SOURCE: Hughes, Derek. “Otway's The Orphan: An Interpretation.” Durham University Journal 75, no. 2 (June 1983): 45-54.

[In the following essay, Hughes argues against critics who find the design and plot of The Orphan to be disjointed, insisting that Otway skillfully created a work of deep psychological complexity and thematic unity.]

The problem of The Orphan (1680) is familiar. The play claims our attention through its historical importance and promptly forfeits it through its apparent ineptitude of design, since its action proceeds entirely from what most readers deem a singularly motiveless deception: Castalio's tragic yet seemingly pointless concealment of his marriage to Monimia.¹ Recent studies have shown that The Orphan possesses at least a coherence of symbolism—that Acasto's illusory Eden succumbs to the corruption of man's fallen nature and that the idealized Nature of the rural retreat degenerates into the Nature of Hobbes.² But we are still left with the question of whether Otway expresses coherent symbolism in coherently motivated drama, and here the play's apologists have been less than convincing. Aline Mackenzie Taylor seeks to minimize problems of motivation by appealing to factors extrinsic to the play, invoking a variety of seventeenth-century codes of conduct, but even so believes that problems and inconsistencies are slurred over by authorial sleight of hand.³ More satisfactorily, Eric Rothstein suggests that Otway invests his characters with the “lace-cuffed Hobbesianism” of Etherege and Wycherley, a doctrine of “corrupt nature” that promotes the suspicion and mistrust rife in Acasto's household (pp. 100-02). But this, too, is to appeal to extrinsic factors. A tragic reworking of Wycherleyan patterns sounds good in a critical book, but a theatre audience will legitimately expect actions to arise naturally from within the play on stage, and not to have their sources in another play by another author; as it stands, Rothstein's analysis explains one set of apparently arbitrary motives by postulating another. A similar defect mars the analysis of Geoffrey Marshall, who sees Castalio's secretiveness as part of a pervasive failure to sustain Acasto's ideal of plain speaking.⁴ But, since Marshall provides no comprehensive explanation for the repeated failures to communicate, the disposal of one problem merely creates a larger one: why is there so little plain speaking? I believe that the characters' motives are perfectly intelligible, and that Otway has depicted them with great dramaturgic and psychological skill; and I believe that close study of his intentions will reveal The Orphan as a very fine play indeed.

In the opening piece of scene-setting, the servants Ernesto and Paulino credulously describe Acasto's imaginary Eden, delivering panegyrics on all the characters and portraying a world in which Nature is free from taint:⁵ Acasto deserves exemption from the mortality of fallen man (I. 30); an all-beneficent Nature operates only to “bless the Earth” (I. 30-31); Castalio and Polydore are “both of Nature mild” (I. 37); Serina and Monimia pursue only “harmless pleasures” (I. 50); and each young pair is united in a perfect communion of soul (I. 38-43, 47-50), undisturbed by the unruly, egocentric passions that make man a prisoner of himself (we note, however, that this ideal world contains no hint of relations between the sexes).⁶ Such impressions are to recur throughout the play: there are other prayers for Acasto's release from post-lapsarian mutability, other praises of rural innocence, and other panegyrics on characters who are either angelic or “Gentle and kind, as sympathizing Nature!” (III. 274).⁷ But, of course, Eden was lost long ago, as we are reminded when Acasto, the candidate for immortality, falls victim to sickness (III. 35-56): to the corruption that is now an ineradicable part of man's constitution. And, in fact, threats to the rural Golden Age appear immediately after the servants' exit, when the brothers enter to reminisce about their recent boar hunt. In part, the events of the hunt recreate the servants' picture of a world transcending that of flawed humanity: witness Polydore's “God-like” (I. 91), if inconsequential, assistance of his endangered brother. But the hunt also suggests the untamed or dangerous elements that lurk amidst the beautiful rural order, for the boar is a “desperate savage” whose onslaught hurls Castalio down a “Rock” (I. 85-86), here and elsewhere used to symbolize the harsh, perilous aspects of the natural world.⁸ The brothers' enthusiasm for the hunt indicates a compulsion to face and glory in the savage principles of Nature, and this compulsion is quickly expanded into a restless desire for the joys of war (I. 96-106), which in turn becomes so universal as to seem a fact of Nature; for, of the five important male characters, one is a soldier, one an ex-soldier, and three (including the Chaplain [III. 160-63]) soldiers manqués. The universal disposition to war is the most obvious (though not the most important or fundamental) motive force in the tragedy: like the boar hunt, Polydore's rape of Monimia is the expression of an innate but frustrated craving for war, the action of an “Ambitious Soul, that Languishes to glory” (III. 16).⁹

Acasto's Eden is, however, chiefly disturbed by the characters' confused, conflicting responses to their own sexual passions, which invade and master the mind from areas outside its control and comprehension. Though the moments of (often illusory) harmony between passion and object transport the lovers with sensations of “Paradise” (II. 401) and “Extatick bliss” (III. 307), the slightest impediment to desire turns it into a source of raging torment,¹⁰ and the rule of passion can introduce disquiet even into scenes of happiness and fulfilment: Monimia, for example, is troubled by the “Passion” (III. 271) that overwhelms her during the marriage ceremony, and shows a remarkable fear of love even during the imagined consummation of her marriage; for, when she refuses Castalio admission to her bedroom in the belief that he is Polydore, she assumes not that the intruder has come on his own initiative but that he has been sent by her husband “T' affront and do her violence” (III. 540). With comparable disquiet, Castalio can describe his love for Monimia as a humiliating, disturbing bondage even when he is not dissembling his feelings to Polydore: “I am a Fool, and she has found my Weakness,” he muses in one soliloquy: “I am a doating honest Slave, design'd / For Bondage, Marriage bonds” (II. 307, 314-15). And, remarkably, he reveals a resentment at his sexual bondage even when anticipating the “Joyes” of his marriage night, planning to “steal” to them “As if [he] ne're had paid [his] Freedom for them” (III. 300-01). Indeed, both in happiness and misery, Castalio and Monimia repeatedly experience love as bondage, each describing the self as a slave and the partner as a despot, and each thus projecting the inner tyranny of passion on to the character of the loved one. For Monimia, Castalio is a “Conquerour” (I. 280), “a Lord-like Creature” (II. 375), “one that has my Soul / A Slave; and therefore treats it like a Tyrant” (IV. 225-26); yet, for Castalio, Monimia is the “Tyrant” (V. 221) and he the “Slave” (II. 308-09, V.82, 218); and, when she likens men to “conquering Tyrants,” he responds by excelling the abjectness of a “creeping slave” (II. 379, 389).¹¹ Troubled by tyrannic passion, the characters express their disorder of mind in repeated images of wandering, which frustrate all longing for the “Peace” and “Rest” of the prelapsarian soul; rest now comes only in the annihilation of death.¹² Even the corrupt young page shrinks from the unrest of sexual awakening, for he has recently avoided Monimia's company out of shame and confusion at the sight of her “swelling Breasts” (I. 224).

From the very outset, disquiet at his own sexual passions pervades and determines Castalio's tortuous relationship with his brother. When he admits to Polydore that he loves Monimia, he (for the first time of many) portrays love as an unwelcome bondage, troubling the mind with dark, unruly thoughts: love is a tyrant “Attended on his Throne by all his Guards / Of furious wishes, fears, and nice suspicions” (I. 143-44), but Castalio will not (he claims) surrender his “Freedom” (I. 162) to its tyranny by marrying. Somewhat confusingly, however, he combines such cynical pessimism with the sentiments and gestures of an ideal Platonic or Orreryan friend: he and Polydore are “such Friends” as to be “one man” (I. 151-52); and, like a conventional ideal friend, Castalio magnanimously assists the suit of his amicable rival, retiring so that Polydore may woo Monimia uninterrupted (I. 183-93).¹³ Since we do not yet know of Castalio's marriage plans and consequently do not realise his outright duplicity, we merely feel expectantly uncertain about his motives—a quite proper state of affairs during a first act. The revelation that Castalio's marriage to Monimia is already fixed (II. 277-80) may briefly increase our puzzlement at his conduct, but the gradual unfolding of action and character should bring understanding. The sentiments with which Castalio hoodwinks his brother may be conflicting and disingenuous, but they represent genuine, if tragically impossible, aspirations. Castalio is troubled by the bondage of sexual passion. And equally, he does miss his former sympathy of soul with his brother: the boar hunt shows the genuine love between the pair, and in his final conversation with Polydore Castalio movingly tries to reconstruct the friendship they had enjoyed from “Infancy” (V. 362) until the disruptive advent of sexual rivalry. Pretending a rebellion against tyrannic passion that he cannot sustain,¹⁴ feigning the Platonic hero's easy subordination of love to magnanimous friendship, Castalio betrays a hankering to escape from the confusion of sexual desire into the calm, unfallen, and ideal world evoked by Ernesto and Paulino. We can begin to see that, in postponing public recognition of his marriage, Castalio is chiefly postponing his own full and irrevocable recognition of the change that has befallen him. His stupid, ephemeral lies and delaying tactics, however incredible as the products of politic design, are perfectly credible as tokens of confused shame at his emotional turmoil.

Monimia is still more fearful of the unfamiliar shadows that have darkened the tranquil light of reason. Outwardly, as she exclaims on her first entrance, the day is “fair” (I. 202), but inwardly she is filled with sombre thoughts stirred by her passion for Castalio: she is haunted by “Distrust,” “heaviness,” and “Apprehension” (I. 206-07); she is “wand'ring into cares” (I. 210; italics added); and she envies the “Rest” of her parents' “peaceful Grave” (I. 209, 208). And she is afraid not because she has outward cause for suspicion but simply because she has surrendered control over her own nature: she has entrusted her heart to Castalio like a child entrusting a toy to another, and she now fears “its harm, and fain would have it back” (I. 214). Her fear of her own passions becomes yet more pronounced when she fights off Polydore's brash propositioning. When he uncanonically suggests that Adam invented language in order to express his lust for Eve (I. 305-11), Monimia replies with her own reflections on Eden, declaring that the first pair were blessed because “They were the only Objects of each other; / Therefore he Courted her, and her alone” (I. 313-14). In suggesting that the original couple's bliss lay in their unique protection from a disturbing variety of possible sexual partners, she implies that her fearful rejection of Polydore is intimately connected with fear of her own refractory sensuality, and her implied fear soon becomes quite explicit. Rebuffed and humiliated, Polydore consoles himself (inappositely, we might think) with some coarse satire against female promiscuity, lampooning women's “loose desires” and appetite for “Every rank Fool” (I. 349, 351). Yet, remarkably, Monimia at once admits the truth of his satire, indicating that he has touched on her essential motive for rebuffing him: “I own my Sexes follies, I have 'em all,” she replies, “And to avoid it's faults must fly from you” (I. 352-53). Already, Paulino's girlish participant in “harmless pleasures” (I. 50) seems to belong to another world.

After his initial bluster towards Monimia, Polydore himself reveals discomfort at the tyranny of sensual appetite. At first, he trots out libertine commonplaces (“Hence with this peevish Vertue, 'tis a cheat” [I. 331]), and indeed proposes a libertine revision of the Eden story, suggesting that Adam remained mute until, lusting for Eve, he invented language in order to express sexual desire (I. 305-11). In Genesis, of course, Adam was articulate before the creation of Eve, for he first exercised language in naming the beasts (2:19-20), asserting his lordship over the animals with the very faculty of rational discourse that elevates him above them.¹⁵ In his inversion of the Biblical account, Polydore seeks to end the war of reason and sense by diminishing and simplifying man's nature, deriving his traditionally rational attributes from his sensuality: man is superior to his “Vassal Beasts” (I. 308) only in that he has more sophisticated means to express and further the lusts that he shares with them. But the imagined harmony of rational and animal is quickly ended when Polydore's brute appetite is repelled by Monimia's human “Honour” (I. 339): for Polydore, to woo in speech is now “To cringe, … fawn, and flatter for a pleasure” (I. 363), to betray the humiliation of sexual captivity; far better is the lordly, wordless, and ubiquitous copulation of the bull, who singles “his Female out, / Enjoyes her, and abandons her at Will” (I. 366-67). This is no longer the stage libertine's standard nostalgia for the “Promiscuous Love” which is “Nature's general Law,”¹⁶ since Polydore envies the beast's freedom to abandon rather more than its freedom to enjoy; for, when he goes on to plan a bull-like assault on Monimia's “Honour” (I. 374), the anticipated sexual pleasure is to be only a means to the exhaustion and extinction of sexual desire. He will

Surfeit on Joys till even desire grows sick:
Then by long Absence liberty regain
And quite forget the pleasure and the pain.(17)

(I. 375-77)

In his reinterpretation of Eden, Polydore attempted to reduce man's being to the harmonious unity of animal existence—a unity consisting in the unchallenged, undivided rule of sensuality. But the rival claims of sense and reason make man's nature deeply and inescapably divided and the very tokens of his civilized reason bring about a disfiguring slavery to the lusts that they inhibit: he can attain neither the easy gratification nor the easy conquest of desire, and must pursue the most immediately carnal of impulses amidst the slow rituals of speech and the obstacles of restrictive, communally articulated custom (“Honour”).¹⁸ Paradoxically, the irrational, inarticulate brutes are to be envied for their calm indifference to lust.

The sentiments of Polydore's complaint are later to be echoed and elaborated by Castalio, who also contrasts the obsessive lusts of man with the calm of the animal world. On the way to the expected pleasures of his marriage night, he again implies a disquiet at the tyranny of appetite: “every warring Element's at peace” (III. 497), he exclaims, dwelling on the perfect tranquillity of the “Herds,” “Fishes,” and “harmeless birds” (III. 498, 499, 503); yet, amidst the universal peace, he steals to his marriage bed like a usurer visiting his “hoarded Gold” at midnight (III. 507-08), driven by an ugly, indomitable appetite that isolates man from the untroubled simplicity of the natural world. Later, painfully perplexed by his exclusion from Monimia's bedroom, he envies the peace of the grazing deer: “Once in a Season too they taste of Love,” he reflects; “Only the Beast of Reason is its Slave” (V. 26-27). In Castalio's second line lies the essence of Otway's play, for The Orphan is above all the tragedy of “the Beast of Reason.” Man's turbulent, fallen sensuality warps and impairs the potentialities of reason, yet the surviving inheritance of reason makes rebellious sensuality seem a fearful and alien force, to be resented and concealed. Man can neither reconcile the warring elements of his nature nor follow one to the exclusion of the other: Castalio briefly attempts to mimic a Platonic paragon of reason, and Polydore briefly attempts to mimic a bull, but the attempts are alike in their tragic consequences. Throughout the play, Otway is to develop and amplify the conflicts introduced in Act I, examining the irreconcilability of sexuality and reason, and the clash between the inescapable reality of the Fall and the tantalizing memory of Eden; and these conflicts are to determine the course of the whole tragedy.

Rebuffed by Monimia, Polydore consoles himself by lampooning female chastity, and in doing so displays a habit of mind that is to become increasingly evident throughout the play; for, as Acasto's mimic Eden is destroyed by fallen passions, the panegyric tone introduced by the servants is more and more intermingled with satire—against the court, the clergy, the male sex, and the female sex.¹⁹ The satire further expresses the characters' obsession with the divided nature of man (Acasto, for instance, dwells on the fact that the unique gift of speech has become a mere cover for predatory destructiveness), and indeed it further expresses their mistrust of their own divided natures. Monimia, we have seen, accepts Polydore's antifeminist gibes, and elsewhere she herself can generalize at the expense of her sex, declaring that she will “be a true Woman, rail, protest [her] wrongs, / Resolve to hate [Castalio], and yet love him still” (I. 278-79). Significantly, the objects of this self-directed satire are the intractability of her passions and the falsity of her language, manifested in her compulsion to love a man she vows to hate. Still more remarkably, Chamont can warn Monimia thus against the snares of man's speech: “Trust not a man; we are by Nature false, / Dissembling, subtle, cruel, and unconstant” (II. 288-89; italics added). Even when not overtly self-directed, the satirical outbursts can be principally expressions of inner disorder. When Castalio describes woman as an “alluring” but poisonous “Bait,” “made Fair on purpose to undo us” (II. 370-72), he is (as so often) creating in Monimia an image of his own inner division of spirit. And, later, she treats him in the same fashion, providing the most explicit confusion of the partner's character with the inner condition of the self: Castalio, she exclaims, is “False as the Wind” and “Cruel as Tygers;” but she then adds, “I feel him in my breast” (IV. 157-59; italics added).²⁰ In their vituperations against the vices of others, the characters again reveal their fear of their own passions; the pervasive mistrust noted by Rothstein is essentially a mistrust of the self.

Yet the impulse to satire is intimately bound up with a continuing impulse to panegyric. Acasto hymns the abstract figure of the king while denouncing all the concrete particularities of his administration (e.g., II. 114-26) and, similarly, combines extravagant reverence for his wife's memory (II. 134-35, V. 117-18) with dark reflections on the corrupting ills of marriage (III. 85-89, 129-35). In comparable fashion, Castalio shifts speedily from fearing Monimia as a poisoned “Bait” (II. 370) to worshipping her as an embodiment of “Natures whole perfection” (II. 409).²¹ The conflicting yet linked impulses to idealize and denigrate epitomize the conflicting sentiments that haunt the characters in love and in all else. Satire expresses man's fear of his fallen and rebellious nature, while the fits of panegyric are akin to the nostalgia for an Eden whose loss cannot be fully accepted or understood. For the paeans to the ideal are chiefly paeans to a lost, golden past: to the orphans' dead parents, to Acasto's dead wife, and to the king whose birth Acasto commemorates but whom he refuses to see again (lest the actual intrude on the ideal?).²² When Chamont dreams of the sister he knew, his dreams are “gentle” (II. 91), but, when his dreams turn to the future, they become menacing and terrible (II. 222-37). And, for the tormented lovers, the chief golden memory is that of childhood, when no troubling desires divided them: in his final scene with Polydore, Castalio asks him to remember and revive the perfect friendship they had enjoyed from “Infancy” (V. 362), but the harmony of the past is now lost beyond recall.

As though longing for a lost simpler self, Monimia at first characterizes her passion in imagery of infantile play, feeling that she has given her heart to Castalio “like a tender Child, / That trusts his play-thing to another hand” (I. 212-13). Until the catastrophic night, in fact, the conduct of love is repeatedly associated with ideas of play: Castalio, for instance, “play'd with love and smiling shew'd / The pleasure, not the pangs of his desire” (I. 266-67). But childhood is as irrecoverable as Eden. The idea of play is itself often tainted with the fallen, predatory passions of the adult world—“lost … / Thy Honour at a sordid Game” (II. 268-69), “Has he supplanted me by some foul play?” (III. 20)—and, as the make-believe innocence of the fake Eden changes (as we shall see) into actualized nightmare, the play imagery undergoes like transformation; for the last occurrence of such imagery is in Acasto's recollection of the “Dark-dreams, / Sick Fancies Children” that throughout the fatal night “play'd Farces” in his brain (IV. 5-7). The one child figure in the play (the Page) is himself already troubled by sexual feelings, and, when Monimia promises “pretty Toys” for his “harmless sports” (I. 239-40), the imagery of innocent play seems as obsolete for him as for everyone else.²³ With his innate corruptness, the Page exemplifies the loss of Eden; with his incipient sexuality, he exemplifies the loss of childhood.²⁴ The transition from childhood is also portrayed in the emotional awakening of the hitherto cherubic (II. 75) and aptly named Serina, who incongruously sees “Something that's near Divine and Truth” (II. 107) in the anarchically bellicose Chamont, a character who negates all that she has formerly represented.

Though tantalized by memories of an ideal past, then, the characters are troubled by unruly passions that frustrate all attempts to resurrect the ideal and recover Eden. The imagined Paradise of love repeatedly offers only torment, and the characters become more and more dissociated from the innocent scene of “happy Shepherds” and “Chearful Birds” (IV. 83, 94) which they believe to surround them.²⁵ Moreover, their unquiet feelings impel them to create and describe a mental landscape that contrasts with and eventually overrides the outer world of rural beauty, exemplifying most fully the projection of inward states on to outward objects. The characters see themselves, for instance, as surrounded by beasts of prey—“the false Hyæna” (II. 333) and “Tygers” (IV. 158)—and repeatedly evoke scenes of desert and savage solitude in which the imagery of spiritual wandering becomes half-literalized. Courted by Polydore, Monimia expresses her fear of sexual defilement by envisaging herself in a state of destitute isolation amidst a bleak and menacing Nature: rather than yield to sexual impulses whose force she admits, she would “wander through the world a begger” (I. 336; italics added) and “run a Salvage in the Woods / Amongst brute Beasts, grow wrinckled and deform'd” (I. 357-58). To be worse than such near-complete erasure of humanity, the surrender of “Honour” (I. 360) to instinct must for Monimia dissolve all the human attributes expressed in the order of civilized community. Elsewhere, the torment of frustrated or guilty passion is directly translated into imaginary landscapes where the order of civilization gives way to primitive isolation or desolation. At various stages in her advancing misery, Monimia likens her state to that of a “ravag'd Province ruinate and waste” where “Desolation's settled” (II. 382, 384), envisages herself in the squalid disorder of a madwoman, with “Matted … Tresses,” “Bed of Straw,” and “wretched sustenance” (IV. 211, 214, 215), imagines herself “Thrust out a naked Wanderer to the World” (IV. 343; italics added), and wishes to forget she “ever had Humanity, / And grow a Curser of the works of Nature!” (IV. 408-09). Rejected by Monimia, Castalio similarly projects himself into a scene of barren desolation, imagining himself “alone” “upon a naked beach” (V. 287-88); and, in his great curse (V. 500-09), he longs to amplify his inner chaos of spirit into a total dissolution of political and cosmic order.

But the most fully particularized of the imaginary landscapes is also the one which most obviously marks the end of Acasto's mimic Eden. Learning of his unintentional incest, Polydore proposes that he and Monimia should leave Acasto's retreat and “roam, / Like the first Wretched Pair expell'd their Paradise” (IV. 448-49; italics added), seeking a dwelling of elaborate and inhuman grimness, where “Adders nest in Winter” (IV. 450). There, at last, the horror of lust will be forgotten: “Desire shall languish like a withering Flower, / And no distinction of the Sex be thought of” (IV. 456-57). Such are the scenes into which the transient illusions of an erotic Eden resolve themselves, and such are the scenes that increasingly efface the surrounding rural beauty, the power of the mental over the actual landscape being illustrated when Monimia says, as if the successive statements were identical in meaning, “The Scene's quite alter'd; I am not the same” (IV. 69). The imagined scenes of savage desolation are projections of those parts of man's soul that have no part in his civilized and civilizing self; like the final destruction of Acasto's household, they reveal the antipathy between passion and the ordered community for which reason strives and suggest that, in the isolation of sexual rejection and sexual guilt, the characters become wholly devoid of any social being. Indeed, even in happiness the lovers see human society as exclusively embodied in the loved one: for Castalio, “every place is desart” in Monimia's absence, and he himself “Salvage and forlorn” (II. 328-29).

Otway's concern with the alternative reality of the mind's landscapes gives depth and originality to his use of the stock device of the ominous dream, for “Dark-dreams, / Sick Fancies Children” (IV. 5-6) exemplify par excellence the unreasoning imagination's capacity to create terrible alternatives to the reality of the outward, substantial world.²⁶ There are two grimly prophetic dreams in the play—Chamont's dream of Monimia's defilement (II. 222-37) and Acasto's dream of his sons' deaths (IV. 5-16)—and both come true. The dreams do not directly advance the action, but, in the immediate sequel to Chamont's account of his, we learn why Otway depicts the play's calamities as the actualizations of dreams; for, in his next speech, Chamont gives his once celebrated account of his meeting with the hag (II. 240-69). As a destitute, “wrinckled” (II. 246) wanderer through a hostile world, the hag corresponds closely to Monimia's numerous self-projections in a similar role, so that here the sinister, inward images of the mind suddenly acquire substantial, external form; and, significantly, Chamont himself is lost at the time of the encounter, for he has to ask directions from the old woman (II. 257). The directions that she gives lead him into the land of nightmare, for this meeting between a lost man and a desolate wanderer is the point at which the worlds of dream and of solid physical reality start to change places, and at which the mental images expressing the dark regions of the soul start to become palpable and real. As the realization of such images proceeds, the characters find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between their dreaming and waking experiences. Refused admission to Monimia's bedroom, Castalio relives the experience of Milton's newly fallen Adam, cursing the lineage of Eve (III. 579-94) and passing a solitary night on the ground (III. 556) amidst a hostile Nature of cold, “dropping dews” and whistling “Winds” (V. 252-53),²⁷ at once reasserting the Fall and actualizing the desolate imaginary landscapes that express the anarchic, asocial passions of fallen man. And, fittingly, those whose experiences meet with his actualized nightmare have to assure themselves that he is not a figment of dream: hearing Castalio's complaints, Ernesto wonders whether his “sense has been deluded” (III. 560); Acasto, similarly, has to persuade himself that his son's voice was not part of his ominous dream (IV. 21-27); and, more accurately, the still undeceived Monimia recalls the events of her imaginary wedding night by asking her husband, “Am I not then your Wife, your Lov'd Monimia? / I once was so, or I've most strangely dreamt” (IV. 115-16).

Monimia's happiness was all too dream-like and the nightmare-like terrors are all too real, however hard the characters try to banish them to the realm of dream: facing the still ignorant Castalio after her terrible discovery, Monimia actually attempts to treat herself as a figment in a dream, exclaiming, “No nearer, lest I vanish!” (V. 207), and provoking Castalio to respond, “Have I been in a Dream then all this while! / And art thou but the shadow of Monimia!” (V. 208-09). Later, he amplifies the image of illusion, feeling himself caught in a transformation of the familiar world that is now vast and externally contrived: “Where am I?” he cries; “sure I wander midst Inchantment, / And never more shall find the way to rest” (V. 283-84; italics added). At the beginning of her death scene, Monimia for the last time revives the imagery of ideal, rural beauty, likening Castalio's voice to “the Shepherds Pipe upon the Mountains, / When all his little Flock's at feed before him” (V. 416-17). But the original relationship between dream and reality has now been decisively reversed, for the world of rural beauty is now the insubstantial mirage and the malignant creatures of nightmare have irrevocably been translated into solid form. Near the end, Castalio tries once more to restore the surrounding horror to the regions of mere nightmare, charging Chamont to “Vanish” (V. 486) as though he were a figure in a dream. But Monimia's dying words—“Tis very dark: Good night” (V. 470)—have already reaffirmed that the characters inhabit a waking world, however endowed with the properties of nightmare.

The gradual irruption of nightmare into the outward world of rustic beauty represents the triumph of impulses which the characters fear and would escape, and whose existence must be denied if an appearance of Eden is to be maintained; it is the invasion of instinct into the realms of a reason conscious of its former supremacy and unable to accept its contracted and imperfect powers. The failure of reason to cope with instinct is extensively revealed in the characters' attempts to deal linguistically with the experience of brute and sub-linguistic appetite, and it is perhaps significant that the two dreams and numerous imaginary scenes of desolation are all devoid of speech, for these express the regions of the soul that have no part in the ordering contrivances of reason: in his dream Acasto “strove to speak, / But could not” (IV. 11-12), Monimia hears Castalio's words as the “moan” of the “false Hyæna” (II. 333), and when Castalio imagines himself “upon a naked beach” he also imagines himself “Sighing to winds, and to the Seas complaining” (V. 288-89), reducing man's vocal sounds to likeness with the inanimate tumult of a disordered Nature. Indeed, in his concrete realization of his desolate fantasies, “Quaking with fierce and violent desires” (V. 251) on the earth outside Monimia's window, he had also mingled his “mournful sighs” with the whistling “Winds” (V. 254, 253), similarly accommodating his voice to the shrill and inanimate sounds of Nature. Conversely, the identification of language with civilized order is suggested when Acasto remembers killing a rebel for his blasphemy against the king's “sacred name” (II. 144).

When he claims that language originated in Adam's lust, Polydore is trying to reconcile man's linguistic and sensual capacities by making the former dependent on the latter. There are similar attempts, as in Monimia's exclamation to Castalio:

Oh, charm me with the Musick of thy Tongue,
I'm ne're so blest, as when I hear thy Vows,
And listen to the Language of thy Heart.

(II. 398-400)

But the characters cannot sustain the desired harmony between reasoning speech and an appetite alien to its dominion, and from the outset they are inclined to exclude passion from the sphere of language: Polydore envies the bull's inarticulate copulation, and “No Tongue … can tell” Castalio's sexual turmoil (II. 392); and after the calamity, as we shall see, the characters repeatedly shrink from the pain of speech. The division between fallen appetite and the divine gift of speech is best illustrated in the marriage rites of Castalio and Monimia, where the Chaplain's pronunciation of “the Sacred Words” is accompanied and contradicted by Monimia's overwhelming seizure of “Passion” (III. 270-71), itself simultaneous with the seizure of sickness that deprives Acasto of his “Speech” (III. 41) and brings him closer to the final silence of death; like his subsequent silent dream, Acasto's silent illness parallels the lovers' descent into mortal disorders which proceed from the Fall and whose processes are not those of reason and speech. It is perhaps also significant that “the Sacred Words” of the marriage service are pronounced not in the consecrated surroundings of a chapel but in the natural surroundings of a “Grove” (III. 243-44), woods being elsewhere more fittingly associated with the wild boars (the second boar is “the Tyrant of the Woods” [II. 4]) and with Polydore's illicit pursuit of the Page's sister (“in the Orenge-Grove” [III. 13]).²⁸ The scenery of the wedding correlates to Monimia's disordered passion rather than to the ritual words, of the service, with their celebration of a wedlock instituted in Eden and innocency. And the Chaplain himself, a warrior by inclination and priest by force of circumstance, seems more in keeping with the natural than the sacred aspects of the occasion. The language uttered during the ceremony is thus at odds with all its other elements.²⁹

Repeated references to secrets and riddles emphasize the discomfort of reason in the face of appetite, the intense and general wish to exorcise sensuality from the confines of speech; for the secrets are always those of the characters' sensual natures, whether they concern a triviality such as Monimia's garters (III. 464-66) or the momentous fact of the lovers' marriage.³⁰ Conversely, sexual pursuit becomes a quest for the desired partner's secret, while the pursuer's language is viewed as something deceptive and dangerous, masking and dissembling the shameful passions of the speaker while probing and uncovering the secrets of the self: “Oh men for flattery and deceit renown'd!” (I. 226); “But if he swears, he'l certainly deceive thee” (II. 291); “Oh the bewitching Tongues of faithless men!” (II. 332). Through the painful discords of their natures, the lovers recreate the more simply motivated deceptions of the court, where (as Acasto complains) ugly passions are also artfully guarded from promulgation in speech (II. 15-46).³¹

Clearly, therefore, the night of silent copulation, lacking in all tokens of human identity, answers a need deeply felt by all the characters: to escape from the divided, warring condition of human nature into the simplicity of an unreasoning, unthinking, purely sensual experience. The night with Monimia enables Polydore to imitate the envied bull, with its courtship of wordless sensual aggression. Similarly, Castalio hopes that his silent wedding night will accomplish the dissolution of reason: “Thought shall be lost, and every Pow'r dissolv'd” (III. 310), he promises himself; and, like Polydore, he sees Paradise in the abdication of thought, inappositely likening his imagined wordless pleasures to “the Extatick bliss / Of Souls, that by Intelligence converse” (III. 307-08). Castalio is diverted from his silent ecstasies by the Page's relentless talking (III. 442-91), but, by virtue of an indecorous pun, Polydore finds his libertine's Eden “on a pleasant hill / Of springing Joy” (IV. 381-82). Even as the false Eden is created, however, Castalio is demonstrating the continued power of the Fall, mimicking the fallen Adam's posture “on the cold ground” (Paradise Lost X. 851) and reviewing the baneful legacy of Eve (III. 556, 579-94). Moreover, the brief retreat into inarticulate sensual simplicity proves calamitous when language and reason make their inevitable resurgence. Contempt for the allegedly arbitrary conventions prohibiting incest is a standard attribute of stage libertines,³² but we have already seen that Polydore is no simple member of their sect: here, as elsewhere, Otway evokes the stereotyped nostalgia for animal freedoms in order to expose the psychological falsity of the libertine view of man.³³ Man's social and rational nature is gravely flawed, threatened by rebellious inner forces, but it is nevertheless inescapable, and the laws and customs of society express an essential and ineradicable part of man's being. Driven to suicide by violation of a uniquely human prohibition that depends on categorizations impossible to the animal mind,³⁴ Polydore reveals just how alien the tempting simplicities of libertinism are to the psychological actualities of man's complex and warring nature.³⁵

The terrible retrospective transformation of the insouciant libertine prank is wholly caused by the unavoidable operations of speech and reason, and by the ineffaceable memory of what speech and reason convey. Polydore is sensually compelled to blurt out “The secret” (IV. 398) to Monimia, to relive and remember in language the experiences of his wordless, unthinking night; and, as he does so, “A thousand horrid thoughts crowd” on Monimia's “memory” (IV. 386). Once the truth has entered speech, memory itself becomes tainted and tormenting, no longer the repository of the ideal: Polydore briefly hopes that his crime “may be yet a secret” (IV. 425), but Monimia cannot escape remembrance of what has been done, and the “thought” of polluted union with an unsuspecting husband makes her long to escape from reason into madness (IV. 432-33). The pain of memory had first appeared at the end of Act I, where Polydore had longed to “forget the pleasure and the pain” (I. 377) of sexual servitude, and now, amidst the accumulating pain of the last two acts, the desire to escape from memory becomes desperate: Monimia wishes to “Forget [she] ever had humanity” (IV. 408) and to “drown / In dark Oblivion but a few past hours” (V. 211-12), and Castalio longs to “blot” woman from his “Remembrance” (V. 39). Similarly, the characters shrink more than ever from the pain of speech: “search … no farther” (IV. 187); “I cannot speak” (IV. 194); “Name not a woman to me” (V. 35); “Shame … interrupts / The Story of my Tongue” (V. 333-34). As Castalio begs her for enlightenment about the “riddle” (V. 266), Monimia brings the fear of speech to its climax: “If I am dumb, Castalio, and want words” (V. 224); “Did I not beg thee to forbear inquiry?” (V. 257); “My heart won't let me speak it” (V. 268).

But the past cannot be dissolved in silence and oblivion, and Polydore makes his last entrance lamenting the reason, contracted but not extinguished, that denies man both perfect knowledge and perfect, brutish ignorance of self:

To live, and live a Torment to my self,
What Dog would bear't that knew but his Condition?
We have little knowledge, and that makes us Cowards:
Because it cannot tell us what's to come.(36)

(V. 304-07)

Calculatingly, Polydore now uses the tormenting gifts of reason to destroy himself, contriving his death by angering Castalio with a careful selection of words: “Whore” (V. 378), “Villain” (V. 388), “Peasants Cub” (V. 396), “Coward” (V. 398). The first three terms, denoting disgrace within the order and custom of society, cannot stir Castalio against his brother; the fourth, slighting his instinctual belligerence, impels him to lunge at his brother with a sword. But then he too has to face the consequences of a brief surrender to unthinking impulse, and his reasoning self views the action with uncomprehending incredulity: “What have I done! My Sword is in thy Breast” (V. 402), he exclaims, resembling (to vary Otway's own dream imagery) a somnambulist who wakes to confront the results of his sleeping actions.

Even death offers only partial release from the rule of language and memory. In her dying speech, Monimia at first envisages herself “forgotten” (V. 461) in the grave, but quickly turns to asking Castalio to preserve her “memory” from “ill tongues” (V. 468, 466). Polydore's penultimate words, “Inquire no farther” (V. 496), continue to the end the evasion of probing and distressing speech, but the duty to vindicate Monimia's innocence has forced him to leave the truth “written” in his “Closet” (V. 493), inextinguishable even by death. Castalio does die exclaiming, “I now am—nothing” (V. 526), but in death as in life the characters embody secrets that excite relentless enquiry, for in the play's concluding speech Chamont resolves to travel (to wander?) in an attempt to unriddle the enigmatic calamities that have destroyed the household: “I go,” he announces, “To search the means by which the Fates have plagu'd us” (V. 527-28). Chamont locates the secret of the tragedy in the unfathomable intentions of the Fates. But, as Otway has amply shown, the characters have in fact been destroyed by the secrets of their own natures: by the dark and inescapable impulses that haunt and perplex “the Beast of Reason.”

Notes

1. For complaints about the characters' arbitrariness of action, see Edmund Gosse, Seventeenth-Century Studies: A Contribution to the History of English Poetry (London, 1885), pp. 290-91; Christian Science Monitor, May 28, 1925, cited in Aline Mackenzie Taylor, Next to Shakespeare: Otway's “Venice Preserv'd” and “The Orphan” and Their History on the London Stage (1950; rpt. New York, 1966), p. 24, n. 29; Clifford Leech, “Restoration Tragedy: A Reconsideration,” Durham University Journal, XI (1950), 112; Hazel M. Batzer Pollard, From Heroics to Sentimentalism: A Study of Thomas Otway's Tragedies, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Poetic Drama and Poetic Theory, X (Salzburg, 1974), pp. 205-06.

2. John M. Wallace, “Dryden and History: A Problem in Allegorical Reading,” ELH, XXXVI (1969), 284-85; J. Douglas Canfield, Nicholas Rowe and Christian Tragedy (Gainesville, Fla., 1977), p. 113, citing John David Walker, “Moral Vision in the Drama of Thomas Otway” (Diss., University of Florida, 1967), ch. 4; Eric Rothstein, Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (Madison, 1967), pp. 100-03.

3. Next to Shakespeare, pp. 8-38. Mrs. Taylor repeats her arguments in her edition of The Orphan, Regents Restoration Drama Series (Lincoln, Neb., 1976; London, 1977), pp. xviii-xxx.

4. Geoffrey Marshall, “The Coherence of The Orphan,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, XI (1969), 931-43; see also Wallace, “Dryden and History,” pp. 284-85.

5. The Orphan I. 1-80, in The Works of Thomas Otway: Plays, Poems, and Love-Letters, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford, 1932), II. All citations from Otway's works are to the Ghosh edition.

6. The ideals of perfect friendship amidst prelapsarian rural innocence, tragically unattainable in The Orphan, are repeatedly celebrated in the poetry of Katherine Philips (“The Matchless Orinda”). See especially “Content, To my dearest Lucasia,” “A retir'd Friendship. To Ardelia,” “Lucasia,” “Friendship in Emblem, or the Seal. To my dearest Lucasia,” “Rosania shadowed whilst Mrs. Mary Awbrey,” “Mr. Francis Finch, the Excellent Palaemon,” “A Reverie,” “A Country-Life,” and “A Friend,” in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. George Saintsbury (Oxford, 1905-21), I, 520-22, 524, 527-28, 529, 535-37, 549-50, 556-58, 561-63. Praise of rural retirement was, of course, a literary topos: see Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, Volume I: 1600-1700, 2nd ed., Oslo Studies in English, II (Oslo, 1962). Otway evokes the flawed, illusory, or destroyed rural paradise elsewhere: see The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1679) IV. 186-489; The Poet's Complaint of his Muse (1680) 1-21; “Epistle to R.. D. from T. O.” (1684); “A Pastoral on the Death of His late Majesty” (pub. 1688). Otway also, however, translated Horace, Odes II. xvi, in praise of retirement (1684), and uses images of Eden or of pastoral for the purposes of political panegyric: see the Dedication of The Atheist (1684; Ghosh, II, 294) and Windsor Castle (1685) 555-66.

7. For other references to Acasto's desired release from change, see I. 77-80, III. 57-60. For other praises of rural innocence, see IV. 81-96, V.415-17. For other praises of angelic or ideal characters, see II. 75, 409-12, III. 101-02, 281, 513, IV. 30-36, V. 141-44, 247.

8. See also I. 274, IV. 384. Boar hunting is listed among the joys of ideal country existence in Horace's influential Epode ii.31-32 and in Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski's Epode i: see The Odes of Casimire, trans. G. Hils (1646), The Augustan Reprint Society, XLIV (Los Angeles, 1953), p. 121. Otway takes a typical feature of rural pleasure and fills it with a typical menace.

9. For other examples of the inclination to war, see I. 9, 60-74, II. 128-29, III. 111, 334-35.

10. For other illusory and transient sensations of Paradise, see I. 305-11, IV. 380-82, V. 193-97.

11. For other images of servitude and conquest, see IV. 239, 245, V. 275.

12. For images of wandering, see I. 316, 336, 370, III. 313, 325, 562, 590, IV. 343, 448, V. 230. For images of peace and rest, see I. 17, 128, 177, 194, 209, II. 150, 404, III. 234, 248, 316, 494-503, IV. 2, 50. For images of restlessness and disquiet, see I. 74, 104, II. 385, III. 518, IV. 75, 166, 384, 394-95. for the identification of rest and death, see I. 208-09, V. 426-28. Similar combinations of imagery occur in Paradise Lost: see, e.g., II. 521-26, 561-69, 614-18, VIII. 180-89, IX. 631-42. My text of Paradise Lost is that in Milton: Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (London, 1966).

13. For heroic characters assisting rival friends in love, see, e.g., Lodowick Carlell, The Deseruing Fauorite (London, 1629) I, sigs. C^v, E^v-E3^v; The Fool Would be a Favourit (1637), ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Waltham Saint Lawrence, 1926) IV, pp. 69-70, V, p. 87; William Habington, The Queen of Arragon (London, 1640) IV, sig. [G3^v]; Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, Henry the Fifth (1664) II.iii.250-355, V.iv.307-406; Mustapha (1665) III.iii. 395-422; Tryphon (1668) IV.i. 53-136, in The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, ed. William S. Clark (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), I. The motif is far less prominent in the heroic play of the seventies, in which passion is often far from the tame slave of reason. An example is, however, provided in the rivalry of Ptolomy and Lysimachus in Samuel Pordage's The Siege of Babylon (London, 1678): see, e.g., I, pp. 3, 5-6, II, pp. 13-14, IV, p. 34. Like The Orphan, Nathaniel Lee's Theodosius (1680) portrays a futile gesture of magnanimous rivalry in a world where passion is tragically divisive (III.ii.338-75, in The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke [New Brunswick, N.J., 1954-55], II. All citations from Lee's works are to this edition). The protagonist of Lee's Caesar Borgia (1679) briefly and cynically deceives his rival brother by pretending to resign his mistress to him (II.i.172-234). The Atheist (1683) also portrays a flawed gesture of magnanimous rivalry: dying, Porcia's husband bequeaths her to the friend who was his rival (III. 353-60), but the bequest is cruelly in conflict with Porcia's own feelings. Orrery is generally regarded as the author of “The History of Brandon,” the source of The Orphan, and here Orrery himself shows the failure of the ideals so repetitively celebrated in his plays: although Brandon and his brother “seem'd to have but one Soul, which actuated both [their] Bodies,” Brandon finds that his passion for Victoria easily overcomes fraternal love (English Adventures [London, 1678], pp. 19, 24-27).

14. For other examples of Castalio's attempted rebellion against passion, see III. 547-55, IV. 111-14, 120-23, 130-35.

15. See, e.g., “On the Account of the World's Creation Given by Moses,” in Philo, trans. F. H. Colson, G. H. Whitaker, et al., Loeb Classical Library (London and New York [subsequently Cambridge, Mass.], 1929-53), I, 116-19.

16. Aureng-Zebe (1675) IV. 132, in John Dryden: Four Tragedies, ed. L. A. Beaurline and Fredson Bowers (Chicago, 1967). The speaker is Nourmahal.

17. Polydore's envy of the bull clearly recalls Pharnaces' envy of the stallion in Lee's Mithridates (1678) II.i.40-51. Pharnaces, however, envies only the stallion's unrestrained promiscuity. For similar envy of animal promiscuity, see The Libertine (1675), in The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers (London, 1927), III, II, 43-44. For simple libertine sentiments in Otway's plays, see Alcibiades (1675) II. 183-89, III.354-61; Don Carlos (1676) II. 1-9, 33-36, III. 1-5; Caius Marius III. 104-13; The Atheist III. 1-42.

18. Aristotle derives man's natural inclination to civilized society from his unique gift of reasoned speech (logos), whose function is to communicate the distinction between useful and harmful, and right and wrong (Politics 1253a). Polydore's sentiments, however, contrast more nicely with Horace's account of man's emergence from the State of Nature (Satires I.iii.99-110). Horace regards the invention of speech as the starting point of civilization and sees pre-civilized man as sharing the sordid and dangerous mating habits of the bull.

19. For satire against the court, see II. 19-46; against the clergy, III. 194-204, 220-27; against man, II. 104-05, 332-37; against woman, III. 29-34, 129-35, 579-94, V. 1-16, 45-50. Castalio's denunciation of woman (III. 579-94) is plagiarized in [Richard Ames], The Folly of Love; or, An Essay upon Satyr Against Woman (London, 1691), p. 24, reprinted in Satires on Woman (1682, 1687, 1691), Augustan Reprint Society, CLXXX (Los Angeles, 1976). The impulse to satire is derived from the Fall in Dryden's “A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693), in “Of Dramatic Poesy” and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, Everyman's Library (London and New York, 1962) II, 97.

20. The intricately motivated satirical outbursts in The Orphan may be contrasted with the far simpler passages of antifeminist satire delivered by Lee's characters, who respond simply and without self-description to the conduct of others: see Nero (1674) V.iii. 31-49; Sophonisba (1675) I.i.201-14; Gloriana (1676) I.i.192-96; The Rival Queens 1677) I.i.27-36; Mithridates III.ii.527-35, IV.i.292-307 (a possible source of Castalio's antifeminist tirade); The Massacre of Paris (1679? perf. 1689) III.ii.122-28; The Princess of Cleve (1680?) V.i.34-39.

21. For other shifts between praise and satirical suspicion, see III. 115-28, 220-35.

22. For idealization of the orphans' parents, see II. 81, 151, 190, 205-18, III.178-81, 229-30; of Acasto's wife, II. 134-35, V. 117-18; of the king, I. 25-29, II. 121-26, 138-39.

23. For other imagery of play, see I.187, 261-62.

24. In The Poet's Complaint 63-75, Otway contrasts the happiness of his “first years” (63) with the “Discontent” (73) of later life. The discontent is, however, initiated by the death of his father. (71).

25. For further stress on the characters' dissociation from their apparently ideal surroundings, see V. 237-43, 413.

26. The fantasies of destitution and desert isolation themselves have the character of nightmare. In A Treatise of Dreams & Visions (London, 1689), Thomas Tryon notes that the melancholy are troubled with dreams “of being surrounded with Darkness, or confined to some close Dungeon, left alone in a Wilderness, oppressed with Poverty, Want and Dispair” (p. 54).

27. Adam denounces Eve and her heirs in Paradise Lost X. 867-908 and lies down on the cold ground in X. 850-51. In Milton, however, the night ends in reconciliation.

28. In “The History of Brandon” the wedding also takes place in a grove (p. 32), but Orrery does not give the grove the extra associations that it has in Otway.

29. The irony with which Otway surrounds the wedding seems to tell against Mrs. Taylor's claim that Otway stresses the sacramental quality of the lovers' marriage (Next to Shakespeare, pp. 21-24). Jack D. Durant has revived Mrs. Taylor's argument, and transferred it to the marriage of Jaffeir and Belvidera, in “‘Honor's Toughest Task’: Family and State in Venice Preserved,” Studies in Philology, LXXI (1974), 484-503.

30. For concern with secrets, see I. 230-45, II. 202, 311, III. 188-259, 378, 406, 464-66, IV. 78-80, 220, 360, 389, 398, 425. On two occasions (II. 320-III. 14, III. 286-312) Polydore spies personally or by proxy on the secret dealings of Monimia and Castalio.

31. The absence of plain speaking, treated as an unexplained dramatic donnée in Marshall's account, is thus amply and subtly motivated.

32. For the association of libertinism and incest, see Aureng-Zebe IV. 131-35; The Libertine I, pp. 26-27; Friendship in Fashion (1678) II. 50-53. Even the hero of Dryden's Don Sebastian (1689) is momentarily and involuntarily attracted by the libertine view (V.i.638-44, in Four Tragedies, ed. Beaurline and Bowers). Lee's Nero and Caesar Borgia combine libertinism and incest in practice, though they do not theorize in defence of incest (Nero, I.i.141-48, I.ii.31-32; Caesar Borgia I.i.262-76, II.i.324-35). See also Otway's Phædra to Hippolytus (1680) 130-40 and its source, Ovid, Heroides iv. 129-38.

33. Of Otway's characters, Don John, Jaffeir, and Daredevil also exemplify the psychological inadequacy of libertine doctrine.

34. For the beasts' unawareness of kinship, see Lee, Theodosius II.i.387-88: “Free as the forrest Birds, we'll pair together, / Without remembering who our Fathers were.” (The lovers' problem is here, however, not kinship but difference in rank).

35. Mrs. Taylor explains “The inconsistency of Polydore's libertinism with his suicide” by suggesting that he represents a contrived amalgamation of conflicting ideas (Next to Shakespeare, pp. 23-24). Otway's characterization seems to me far less artificial and insubstantial than her analysis suggests.

36. According to Robert South, the unfallen Adam's “understanding could almost pierce into future contingents, his conjectures improving even to prophecy, or the certainties of prediction” (Sermon on Genesis 1:27, in Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions [Oxford, 1823], I, 37).