[In the following essay, Solomon argues that critics of Venice Preserv'd have understood neither the age in which the play was written nor the author's political intentions.]

Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1682) has always posed interpretive problems for literary critics and stage directors.¹ Although initially received as a Tory “Paean of Triumph” over the Whigs who sought to exclude the Duke of York from the throne, the play resists simple thematic dichotomy into discredited Whig rebels and vindicated Tory oligarchy. Frustrated in their attempts to interpret the play as coherent political allegory, critics have almost universally tempered their admiration of the play with censure of its inconsistencies of theme and characterization.

In order both to do justice to the contemporary reception of Otway's play as unambiguously Tory in sympathy and to justify as rhetorically successful the alleged inconsistencies of theme and characterization, I argue that Venice Preserv'd should be interpreted as court propaganda designed to discredit inflammatory Whig rhetoric and to win moderate Whigs to the Tory cause. I begin with the political background to Venice Preserv'd, then consider the difficulties in coherently interpreting the play, and, finally, offer my own interpretation.

I. THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF VENICE PRESERV'D

During the Restoration “stage and state were scarcely a letter apart.”² This was especially true of the years 1679-1682 when the Country party, led by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, sought in the name of English liberty to exclude James, Charles's Catholic brother and heir apparent, from the throne. The two theaters, ever dependent on the patronage of the Court party, became even more openly partisan, and during the Exclusion Crisis “few plays were produced which were not largely political in their allusions, if not in their entire plots.”³ Charles's theatrical monopoly and his Lord Chamberlain's supervision insured that political statement in drama was virtually an extension of court doctrine or apologetics.⁴ Four of Otway's plays were produced during the Exclusion Crisis, Venice Preserv'd coming climactically in February of 1682. Court patronage for Otway in these years is unmistakable, including an honorary M.A. from Cambridge and the award of the enormous sum of £5,000 per annum to tutor the king's and Nell Gwyn's bastard son. Clearly Charles believed that Otway's pen was serving his political purposes.

Charles's need for an effective court propagandist was never greater than in the years following Titus Oates's allegations of a Popish Plot—a period when the general political hysteria “threatened at times to erupt into a major revolution.”⁵ Shaftesbury's single-minded commitment to enacting legislation to exclude the Duke of York polarized the nation into hostile parties, each claiming the allegiance of the moral majority and denouncing the other's subversive factionalism. In Whig rhetoric, enemies of exclusion were a small, parasitical and popishly inclined band of court sycophants; to the Tories, Shaftesbury's Whigs were a “rabble, led by a clique of conspirators who cynically exploited alleged grievances and the protestant religion in order to gratify their lust for power.”⁶ This rhetorical vision of the Whigs was conscious strategy on Charles's part. Certainly his speech upon dissolving the Oxford Parliament on March 28, 1681 contrasts his own sweet reasonableness with the reckless and self-interested revolutionary fervor of the Whigs, the same contrast that concludes Dryden's masterpiece of political apologetics, Absalom and Achitophel. Dryden and Otway were only two of many Tory journalists who developed an unsubtle but rhetorically effective depiction of the Whigs “as would-be authors of another civil war.”⁷

Shaftesbury, predictably, was the rhetorical focus for the Whig characteristics that Otway loathed: “the false piety shrouding a mercenary heart, and the sly bourgeois opportunism which stops at nothing, not even murder, in the pursuit of material aggrandizement.”⁸ In Otway's Caius Marius (August or September, 1679) Shaftesbury is ridiculed as Old Marius, the corrupt and cruel politician who draws this moral from his own deservedly dreadful end:

Be warn'd by me, ye Great ones, how y' embroil
Your Country's Peace, and dip your Hands in Slaughter.
Ambition is a Lust that's never quencht,
Glows more inflam'd and madder by Enjoyment.(9)

The following February in Otway's The Poet's Complaint of his Muse Shaftesbury copulates with the old Presbyterian witch to engender Libell, the allegorical representation of defamatory Whig propaganda. The most virulent of Otway's attacks on Shaftesbury, however, appears in Venice Preserv'd, where the Whig leader is both the corrupt and sexually perverted Senator Antonio and the bloodthirsty revolutionary Renault.

Throughout the Exclusion Crisis Charles's political judgment was “almost faultless”¹⁰ and the presentation of Venice Preserv'd was a cleverly orchestrated political event. The play opened on the ninth of February. Charles himself attended the third performance, that from which the playwright received the proceeds. On April 21, a day of Tory celebration when the Duke of York was enthusiastically entertained by his supporters at Merchant Taylor Hall, he went to the theater—the Duke's Theatre—to see Otway's tragedy. To further highlight the political significance of the visit Dryden wrote a special prologue and Otway a special epilogue, both celebrating the Tory victory. The prologue and epilogue were especially “Recommended to All Men of Sense and Loyalty” in the Tory Observator of April 27.¹¹ Dryden and Otway wrote still another set of propagandistic prologue and epilogue when the Duchess of York attended the play on May 31. It is impossible, therefore, not to number Venice Preserv'd “among the propaganda pieces engendered” by the political turmoil of the Exclusion Crisis.¹² John Loftis calls it the “finest political satire in dramatic form.”¹³ Certainly it was as a symbol of the Tory victory over the Whig Exclusionists that Venice Preserv'd received such an immensely popular and prestigious reception.¹⁴

II. THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETING VENICE PRESERV'D

Although Venice Preserv'd is still regarded as “one of the most notable political plays in the language”¹⁵ and although it has usually been considered the best tragedy of its period, modern criticism has found the play virtually impossible to interpret coherently. What most critics seek is an interpretation that will do justice both to the aesthetic autonomy of the work and to its political relationship to the events of the Exclusion Crisis. Unable to make the dynamics of the drama systematically correlate with Otway's partisan political intentions, “almost all modern critical discussions have emphasized the play's defects.”¹⁶ Praise of the play is almost always “tempered with censure, if only a vague suggestion that despite its sweep and passion, there is something in it which is fundamentally not quite right.”¹⁷

For one thing, critics object, the characterizations are problematic. Venice Preserv'd is a play, one critic contends, “where it is impossible to sustain a fixed view of the central characters”; the result is that the audience is disoriented and finds in scene after scene “an air of alarming dissonance.” Jaffeir, for example, has been called “the most equivocal of tragic heroes.”¹⁸ One critic sees him as “a great and lofty soul,”¹⁹ another as “a weakling, incapable of heroism.”²⁰ Jaffeir's revolutionary friend, Pierre, is similarly interpreted by some critics as a self-seeking political malcontent, by others as another Brutus idealistically dedicated to the destruction of tyranny.²¹ Jaffeir's wife, Belvidera, too, is alternatively seen as a lascivious weakling and as a heroine of “great nobility,”²² as either the cause of Jaffeir's betrayal of his noble co-conspirators or as his moral redemption.

Nor is there greater consensus over Otway's attitude toward the two groupings of characters: the Venetian Senate and the revolutionaries. The political allegory here, one critic asserts, “will not bear examination” because “the artistic sympathy created for the conspirators clashes with the political sympathy solicited for the senate.”²³ “The action of Venice Preserv'd is inconsistent as political allegory,” another critic argues. “Both the Senate and the conspirators are corrupt, and if either may stand for the Whigs, both can scarcely do so.”²⁴ The histories of stage interpretation and audience response show this problem to be practical as well as notional. Banned in London in 1777 for its “dangerous republican tendencies,” the play was in the same year a favorite with General Howe's intensely Tory officers quartered in New York.²⁵ Having Shaftesbury ridiculed in both lecherous old men, Renault the conspirator and Antonio the Senator, Otway intends to show, one critic argues, “that both sides of the civil struggle have men who are vicious and corrupt,”²⁶ an interpretation that is difficult to harmonize with the focus on Shaftesbury in both characterizations, with Otway's politics, and with Tory enthusiasm over the play in February of 1682.

Uncertainty about how individual characters and even groups of characters are to be interpreted, critics have suggested, grows out of the problematic nature of the fable Otway adopts: Abbé de St. Réal's La Conjuration des Espagnals contre la République de Venice. “It has been observed,” Addison wrote in 1711, that Otway “founded his Tragedy of Venice Preserv'd on so wrong a Plot, that the greatest Characters in it are those of Rebels and Traitors. Had the Hero of his Play discovered the same good Qualities in the Defense of his Country, that he shewed for its Ruin and Subversion, the Audience could not enough pity and admire him.”²⁷ Johnson concurred, finding a similar lack “of morality in the original design” of the drama.²⁸ Both Addison and Johnson presuppose that actions against a representative political body are inherently vicious, ignoring two aspects of Otway's immediate context: the Tory view of Shaftesbury's manipulation of Parliament as a revolutionary act against legitimate succession, and the Whigs' propagandistic use of the Senate of Venice as a democratic ideal to contrast to the existing British Parliamentary System.²⁹ Subsequent critics who have attempted to correct the interpretive oversimplifications of Addison and Johnson have provided not a coherent counter-interpretation but an apology for ambiguity. Otway, the argument runs, was too subtle an artist to capitulate to “party spirit” and consequently did not view rebellion as either inherently praiseworthy or damnable. In contrast to lesser propagandistic playwrights, Otway saw in rebellion “a more profound image of the tragic moment in which ideas and sensations of necessity and freedom, irreconcilable obligations of public and private origin, and the eternal struggle to remain human exist together to form a complex pattern which is as ambiguous and paradoxical as the vision inspired by the ‘party spirit’ is clear and settled.”³⁰ “I do not think it entirely a Tory play,” another critic believes. “Its primary purpose is to furnish us with a tragic view of human nature that transcends the distinction between Whig and Tory.”³¹

Thus the breakdown of the political allegory, seen by some critics as a conceptual, structural defect of Venice Preserv'd, becomes its strength. Otway was too fine an artist, so the argument goes, to write political propaganda; instead, he wrote tragedy. The “political ambivalence” of the tragedy, according to this now-dominant, revisionist reading, “contributes to its strength rather than to its weakness” by transcending “immediate issues” in order to attain “a universal pertinence.”³² Such an interpretation presupposes that, however “political allusions heighten the effect,” Venice Preserv'd is “a play whose meaning is not essentially political.”³³ As another critic states, “political interests … remain subordinate” to Otway's desire “to foster that pathos which the theoretical critics demanded.”³⁴ Consequently, it is Otway's allegiance to the imperatives of pathetic tragedy that determines the drama, not his political allegiance to Charles II. One critic, freed from the constraints of evidence, even argues that Charles disliked the ambiguous politics of the play but was too wise to object to the miscomprehending Tory jubilation.³⁵

This depoliticizing of Venice Preserv'd is an interpretive technique for turning perceived dramatic inconsistencies and inadequacies into rich ambiguities. “If Venice Preserv'd has a didactic point,” a recent critic writes, “one is hard put to see what it might be. Everything is too finely balanced.”³⁶ Critics see Otway's as a “hard” rather than a “soft” tragedy, refusing as they claim it does to “impose some kind of solution upon the conflicting claims of life.”³⁷ According to another critic, “[T]he apparent weaknesses in characterization and construction, the hysterical emotionalism, the contradictions in tone fall into place to reveal a somber indictment of the late Restoration world, as a dark satiric tragedy worthy of the Jacobean dramatists.”³⁸ Otway's eschewal of partisan politics and his rejection of the corrupt spirit of his age are what, according to modern criticism, make his play “startlingly modern” and “existential.”³⁹ Accounts of the “probable political occasion” of the play or of Otway's “party affiliations” are seen as irrelevant to “our critical concern with the underlying tone and tragic outlook” of Venice Preserv'd.⁴⁰

This now-common “tragic” interpretation of the play ought to give critics pause, since it so drastically contrasts with the response of Otway's contemporaries. Obviously, a contemporary audience may misread a text; they may, for example, believe they were witnessing a Tory “Paean of Triumph” over the Whigs when, in reality, they are seeing a “somber indictment” of both parties. Similarly, a poet might intend one thing and be betrayed by genius into another thing entirely; he might attempt propaganda but achieve tragedy. Still, an interpretation that incorporates the author's known political opinions and the immediate audience's response would seem to have greater probability than one that, disregarding history, contradicts both.

Although many of the readings of Venice Preserv'd offered by modern critics are eloquent and interesting, I believe they are fundamentally mistaken in deemphasizing the propagandistic character of Otway's tragedy. Freed from the moorings of the play's immediate occasion, they sometimes drift on the wide, unchartable waters of conjecture only to arrive at interpretive shores as different as London and New York in 1777. Moreover, the claim to legitimize incoherence into ambiguity is suspiciously like sleight-of-hand, and assumes that Otway valued ambiguity as much as modern criticism does. The most serious objection to these current interpretations, however, is that they systematically misread as deliberately incoherent a play that is artistically coherent, that they read as amoral a drama that is fundamentally didactic, and that they read as “not essentially political” a tragedy that is as clear an example of partisan propaganda as British literature can show.

III. THE KEY TO VENICE PRESERV'D

I agree, then with Aline Mackenzie Taylor's judgment that “since Venice Preserv'd won royal favor at its premiere and was stigmatized as a Tory play thereafter, it seems clear that the point of view from which the action may be seen to best advantage is that of its first audience.” However, I disagree with her ingenious depoliticizing of the play, whereby the modern reader is urged to assume a “mood of political irresponsibility” that will put the interpretive focus on the private grievances of the major characters.⁴¹ Instead, I believe the interpretive key to the play is to see Otway's propagandistic purpose as threefold: to dramatize the moral anarchy of revolution; to discredit inflammatory Whig rhetoric; and to win moderate Whigs to the Court cause. The first purpose has been generally acknowledged and is at the root of “existential” readings of Venice Preserv'd. The giddying proliferation of self-contradictory oaths and allegiances that breeds the tragic alienation of the Senatorial son-in-law Jaffeir from his soulmate, the revolutionary Pierre, is compellingly documented in almost every study of the play. Where such interpretations err, it seems to me, is in viewing the moral anarchy of revolutionary Venice as a microcosm of all human existence and, thereby, in seeing Otway as essentially “modern” and apolitical.

In fact, Otway's intention is primarily propagandistic—and by that I mean he intends to have an immediate effect on the political beliefs and actions of his audience. Rhetorically, revolution was a Whig association, in contrast to which stood Charles and all his allied established hierarchies in church, state, and law. Those many critics who have despaired of identifying a consistent “political allegory” of Whigs and Tories in Venice Preserv'd have failed to see that Otway's “Paean of Triumph” over the Whig Exclusionists is a play populated entirely by Whigs. The conspirators, including Renault/Shaftesbury, are Whig revolutionaries; the corrupt Senators, including Antonio/Shaftesbury, are Whig parliamentarians. One searches in vain for a Tory constituency in the play; there is no ideal political establishment. A few critics have acknowledged even this point. Where their attempts at consistent interpretation fail, however, is in accounting for the intermittent heroic action of the revolutionaries. A satisfactory interpretation must explain why Otway creates self-interested Whig revolutionaries who are simultaneously, if intermittently, heroic, sensitive, sympathetic, and honorable.

It is rhetorically essential to Otway's appeal to the Whigs in his audience that he discredit Whig revolutionary rhetoric. This amounts, in large part, to discrediting Pierre's rhetoric. The play, in essence, is a cautionary tale in three stages. First, Jaffeir is radicalized by his friend Pierre into seeing his personal, private grievance against his father-in-law, a Venetian senator, as justification for political rebellion. Then, he is convinced by his wife Belvidera to denounce his evil coconspirators to the Senate. The contrast between a satanic Pierre tempting his friend to sin and an angelic Belvidera calling Jaffeir to redemption through confession is vivid. Act 2, scene 2 abounds in references to the “hellish” midnight meeting of conspirators and, more specifically, to Pierre as Satan. Given money by his friend, Jaffeir exclaims:

                                                            I but half wished
To see the Devil, and he's here already.
Well!
What must this buy, rebellion, murder, treason?
Tell me which way I must be damned for this.

(2.2.34-38)

When the conspirators meet again, Jaffeir laments his ill-advised association:

Heav'n! where am I? Beset with cursed fiends,
That wait to damn me; what a devil's Man,
When he forgets his nature.

(3.2.302-4)

Finally, Jaffeir acknowledges that Belvidera's arguments against revolution are just: “By all heaven's powers, prophetic truth dwells in thee” (4.1.69). Yet though Jaffeir betrays the plot he never overcomes Pierre's bad counsel. In the final stage of the play Jaffeir fanatically follows the conspirators to death and damnation. On the scaffold where the proud and adamant Pierre contemptuously refuses the priest as a “tempter,” Jaffeir is still ready to sacrifice all to Pierre's satanic extremism:

                                                            Thy wishes shall be satisfied.
I have a wife and she shall bleed, my child too
Yield up his little throat, and all t'appease thee.

(5.3.84-86)

Instead, Jaffeir commits suicide, characterized by the priest as a “Damnable deed!”

Pierre leads Jaffeir to damnation by seducing him into sharing a Whig rhetorical vision that transforms private, petty grievances into patriotic political causes. Tory propaganda systematically characterized the Whigs as “concerned only to exploit popular grievances in order to advance their own subversive purposes, not to relieve the people who were being cynically used.”⁴² Three months before Otway's play was staged, Dryden fulminated against the Whigs' claims that they were motivated by the need to resist Catholicism and to redress public grievances, calling such justifications rhetorical cheats disguising self-interest: “Religion, and redress of grievances, / Two names that always cheat and always please.”⁴³ Otway's detestation of Whig propaganda is clear. His Poet's Complaint of his Muse (1680) is one long “Satyr Against Libells.” Libell personifies for Otway “the two evils of propaganda and perjury,”⁴⁴ both offspring of Shaftesbury's copulation with the good old Presbyterian cause. It is Whig propaganda that draws in

                                                            all the rude
Ungovernable, headlong Multitude:
Promis'd strange Liberties, and sure Redress
Of never-felt, unheard-of Grievances:
Pamper'd their Follies, and indulg'd their Hopes.

(Works 2:415)

Like Absalom and Achitophel, Venice Preserv'd has the conspirators use such inflammatory Whig rhetoric in order to discredit it. Critics have sometimes faulted passages of “pompous rhetoric” in Venice Preserv'd without recognizing that the pomposity of revolutionary utterance is intentional.⁴⁵ Pierre's calls for liberty and revolutionary redress of grievances are Otway's deliberate ridicule of a Whig rhetoric that systematically selects from and, as Kenneth Burke says in another context, deflects reality. The pompous abstraction of Pierre's rhetorical harangues dehumanizes Jaffeir, fitting him for rebellion. When Belvidera's vivid counter-rhetoric paints the real face of revolution, Jaffeir's self-justifying rhetorical vision is destroyed and he regains his humanity.

Ronald Berman astutely characterizes the “radical form of Natural Right” argument found in the speeches of Pierre, Jaffeir, and Renault, and notes that Otway intends for this shared ideological delusion to collide disastrously with reality.⁴⁶ The wooing of Jaffeir, in fact, is a process of rhetorical redefinition whereby Pierre “proves” that what his friend takes to be “rebellion, murder, treason” (2.3.36) is actually a just revolution “founded on the noblest basis, / Our liberties, our natural inheritance” (2.2.89-90). Such self-justifying rhetoric, of course, is an indictment of immoderate Whig political argument. Equally interesting are those speeches in which the revolutionaries visualize the Hobbesian anarchic nightmare that will precede the dictatorship of their new order:

PIERRE:
How lovely the Adriatic whore,
Dressed in her flames, will shine! Devouring
          flames!
Such as shall burn her to the watery bottom
And hiss in her foundation.

(2.3.96-99)

JAFFEIR:
Nay, the throats of the whole Senate
Shall bleed, my Belvidera. He amongst us
That spares his father, brother, or his friend,
Is damned. How rich and beauteous will the face
Of ruin look when these wide streets run blood;
I and the glorious partners of my fortune
Shouting, and striding over the prostrate dead,
Still to new waste.

(3.2.140-47)

In such sadistic descriptions Otway was probably relying on his audience's familiarity with current Whig propaganda, which hypothesized the horrors of a Catholic regime should James not be excluded from the throne. Otway attacked such “particolour'd” rhetoric in The Poet's Complaint, making specific reference to The Countrey's late Appeal, one of the most vehement and frightening Whig pamphlets of the age. Intended to inspire confidence in Shaftesbury, the Appeal invites Londoners to “imagine you see the whole town in a flame, occasioned this second time by the same Popish malice which set it on fire before. At the same instant fancy, that amongst the distracted Crowd, you behold Troops of the Papists, ravishing your Wives and Daughters, dashing your little Childrens brains out against the walls, plundering your Houses, and cutting your throats” (Works 2:533). By having the revolutionaries characterize their own ambitions in the phrases of Whig pamphleteers, Otway turns the Whigs' rhetoric against them, suggesting that this nightmare vision is a sadistic Whig fantasy of resentment and retribution.

Although there is much abstract talk of political liberty, the real motive for Pierre and Jaffeir is revenge for private grievances. Pierre resents Antonio's use of his senatorial power and wealth to ingratiate himself with the courtesan Aquilina, Pierre's mistress; and Jaffeir resents Pruili's refusal to support him and Belvidera in a manner appropriate to a senator's in-laws. Revolution will allow them to have both revenge and the power and wealth they yearn for. Act 2, scene 2 ends with their private and public politics completely confused, as Jaffeir says:

                                                                      from this hour I chase
All little thoughts, all tender human follies
Out of my bosom. Vengeance shall have room.
Revenge!
PIERRE:
And liberty!
JAFFEIR:
                                        Revenge! Revenge—
                                                                                                    [Exeunt]

Their rhetoric rationalizes their petty self-interest as concern for political liberty. At the same time, it fosters a heroic image of monumental self-deception.⁴⁷ Pierre describes his coconspirators as “men like gods” (2.2.74), “men / Fit to disturb the peace of all the world, / And rule it when it's wildest” (2.2.120-22), “leaders fit to guide / A battle for the freedom of the world” (2.3.85-86). When Belvidera asks Jaffeir how he can league himself with “traitors” to “sell [his] country,” Jaffeir assures her:

                                                            I've engaged
With men of souls, fit to reform the ills
Of all mankind. There's not a heart amongst them,
But's as stout as death, yet honest as the nature
Of man first made, ere fraud and vice were fashions.

(3.2.165-69)

Belvidera's description of Renault's attempted rape dispels Jaffeir's illusions and disposes him to heed her counter-characterization of his allies:

Can thy great heart descend so vilely low,
Mix with hired slaves, bravoes, and common stabbers.
Nose-slitters, alley-lurking villains! join
With such a crew, and take a ruffian's wages,
To cut the throats of wretches as they sleep?

(3.2.161-65)

Clearly, then, Otway treats revolutionary rhetoric as a propagandistic perversion of “treason” into legitimate “redress of grievances” and of “traitors” into “men like gods,” fit by nature to decide the fate of nations. The Whig cries of “liberty” and “redress of grievances” are seen for the self-serving and self-justifying frauds the Tories believed them to be. Critics have sometimes expressed dissatisfaction over the “political bias of what is otherwise a tragedy of private life.”⁴⁸ But surely Otway's point is that we have the anarchic rule of unreason when private, nonpolitical concerns are, through rhetorical perversion, used as justification for violent revolution.

The rhetoric of the rebels is discredited and with it their cause. Jaffeir's tragedy is the working out of the personal consequences of an error of intellectual judgment. By the time he realizes the grotesque inaccuracy of Pierre's description of the rebels as “men like gods” he has already pledged his and Pierre's honor to the rebel cause. To “redeem” himself he denounces the plot to the Senate but stipulates that he be pardoned and the “lives of two and twenty friends” be spared. The Senate agrees, but the traitors themselves are adamant:

DUKE:
                                                            Say, will you make confession
Of your vile deeds and trust the Senate's
          mercy?
PIERRE:
Cursed be your Senate; Cursed your
          constitution!
The curse of growing factions and division
Still vex your councils, shake your public
          safety,
And make the robes of government you wear
Hateful to you, as these base chains to me.
DUKE:
Pardon or death?
PIERRE:
                                                            Death, honorable death.
RENAULT:
Death's the best thing we ask or you can
          give.
ALL Conspirators:
No shameful bonds, but honorable death!

(4.2.153-62)

This exchange is crucial in interpreting the play. It prefigures Pierre's refusal on the scaffold of the priest's offer of confession and absolution, and reinforces our image of Pierre as contemptuous of all authority. To himself and to his disciple Jaffeir his satanic, self-destructive pride and intransigence are evidence of his indomitable heroic spirit. Yet, however gratuitously glorious it may momentarily seem, continuance in a lost cause is ultimately self-destructive. The tragedy illustrates this by Jaffeir's “damnable” suicide on the scaffold, his unholy atonement for betraying his colleagues to the Senate. It is this seemingly nihilistic conclusion that leads critics to speak of the impossibility of meaningful or heroic action in Otway's “world.”

This misreading, I believe, comes from a misunderstanding of the Senate's role in the play. If the Senate were a wholly benevolent, effective governing body, allegorically representative of a Tory parliament perhaps, there would be no difficulty in assessing the actions of Pierre and Jaffeir. They would be base, deluded rebels, dangerous to public order. On the other hand, if the Senate were intolerably base, wholly self-interested, then the rebels would be as heroic in our eyes as in their own. Most critics have asserted that “both the Senate and the conspirators are corrupt” and that, therefore, an allegorical political reading of the play is impossible.⁴⁹ They contend that by having two characters who represent Shaftesbury—one as rebel and one as senator—Otway has made political distinctions impossible. Both government (Antonio) and opposition to government (Renault) are corrupt; thus all public action is nihilistic.

Zera S. Fink has convincingly solved this apparent dilemma by stressing the Whigs' propagandist use of the Venetian Senate as a model for restructuring English constitutional government.⁵⁰ The ideal presented in Britannia and Raleigh, a Whig indictment of Charles and the Tories, is typical:

To the serene Venetian state I'll go,
From her sage mouth famed principles to know;
With her the prudence of the ancients read,
To teach my people in their steps to tread.
By those great patterns such a state I'll frame
Shall darken story, engross loud-mouthed Fame.(51)

Tories, in contrast, argued that Charles's acceptance of exclusion would reduce him, as the Whigs wished, to a mere “Doge of Venice.”⁵² When his fable is interpreted in this propagandist context, it becomes clear that Otway's Senate of Venice is the Whig ideal discredited. The venal, demagogic rhetor Antonio is at once Otway's rebuttal of this Whig rhetorical vision and an indictment of Shaftesbury's maneuvering in parliament. The repeated ridicule of Antonio's self-serving senatorial speeches is Otway's criticism of another manifestation of Whig “Libell.” Thus neither the conspirators nor the Senate are moral norms in Venice Preserv'd. Rather, they are two Tory rhetorical visions of Whig ascendancy: as rebels and as rulers. By putting self-justifying, Whig revolutionary rhetoric in the mouth of men with purely personal, petty grievances, and then by having those rebels seek to overthrow “the serene Venetian state” of Whig propaganda, Otway creates his own nightmarish vision of a world gone to the Whigs.

It is a mistake, however, to see no Tory norms explicitly represented in the play.⁵³ From contemporary political propaganda, of course, we could extrapolate contrary Tory ideals for each of the Whig malefactions in Venice Preserv'd. However, without leaving the play itself, we can see a third political force that should be acknowledged: the Duke of Venice. Although much reduced in power in accordance with the Whig ideal, the Duke is still the head of the government and retains in diminished form something of the magnanimity of the Tory characterization of Charles II, the indulgent father figure quick to forgive and reluctant to condemn—a figure familiar from Absalom and Achitophel and other Tory apologias for Charles's proroguing of the Oxford Parliament the previous year. Coming in for none of the criticism levelled by the rebels against the Senate, the Duke appears only in act 4, scene 2, where he acts with dignity and fairness. The contrast with Antonio is explicit. When Pierre enters the Senate chamber to defend himself, the Duke says, “Go on; you shall be heard, sir.” Antonio immediately retorts, “And be hanged too, I hope” (4.2.124-25). The Duke offers Jaffeir the opportunity “to redeem his honor, / Unfold the truth and be restored with mercy” (4.2.34-35). Similarly, in the passage cited above he encourages Pierre to “make confession … and trust the Senate's mercy.” Pierre refuses the Duke's offer just as he later spurns the priest's request to trust his fate to the “all-seeing judge,” God. “Why,” the priest asks, “are you so obstinate?” (5.3.3). From a Tory perspective the typological link between God and God's anointed survives as moral norm in Venice Preserv'd, and Pierre's obstinacy appears as satanic self-assurance, a refusal to discipline his individual will by any consideration outside himself. It is in attempting to live up to Pierre's “heroic” vision that Jaffeir brings tragedy upon himself and Belvidera.

The motif of redemption through confession and alteration of life is central to Otway's rhetorical appeal to the Whigs in his audience.⁵⁴ As the epilogue to Otway's The Atheist the following year testifies, the Whigs in the theater did not sit silently acquiescent when Tory propaganda was paraded before them; they could be very disruptive.⁵⁵ Moreover, Otway's purpose required not just quiescent Whigs but Whigs receptive to his point of view. For the Tories in his audience Venice Preserv'd would have dramatized and discredited as venal and anarchic the Venetian state idealized by Whig exclusionist propaganda. Simultaneously, it shows the fractious Whigs as deluded, dangerous, self-interested, and sadistic revolutionary fanatics dedicated to gaining tyrannical control of the government at any cost. Otway's rhetorical dilemma is simple: how to write a Tory “Paean of Triumph” without alienating those Whigs in the audience who might be recruited to the Tory cause.

Solution of the dilemma is also the solution of much of the confusion about interpreting individual characters and the theme of the play as a whole. To avoid rhetorically alienating the Whigs in his audience, Otway creates characters who are self-deceived or deluded by others but who are at the same time heroic and sympathetic. “Heroic” may characterize either actions or activity: either what is done or how something is done. Satan, like Dryden's portrait of Shaftesbury in Absalom and Achitophel, is heroic in the second sense but not in the first. It is, in fact, a disjunction between the two kinds of heroism that makes Achitophel/Satan/Pierre villainous and ultimately self-destructive; heroic perseverance in a bad cause is no virtue. Jaffeir, led on by the dual lures of bad counsel and intoxicating, self-justifying propaganda, has pledged his heroism to a cause he later learns is vicious and sadistic. His honor is “redeemed” when he confesses to the Duke; he does the right thing. But the intransigence of Pierre and the other revolutionaries, their contemptuous refusal of “mercy,” both political (the Duke) and spiritual (the priest), leaves Jaffeir self-divided, without integrity, his honor compromised. He attempts to regain his integrity through heroic action. Ironically, his “heroic” suicide is “damnable” to both himself and Belvidera. Otway's play is thus an apology for Jaffeir, whose very real heroism is wasted in a bad cause, as well as an indictment of his error in choosing an unholy alliance.

Venice Preserv'd, therefore, creates a rhetorical vision of some of the characters to which Whigs in the audience could respond positively. Jaffeir and, presumably, Pierre are potentially heroic in both senses, although in the play their heroism is compromised by circumstance and misjudgment. Their wills are not corrupt, but their minds are muddled by private grievances and revolutionary rhetoric. Although deluded, they believe the Whig rhetoric. On the other hand, the unredeemable, like Renault (the conspirator) and Antonio (the Senator), are cynical and self-aware, using rhetoric as a self-serving, manipulative tool. Otway makes the contrast explicit when Pierre, characterizing his rebellion, alludes to Brutus, the idealistic protector of his country's liberty, while Renault alludes to Catiline, the self-seeking rhetor and traitor (2.3.51-57). Priuli is similarly distinguishable from Antonio; this is the point of the juxtaposition of Priuli's request for forgiveness from Belvidera with Aquilina's extortion of Antonio in act 5, scene 1. Some Whigs, then, are not mistaken but are innately vicious and unredeemable. Others, however, are potentially heroic but have been deceived into misalliance. To those Whigs in his audience, Otway's play is a summons to integrity, to political unity, to forgiveness, to redemption.

Two things outside the text of the play support the contention that Otway was consciously appealing to Whigs to reconsider their political allegiance. First, the prologue Dryden wrote for the Duke of York's attendance at Venice Preserv'd on April 21 denounces loud-mouthed “Hypocrisy” but encourages those former enemies of the Court who are genuinely eager for reconciliation:

Yet late repentance may, perhaps, be true;
Kings can forgive if rebels can but sue:
A tyrant's pow'r in rigor is expressed,
The father yearns in the true prince's breast.
We grant an o'ergrown Whig no grace can mend;
But most are babes that know not they offend.(56)

“O'ergrown Whigs” like the hypocritical Shaftesbury/Renault and Shaftesbury/Antonio are unredeemable, Dryden acknowledges; but Pierre and Jaffeir, though in error, are “babes” quickly forgiven by an indulgent father/king/Duke of Venice. Otway's epilogue for the same performance is equally explicit in its call for political unity. Whigs are urged to “Repent your madness and rebel no more.” The private sources of public grievances are ridiculed:

Nor every fool, whose wife has tripped at Court,
Pluck up a spirit, and turn rebel for't.

Finally, in an allusion to the medal struck to celebrate the failure to indicate Shaftesbury for high treason, Whigs are urged to ask the Duke of York to intercede with the King on their behalf:

Nail all your medals on the gallows post,
In recompense th'original was lost.
At these, illustrious repentance pay,
In his kind hands your humble off rings lay;
Let royal pardon be by him implored,
Th'attoning brother of your angered lord.(57)

Otway intends the typology of Christ as intercessor to strengthen his benign characterization of James, Duke of York, but also to recall the pardon implored by Jaffeir for the traitors and Pierre's “damnable” refusal of the priest's intercession.

The second extratextual indication that Otway was deliberately appealing to repentant Whigs in the fable and the characterizations of Venice Preserv'd is his association with George Savile, the Marquess of Halifax, an association almost totally ignored by scholars. Biographical facts about Otway after the production of Venice Preserv'd are scarce.⁵⁸ However, it seems legitimate to extrapolate from what we know. Otway greatly admired the Marquess of Halifax and dedicated The Atheist to his son when it was published in 1684. The dedication does not celebrate the son but is a lengthy tribute to Halifax as one “whose good Nature cannot but confound the most inveterate Malice; and whose Wit must baffle the sauciest Ignorance,” as “that Great Father of his Country, who when all manner of Confusion, Ruin, and Destruction, was breaking in upon us, like the Guardian Angel of these Kingdoms, stood up; and with the Tongue of an Angel too, confounded the Subtleties of that Infernal Serpent, who would have debauched us from our Obedience, and turned our Eden into a Wilderness” (Works 2:293-94). In Otway's allegory Shaftesbury is the infernal serpent who is defeated by Halifax's angelic tongue. In fact, the decline in Whig power dates from the defeat of the Second Exclusion Bill after “an oratorical duel between the two most effective speakers” of the age—Halifax and Shaftesbury.⁵⁹ Thus, to Otway, the Marquess of Halifax is the antidote to factious “Libell.”

More important, however, for interpreting Venice Preserv'd specifically, Halifax advocated a middle course, a political “trimming” that would accommodate both Whigs and Tories of good will. Although he was allied with the king against Shaftesbury's attempts at exclusion, when that battle was won Halifax began to construct a counterweight to Tory extremism and appealed directly to “repentant whigs.” As Howard Schless argues, Halifax and Otway realized that a critical number of Englishmen stood very near the fulcrum of the political seesaw, “where even a slight movement could produce major changes in the positions of the opposing parties.” Moreover, their rhetorical strategy complimented Charles's public posture as a ruler who avoided and condemned political extremes.⁶⁰ However, Halifax's courting of former Whigs, especially during the period immediately after Venice Preserv'd, was “unforgivable” in the eyes of Tory extremists who still saw all Whigs as “a detestable and dangerous faction, ready to plunge the nation into rebellion and disorder.”⁶¹ Symptomatic of this suspicion was the change in November of 1682 of the dialogue-essay in Roger L'Estrange's Observator. The speakers in his “Stridently Tory” periodical were changed from Whig and Tory to Trimmer and Tory. As Schless notes, to his contemporaries Halifax personified the position of the Trimmer.⁶² Thus Otway's praise of Halifax as “the guardian Angel of these Kingdoms,” just as the Marquess was appealing to moderate Whigs and receiving harsh criticism for doing so, is significant and can be viewed as the continuation of Otway's support for a recruitment policy evident earlier in Venice Preserv'd.

Although diametrically opposed to her nonpolitical reading of Venice Preserv'd, I concur with Taylor's suggestion that our best chance of harmonizing the modern reader's conflicting impressions of the play is to attempt to approximate the point of view of the original audience.⁶³ To do so is to place Otway's text in a white-hot political context. To summarize: Charles's proroguing of parliament has defeated the exclusion movement for the moment; but despite all his judges and propagandists could do, Shaftesbury has been acquitted of high treason, an event jubilantly celebrated by Whig propagandists like Thomas Shadwell. Earlier, with the support of Halifax, Charles had sent James into Scottish exile in an attempt to cool the revolutionary hysteria. Now, fearing that the king might die with his brother out of the country, as had nearly happened in August of 1679, and fearing that the Whigs would on such an occasion rise rebelliously in support of Charles's illegitimate son Monmouth, Halifax and Charles's other senior advisors support the recall of James from Edinburgh. The production of Venice Preserv'd is deliberately coordinated with James's return. Presented at the Duke's Theatre, the first night epilogue is a panegyric on the Duke of York and a call to “Rouse and unite to take his injured part; / Till royal love and goodness call him home.” On the play's third night, the king attends. On his return from Scotland, James attends a performance to hear a new prologue and epilogue imploring Whigs to “Repent your madness and rebel no more.” Similarly, when the Duchess returns a month later, she attends to hear yet another prologue and epilogue proclaiming the end of “factious rage”:

Distempered Zeal, Sedition, cankered Hate,
No more shall vex the Church, and tear the State;
No more shall Faction civil discords move,
Or …
Discord that only this dispute shall bring:
Who best shall love the Duke, and serve the King.(64)

Otway's original epilogue notes that in the play “the conspiracy's prevented,” and certainly for the Tories in his audience the play was a celebration of the defeat of exclusion and of James's symbolic return to London. It played to their rhetorical vision of Whig extremists as self-interested exploiters of popular grievances, as seditious and venal potential tyrants hypocritically demanding “liberty.” Shaftesbury/Renault is the archetype of the vicious traitor masking personal ambition in a people's revolutionary rhetoric. At the same time, Shaftesbury is also maligned as Antonio, the oratorical senator who uses his representative office to turn Venice into his own private whorehouse. Even more than Renault's violation of trust in his attempted rape of Belvidera, Antonio's “Nicky-Nacky” scenes and his defense of Acquilina before the Senate make explicit the connection between private lust and the misuse of political power. Antonio is able to pervert his public trust because the Whig ideal—the Venetian Senate—has no strong prince to insure the people's interest. Otway's scene of Venice, therefore, is a Tory dramatization of the effects of exclusion, of leaving King Charles with the reduced powers of a Duke of Venice.⁶⁵

All this is present for the Whigs in Otway's audience, but there is something more as well. Whig sympathizers are offered the heroic friendship of Pierre and Jaffeir, both deluded into revolution by a rhetorical alchemy that redefines private disappointments as public grievances. Though bent on personal vengeance, both characters believe they are fighting nobly for liberty. Their political enthusiasm blinds them to the real nature of their intended acts and to the character of their coconspirators. In the nightmare Whig world Otway creates, they are both betrayed by Shaftesbury: Pierre by Senator Antonio and Jaffeir by Renault the revolutionary. In this Whig world of moral anarchy, their personal sense of honor is doubly disoriented—first by a distorting revolutionary rhetoric and second by an absence of political allies who merit allegiance. This is especially true of Jaffeir. When Pierre refuses mercy from the Duke, Jaffeir is doomed. The message for the moderate Whigs in Otway's audience was clear. Do not, like Jaffeir, waste your heroism in a discredited cause. Perseverance in error is no virtue. Instead, join other moderates, like the Marquess of Halifax, who recognize the folly of extremism and are now committed, under the joint rule of king and parliament, to the common good.

This interpretation, emphasizing Otway's discrediting of Whig propaganda and his appeal to repentant allies of Shaftesbury, is not intended to rule out other readings, many of which are subtle and enlightening. Rather, it is intended to stress the essentially political nature of the play—as Tory propaganda—and to argue that Venice Preserv'd presents a unified, coherent tragic vision of what happens when potentially heroic characters are perverted through bad counsel—self-deluding revolutionary rhetoric—and vicious colleagues to treason against the public order. This reading does call into question the “nihilistic” or “pessimistic” interpretations of Otway's play. There is a “Tory gloom” in delineating the Whig world of Venice Preserv'd, but it is the gloom of shared hypocrisy and self-delusion, not an existentially necessary condition. To see Otway as a latter-day Jacobean nihilist does not do justice to his partisan political vision and makes coherent interpretation of Venice Preserv'd impossible.

Notes

1. Aline Mackenzie Taylor, Next to Shakespeare (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1950), 143-244.

2. Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 3, 1682-1685, ed. Howard H. Schless (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), 35. Cited hereafter as POAS 3.

3. John Robert Moore, “Contemporary Satire in Otway's Venice Preserved,” PMLA 43 (1928): 166.

4. John Loftis, “Political and Social Thought in the Drama,” The London Theatre World, 1660-1800, ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1980), 254-55.

5. J. R. Jones, Country and Court: England 1658-1714 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), 197.

6. Jones, 198.

7. Jones, 215.

8. Kerstin P. Warner, Thomas Otway (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 48.

9. The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1:518. Cited hereafter as Works.

10. Jones, 215.

11. The London Stage, 1660-1700, ed. Emmett L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968), 1:cxxxiv.

12. Loftis, “Political and Social Thought in the Drama,” 263.

13. John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 18.

14. Roswell Gray Ham, Otway and Lee (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1931), 185-86.

15. Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1945), 144.

16. David R. Hauser, “Otway Preserved: Theme and Form in Venice Preserv'd,” Studies in Philology 55 (1958): 481.

17. Taylor, 39.

18. Michael De Porte, “Otway and the Straits of Venice,” Papers on Language and Literature 18 (1982): 245.

19. Warner, 125.

20. A. H. Scouten in The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 5, 1660-1750 (London: Methuen, 1976), 275.

21. Ham, 190.

22. Ham, 193, 197.

23. Works 1:59.

24. Thomas Otway, Venice Preserved, ed. Malcolm Kelsall (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1969), xiii. All quotations from Venice Preserv'd are from this edition. Further citations in the notes will be to Otway.

25. Taylor, 202.

26. Warner, 51.

27. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:167-68.

28. Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:245-46.

29. Fink, 123-48.

30. Gerald D. Parker, “The Image of Rebellion in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd and Edward Young's Busiris,” Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 393.

31. Ronald Berman, “Nature in Venice Preserv'd,” ELH 36 (1969): 536.

32. Warner, 56, 120.

33. Eugene M. Waith, Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 251.

34. Eric Rothstein, Restoration Tragedy (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 109.

35. W. Van Voris, “Tragedy through Restoration eyes: Venice preserv'd in its own theatre,” Hermathena 99 (1964): 61.

36. De Porte, 250.

37. Berman, 543.

38. William H. McBurney, “Otway's Tragic Muse Debauched: Sensuality in Venice Preserv'd,” Journal of English and German Philology 58 (1959): 399.

39. Warner, 131.

40. Parker, 395.

41. Taylor, 41ff.

42. Jones, 219.

43. Absalom and Achitophel, 747-48; quoted from Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 2, 1678-1681, ed. Elias F. Mengel, Jr. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), 483.

44. Warner, 42.

45. Moody E. Prior, The Language of Tragedy (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1947), 191.

46. Berman, 538-43.

47. Scouten, 275; Hauser, 486; and Jack D. Durant, “‘Honor's Toughest Task’: Family and State in Venice Preserved,” Studies in Philology 71 (1974): 491.

48. Taylor, 39.

49. Otway, xiii.

50. Fink, 124-48.

51. Anthology of Poems on Affairs of State, ed. George de F. Lord (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), 127.

52. Jones, 209.

53. De Porte, 255.

54. Hauser, 491-93. Professor Hauser effectively identifies the sin and redemption motif but interprets its use differently, seeing “the Satanic Pierre [as] the means whereby Jaffeir's salvation is effected.”

55. Loftis, The Politics of Drama, 21.

56. Otway, 101.

57. Otway, 102.

58. Warner, 15. In Warner's recent study there is only one passing reference to Halifax, and the index incorrectly identifies that reference as to the Earl of Halifax, Charles Montague.

59. Moore, 176.

60. POAS 3:xxxi, xxviii.

61. Jones, 220. The characterization “repentant whigs” is Jones's.

62. POAS 3:xxxii, 487.

63. Taylor, 41.

64. Otway, 104.

65. Jones, 209.