the play, Sir Jolly Jumble, an impotent, bisexual pimp and voyeur, has served them as a go-between, and his involvement is enough to limit the romantic implications of their relationship. The concurrent courtship and marriage of Courtine and Sylvia that function as an underplot to the main action represent a romantic possibility denied to Beaugard and Lady Dunce, despite the hesitation and even the cynicism that results from the pair’s lack of faith in the institution of marriage.

The Atheist

Otway’s last play, The Atheist, a “second part” of The Soldier’s Fortune, was probably written for the same reason as was the second of Aphra Behn’s Rover (pr., pb. 1681) plays: to capitalize on the theatrical success of the original. Beaugard, in the earlier The Soldier’s Fortune, was the same type of character as the “Rover” Willmore; The Atheist was of the same dramatic kind as the Rover plays. In the dramatic extravagance of their use of cloaks and daggers and nighttime intrigue, these plays have more in common with the “Spanish” plays of the early years of the Restoration than with the social comedies of the 1670’s. Yet the one aspect of The Atheist that is an actual sequel to the events of The Soldier’s Fortune—the treatment of the marriage of Courtine and Sylvia—establishes a thematic link with Otway’s earlier comedies. Courtine has reached the nadir of Goodvile’s dissatisfaction with marriage, but his attempts to escape its bonds are complete in their lack of success. His situation is contrasted with that of his brother-in-arms, Beaugard, who by the death of an uncle has achieved a fortune totally unencumbered by the demands of marriage. He, it seems, has entered into a rake’s paradise of financial and emotional freedom. That Beaugard freely marries a widow who had echoed his consistent objections to marriage suggests, however, that in The Atheist, Otway, for once in his comedies, acceded to the satisfaction of a dramatic formula and a romantic pattern. Moreover, both Daredevil, the “atheist” of the title, and Beaugard’s father bear a potential for thematic complication that is never realized in the play. Instead, they supply local dramatic interest in the manner of “humours” characters; they are intrinsically entertaining. Otway’s increased allowance of the claim of comic entertainment in The Atheist may have constituted a recognition that he had exhausted a particular comic vein and may therefore have been an attempt to write a dramatically richer, perhaps a more Shakespearean comedy; it may, on the other hand, have been simply meretricious.

The Orphan

Otway’s personal disappointment in the rewards of military service may have been reflected in The Soldier’s Fortune. In The Orphan, produced earlier in the same year, the uncertainty of virtue’s reward at court is the reason given by Acasto, himself a disillusioned courtier, for the continued rustication of his twin sons, Castalio and Polydore. Eric Rothstein spoke of the influence that the naturalism of Restoration comedy had on The Orphan, while the play’s subtitle, The Unhappy Marriage, suggests a tragic treatment of one of the topics of Friendship in Fashion, and the dramatic prominence of the friendship of the two brothers points to another form of thematic continuity. Although The Orphan does not represent a formal assault on heroic ideals as such, its depiction of the corruption of a rural idyll denies that sense of pastoral whose function in the late heroic play, according to Rothstein, was as “a counterpoise to dismal actualities, a psychological possibility of vacationing forever from corrupt courts, the contests of ambition, the dangers of martial glory, the deceitful lures of fortune.” Moral corruption in Friendship in Fashion seems the common, but local, condition of fashionable life; the tragic power of The Orphan results from the unaccommodated recognition of a corruption that, in its adherence to a world so much closer to the pure facts of humankind’s nature, is made to seem almost universal.

The central dramatic fact of The Orphan is Polydore’s taking the place of his brother Castalio on his wedding night with Monimia, their father’s ward. Although the act itself is only technically incestuous, it registers the shattering of all the chains of social relationships that have, by various means, been fused into a familial pattern. At the beginning of the play, Acasto’s servants mention that Monimia is only his ward and Serina, his only daughter, but in the remainder of The Orphan, this distinction is often blurred. Serina’s character is remarkable only for its lack of prominence. Indeed, the high point of Serina’s dramatic existence begins with her being greeted by Monimia’s brother, Chamont, as “another sister.” The sudden efflorescence of his love for her and its allowance by Acasto does not, however, divert Chamont from an overwrought and morbid concern for his sister. Moreover, the strangely unmotivated secrecy of Calisto’s dealings with Monimia tends to imply that their marriage represents some manner of violation beyond that of the trust of his father and brother. Thus, the celebration in act 2 of his king’s birthday by Acasto, divorced from the changes of courtly fortune and content in the security of his newly extended family, achieves a full measure of dramatic irony. Chamont has come from the court, but it is not he who contaminates Acasto’s world; corruption is already present in his sons.

Critics have been disturbed (or, more accurately, distracted) by the problem of how Polydore, confined by his father to a country retreat, could have learned the language of a fashionable sexual cynicism. Too strict a conception of dramatic verisimilitude obscures Otway’s point: Otway was here using the diction of libertinism, as in the characterization of Don John in Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, primarily in order to express a sexual attitude, not a coherent philosophy. It is not, perhaps, an accident of language that “venery” is a word that comprehends Polydore’s hunting of the boar as well as his sexual pursuit of Monimia. Polydore’s sexual attitude is the efficient cause of the play’s tragic dilemma, but not the formal ground of its tragic significance. Otway, both here and in Venice Preserved, suggests that the actions determining tragedy are neither matters of simple moral choice nor the products of moral intention. The sensibility evident in Polydore’s relationship with his brother, and his regret for his crime, while they offer no protection against, or relief from, the fact of moral pollution, are at the center of the play’s pathos. Because the play is uninhibited by sustained and explicit moral judgment, there exists an almost total freedom of response to the emotional dilemmas of the characters. To suggest, however, that pathetic response is the play’s only dramatic concern is to ignore the power of the play’s moral analysis, a power that resides not in judgment but in recognition.

Venice Preserved

The dramatic progress of Venice Preserved is sustained by the series of shifting moral, political, and personal oppositions that confront Jaffeir, the play’s central character. While the extensive use of peripeteia as a dramatic device may seem to recall the heroic play, its significance has been radically altered. Peripeteia was employed in Dryden’s heroic plays to register the heroic self-consistency of his protagonists in the face of changing fortune; in Venice Preserved, it is the impossibility of moral integrity that is the point of the vacillations in the dramatic action, since Jaffeir is implicated in all of them. The initial, domestic antagonism of Jaffeir and his father-in-law, Priuli, is projected, through the agency of Jaffeir’s friend Pierre, into his joining in a conspiracy against the entire senatorial order of which Priuli is a member. Priuli had considered Jaffeir’s marriage with his daughter, Belvidira, a betrayal of trust; Jaffeir now leaves Belvidira with the conspirators as a pledge of his faithfulness to their cause. Consequently, the first countermovement of the play begins, not as might have been expected, in the initiation of the revolt, but with Jaffeir’s learning of the attempted seduction of his wife by Renault, the oldest and the most morally repugnant of the conspirators. On the tide of his emotional reaction, Belvidira is able to lead her husband to the betrayal of the conspiracy. Although the main conspirators have already been apprehended by the time of his betrayal, thus undercutting the public significance of Jaffeir’s action, this fact does not diminish his consciousness of guilt. There is no possible resolution of the conflict of love and honor, because these concepts no longer exist as moral ideals capable of being reconciled, as in Dryden’s heroic plays. Jaffeir is forced to choose between life with Belvidira or death with his friend Pierre. He chooses death.

Every human relationship, every political act in Venice Preserved seems tainted by sexual motivation. Even the friendship of Jaffeir and Pierre is at times represented in imagery that is unequivocally sexual. This pandemic sexuality cooperates in the representation of the action to constrict the moral vision of the play, and, insofar as Venice Preserved bears a general political significance, it is that the world of politics reflects this fundamental moral ambiguity. Thus, the so-called Nicky-Nacky scenes must be seen as more than a satiric, political attack (though they are that) on Anthony Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, perhaps the most important of the Whig leaders during the Exclusion Crisis, or, in dramatic terms, as merely more or less offensive bits of comic relief. Otway’s presentation of the perverse sexual relationship of Antonio, himself a senator, with Aquilina, formerly a mistress to Pierre, so precisely echoes and counterpoints the action on the “serious” level of the play that a sense of dramatic equivalence is established that qualifies the audience’s understanding of both the senators and the conspirators.

Venice Preserved is the best known of Otway’s plays, perhaps because it is the most accessible to modern audiences. In a sense, the public and private dimensions of The History and Fall of Caius Marius and The Orphan are made to converge in the series of contradictory stances that Jaffeir is forced to adopt. Even though the oppositions that Jaffeir faces are fully articulated, they are perplexed and problematic. Jaffeir, like Antony in Dryden’s All for Love: Or, The World Well Lost (pr. 1677), decides on death as the resolution of conflict, but, since his dramatic existence is so much closer to the mean of human experience, his death cannot be considered an act of romantic transcendence. In Venice Preserved, even more completely than in All for Love, the death of the central character represents a tragic denial of life.