[In the following excerpt, Hagstrum discusses satire and pathos in Otway's comedies and tragedies.]

Thomas Otway fully deserves the reputation he possessed for over a century following his death—that of a tender, loving writer whose serious works, more than those of any other Restoration dramatist, aroused the pity that Aristotle required and who remained for generations the examplar par excellence of the pathetic. Since that quality was admired greatly as, along with the sublime, the very nerve of poetry, Otway's reputation as a tragedian was inflated until he occupied a position “next to Shakespeare” as a natural portrayer of human affections. It has not been sufficiently realized that the tears Otway shed and produced are as much the tears of morbidity as magnanimity, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that these qualities also may have colored the literary emotionalism of his many successors and raised on the cheek of eighteenth-century eroticism a blush of hectic red.

The legendary life of Otway prepares us for more than tears. Like Lee's, his “fiery face” was “painted with the juice of Vines,”¹ and he met, at the Christological age of thirty-three, an untimely end about which legends have clustered. Something of a vagabond, he is supposed to have been familiar with hunger, thirst, and cold. And, most romantically of all, he suffered from unrequited passion for the great Mrs. Barry, who immortalized the roles he created for her and who answered his ardors by loving the noble and licentious Rochester.² Otway's love was unfolded in those strange, undated Familiar Letters, perhaps written in 1682 and published in 1697, six missives without address, date, or superscription and with only an occasional signature, that seem to come from nowhere and may not be authentic.³ But whether they are authentic or not, they constitute a good introduction to the man's response to love: if not written by Otway himself, they were doubtless produced by someone who knew the man and his plays and was attempting to create a believable extension of them. The letters contain professions of undying love in two complementary but fully distinguishable moods—one of tender purity of spirit that expresses itself in floods of unselfish devotion, the other of wild, frenzied, and violent passion and desire: “I Love, I Doat, I am Mad, and know no measure” (letter 2; 2:478).

Otway's slim collection of nondramatic literature also suggests that his “pathos” is more complicated than its later association with bourgeois domestic sentimentality would suggest. Like Dryden, he was attracted to Ovid and, again like Dryden, particularly to the incestuous stories, translating the heroic epistle “Phaedra to Hippolytus” and thus linking himself with the most famous play of Racine, whom he admired and whose tender and delicate sensibility he imitated. His poetry shows friendship to be a reinforcement of love. A “much-lov'd Friend” joins Otway in pastoral retreat, wasting the day in “shady, peacefull Bowers,” and at its end each, taking his beloved to bed, fills every sense with “perfect pleasure”: “With twining limbs, that still loves posture keep.” Even political allegory and satire provide a romantic landscape and mood. The poet seeks the lonely heath. Like Gray in the next century, he is glued to a tree. He sheds tender and violent tears. He remembers his mother and his “much-lov'd fondled” boyhood. Above all, he thinks of the severe and “awfull” majesty of his beloved—as unavailable in rhyme as Mrs. Barry was in real life.⁴

The comedies, for which Otway was well known in his own day, are bitterly satirical, shockingly scabrous, full of sexual monsters, unfaithful friends, and cowardly cuckolds, with little optimism about the institution of marriage or indeed about the promise of any fulfillment in life or love.⁵ The harsh realism of Otway's comic world is by no means an annihilating contradiction of the world of the tender tragedies or of his serious sensibilities. It complements the elevated and mythical world which is our chief concern and shows that the morbidities I shall dwell on sprang from the frustrations of real life.

Our analysis of the amorous aspects of Otway's tragic muse can begin with his second play, Don Carlos (1676), since in this “Heroic Play” he tried to embody the pathos of Racine's Bérénice and believed he had succeeded in drawing “Tears from the Eyes of the Auditors, I mean those whose Souls were capable of so Noble a pleasure.”⁶ Certainly Otway's claim that his play was “pathetick” is vindicated by its conclusion, which—with sincere and mutual forgiveness all around before the death of the lovers and the madness of the greatly sinning king seal up all in silence—realizes with considerable success the Aristotelian aim of evoking pity. The central love in the story is illicit: the young prince, Don Carlos, continues to love the young queen, who had been intended for him before his father married her, and that affection is fully returned. The love is obsessively called incest by the madly jealous father, husband, and monarch, an epithet also used by the queen, though less frequently and in denial of any overt act. There are so many recollections of Hamlet in the whole first part of the play that Otway may be thought to have given Shakespeare's masterpiece a modern Oedipal reading. However that may be, the deep love between Don Carlos and the queen is viewed legalistically as a forbidden affection between stepson and stepmother, though it is actually a love between two young people protesting against the greater unnaturalness and illicitness of unions between youth and age. What is forgiven at the end by the father and what is repented of by the son (who concedes he should have been submissive to his father) is a quasi- or mock incestuous affection that is profound but never physically realized. Since the good and suffering queen never repents but exults in it as she dies on the bosom of her lover and contemplates an eternity of bliss with him, we must regard the love as good, however society or a jealous old monarch may classify it. And it receives the approval of the healthy and youthful Don Juan, a Restoration “naturalist” who attacks the “dull Law” that overrules nature and so destroys man's freedom to obey his “Godlike mind” (2.1.1, 6). One may be reluctant to call the love in this play morbid, but it is certainly unconventional and obsessive, and it attacks the very roots of social and political stability.

It was The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserved (1682) that gave Otway the reputation, in Samuel Johnson's words, of being “one of the first names in the English drama” and, in Goldsmith's, of ranking “next to Shakespeare” as “the greatest genius England has produced in tragedy.” His popularity was broadly based. Gay said in the early eighteenth century that “saunt'ring 'prentices o'er Otway weep,” and the Romantics treated him as a legendary poet-lover whom society misunderstood and persecuted; they looked upon Jaffeir from Venice Preserved as a schöne Seele and Pierre as a Romantic rebel. Byron thought the last mentioned as immortal as the stones of his native Venice: “And Pierre cannot be swept or worn away.”⁷

Because of its reputation for tender sensibility, we come to The Orphan expecting to shed tears of pity over the plight of its delicate heroine. Johnson said that “its whole power is upon the affections”;⁸ and Rowe, a disciple, had earlier praised it for touching the nerves of “good nature,” of “tenderness or humanity.”⁹ The play does indeed satisfy the expectations aroused by such criticism. It is given a remote pastoral setting, far away from courts and cities, where a loyal but retired subject of the king lives with his two sons who love each other and also with a daughter and an adopted girl, the orphan of the title. Are we back in Eden? Are we in a land of romance and chivalry (the real boar hunt resembles a tapestry on castle walls)? Or are we in the land of late childhood or early adolescence (the young brothers dream of the future and their careers)? The heroine is gentle and dovelike, and it is not difficult to shed tears over her great sufferings, which never embitter her sweetness.

But one is not far into the play before discovering that the view of Otway as only, or even primarily, an artist of delicate pathos seems shallow and inadequate. We confront disturbingly morbid suggestions and gaze into psychological abysses. Rowe also had a sense of this, for in the midst of his praise of Otway's power to evoke pity he confessed to “an uneasiness”¹⁰—an extremely accurate word for the emotion that creeps over us as this isolated Eden turns into a place of primal fear. The two brothers, seemingly gracious and mutually devoted, soon quarrel over possession in love of the fair orphan Monimia, who has been raised with them as a sister. From this quarrel the whole tragedy proceeds. Monimia's brother, Chamont, who arrives home from the wars, has dreamed that she holds a wanton lover in each hand and that a witch has told him she is a pawn in a grim, fraternal game.¹¹ But the sensuality, which develops as the innocence of the house melts away, is more delicate than in Chamont's conventional dream—and more insinuating.¹² The older brother, Castalio, receives reports about Monimia's swelling breasts from the page, who is promised a pony if he brings further information—about the color of her stockings and her habit of gartering them above the knees. It is this brother whom Monimia loves and marries, who is at first assertive, then deceitful, about his intentions, and who ultimately becomes vengeful and fierce, his last hope being that confusion in nature and society will break the chain of causes and dissolve all forms and his last word being that he himself is nothing. The agent who produces the suffering and the tragedy is the younger brother, Polydore, who strikes out at Castalio in searing sexual rivalry for the love of a girl who is as close as a sister in this isolated familial society. The decisive act comes on the night the secret marriage is to be consummated. Monimia approaches the event with foreboding and “soft compassion” (3.1.276). The dangerously brooding Polydore, ignorant of the marriage, overhears the signal that will bring the bridal pair together in what seems to him like an illicit and faithless love tryst. Taking his brother's place that night, he reaps Castalio's fruit and commits what Laudian Anglo-Catholicism was firm in calling incest. The rightful husband is turned away from his nuptial door, and the bride is ravished in darkness by a brother whom she believes to be her husband. When the truth comes out the next day, she continues to love her lord, not her ravisher. She goes mad and drinks poison, but not before she is revealed as “the trembling, tender, kind, deceived Monimia” (5.1.453), who takes no comfort in her innocence but considers herself irremediably polluted. Here Otway reveals a striking contrast to Dryden, who in Don Sebastian kept even a blood incest emotionally guiltless since it was done in ignorance.

Polydore's reaction to the night of “rage and incest” (5.1.427), as he calls what he has caused, is also one of shock and disbelief—what he had thought was a more or less natural act of defloration he now learns was a betrayal of a brother which the law regarded as incestuous. Before he knows the full truth, he proposes the murder of the child that could result, and he envisions himself and Monimia going out into the world like the expelled Adam and Eve. In the accursed nature they would then encounter, adders sting and poisons “hang / Like gums against the walls” (4.1.454-55), a nature where “Desire shall languish like a withering flower, / And no distinction of the sex be thought of” (459-60). Natural humanity Polydore feels to be perverted even before the whole truth has been revealed to him.

The play is full of crude improbabilities, and these have been vividly pointed out from the time of Voltaire to the present. Of the wedding night, one critic has said, “O! What an infinite deal of Mischief would a farthing rush-light have prevented.”¹³ But a realistic standard of criticism is as egregiously inappropriate as a purely logical one. In Otway's world of primal psychology, it can be said that his lack of Dryden-like coherence or the power of crisp, clear statement, his confusion of emphasis, his jarring and unresolved juxtapositions are in fact virtues, since they open doors upon the unplumbed depths of the soul. No Christian norms are invoked or even implied. The world is primitive, virtually a familial state of nature. Experience comes crashing in with a fatal accident that leads all the principals to suicide. They end loving and forgiving one another, to be sure—the pattern of Don Carlos being repeated—but they are kept destitute of the hope of immortality that the queen in the earlier play dreams of or that Shakespeare and Dryden gave to Antony and Cleopatra. Otway concentrates upon what became for the eighteenth century and the Romantics the most intense zone of psychological geography, the frontier between innocence and experience. The three leading characters all cross it, meeting pollution and anger, guilt and early sorrow. Love was briefer than a candle and was in its short career perverted before being blasted. Otway has discovered the fearful complications that lurk in familial love, in primal affections, and in unions of similitude.¹⁴ The two brothers and their fair “sister” commit, with a kind of tragic and choiceless inevitability, the narcissistic sins against which Milton had warned. Anyone who follows in detail the career of eighteenth-century love will understand the steady popularity of a play that explores the intimate world of family love and exposes its potential morbidity.

Venice Preserved, a better but less typical play, is set in a public world of political plots and civil strife. It too is suffused with psychosexual energies and their frustration. Its most notorious sections, the Nicky-Nacky scenes, constitute a farcical reductio of a famous political leader to absurdity, but they also portray sexual perversion. “Nicky Nack” refers to the female pudenda, and old Antonio (Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury, Dryden's Achitophel)¹⁵ is debased to wooing a prostitute, while crawling on his knees, bearing a bag of gold, talking baby talk, soliciting her kicks, barking like a dog, biting her, and howling with pleasure at her lashings. Taine has called all this “la grande buffonerie amère, le sentiment cru de la bassesse humaine.”¹⁶ Undoubtedly. But let us not confine the bassesse to Nicky-Nacky. The whole play is instinct with morbid or regressive sexuality; on one scholar's count, there are some thirty direct and indirect references to female breasts.¹⁷

Love and friendship do survive in the end, as they did in The Orphan; but they are here, as also in the earlier play, frustrated into tragic defeat and death and made complex and ambiguous. Always there is the suggestion of unexplained, unexplainable psychological depth. The love of Belvidera and Jaffeir, which began in a rescue of the lady during the venerable ceremony of the city's wedding with the sea, is confirmed in marriage and the birth of a handsome boy and then is suddenly and mischievously complicated when five years after the rescue and three years after the marriage, a jealous father feels his daughter has been stolen from him by a husband he now banishes from wealth and station. The young wife, in the crisis that ensues, proves soon to be an overmatch for her loving husband, whose weakness of character and infirmity of purpose appear in contrast. Belvidera is a bold as well as lovely woman, a civilizer as well as a leader of men, who is not ashamed to say to her husband,

                                                  I joy more in thee,
Than did thy Mother when she hugg'd thee first,
And bless'd the Gods for all her Travel past.
…
Oh lead me to some Desart wide and wild,
…
Where I may throw my eager Arms about thee,
Give loose to Love with kisses, kindling Joy,
And let off all the Fire that's in my Heart.

[1.332-34, 348, 353-55]

Quite a contrast to the trembling Monimia! But Belvidera's aggressiveness is no more availing against the forces of destruction than the orphan's gentle sweetness.

The rebels against the selfish authorities of the Venetian state may at first seem to be as good as the Romantics thought them. But Pierre's cry of hatred “Burn! … burn” (1.277-78) is not nobly but sexually and jealously motivated, since his basic complaint is that his beloved Greek prostitute Aquilina is being wooed by the old and lecherous Venetian senator. The rebellion as it develops and draws Jaffeir into its net also demands the sacrifice of healthy sexual love: the husband must apparently follow the revolutionary, who intends to banish “all tender humane Follies / Out of my bosom” (2.193-94), and then after his sacrifice must discover that his wife is being made the object of the illicit depredations of old Renault, an ally of Pierre and a man of despicable sexual mores. The heroine may be extreme in her designation of the rebels as a pack of “Common stabbers, / Nose-slitters, Ally-lurking Villains” (3.2.162-63). But there is a spirit of moral ambiguity that hangs over their characters and action. As the plot moves to its climax, Jaffeir is torn between love of the now disillusioned Belvidera and loyalty to his word and to the leader of the conspiracy, whom he also truly loves. His love pulls him toward treacherous betrayal, his loyalty toward an ineffectual and doomed action. Jaffeir, being weak, is pulled in both directions—a fatality that leads to his wife's madness; his friend's death, preceded by his violent anger and then his forgiveness; and finally his own death, a divided soul wavering between conflicting duties. Are these duties and the hesitations they cause intellectually definable, like those of Dryden's Antony, torn between Egypt and Rome? Scarcely, for this is not so much a conflict of values as one of eroticisms. Jaffeir is nothing if not loving and emotional, and it is his loving coeur sensible that explains his fate.

JAFF.:
No, Belvidera; by th' eternal truth,
I doat with too much fondness.
BELV.:
                                                                                Still so kind?
Still then do you love me?
JAFF.:
                                                                      Nature, in her workings,
Inclines not with more ardour to Creation,
Than I doe now towards thee; man ne'er was bless'd
Since the first pair first met, as I have been.

[5.266-71]

These expressions of love come after Pierre has been condemned, an act over which Jaffeir grieves and for which he feels agonizingly responsible. And when Pierre moves toward his death, the pull of friendship takes on almost the same erotic force as the heterosexual love.

PIERRE:
                                                  Dost thou love me?
JAFF.:
Rip up my heart, and satisfie thy doubtings.
PIERRE:
Curse on this weakness. (He weeps.)

[5.438-40]

On the scaffold together, Jaffeir stabs Pierre and then himself, leaving the mad Belvidera to die alone in the final act.

As in The Orphan, the principals die without Christian hope (Pierre spurns the priest's attendance), and it is hard to find a normative character, intellectual or ethical, in the entire play, although Belvidera comes the closest. Dryden the critic did not even search for a choric center: he placed Otway's excellence in the portrayal of the passions, which are “truly touched” in Venice Preserved even “though perhaps there is somewhat to be desired, both in the grounds of them and in the height and elegance of expression.” Otway's genius lay in expressing what Dryden in the same essay called the “passions and motions of the mind.”¹⁸ Those passions are, in both of Otway's best-known plays, at once tender and violent, arising alike from love and friendship and the conflict between them and with society—in the first the small society of the family, in the second the larger one of the state. The generation gap looms large in Venice Preserved, where youth and beauty, kindliness and love seem almost entirely the domain of the young, who are destroyed by their elders. In both plays, though more prominently in The Orphan, love is tinged with morbidity or ambiguity, and in the end lovers and friends are alike brought to destruction. Otway raises tender love and friendship and then destroys them in untimely death. Sensibility, no less than heroism, drives on toward the grave, which swallows up, in silence and with no hopes for futurity, all kinds of affection. The bold healthy love that Belvidera possesses is as surely destroyed as the quasi-incestuous love that tortured the queen in Don Carlos or the quasi-incestuous act that doomed the orphan Monimia.

Otway was at once a highly emotional and natural artist. But nature was less an ethical norm, a frein vital, than a stimulus to passion, a sanction of tears and sensibility. One demonstration that Otway was riding the tidal wave of the future is that he found almost at once a critic who appreciated his achievement and who embodied at the very heart of his critical system those natural emotional and psychological values implicit in his best plays. For John Dennis the sublime (the lofty, the fearful) was virtually the same as the pathetic (the emotional), nature was virtually equated with passion, and original genius expressed “Furious Joy, or Pride, or Astonishment.” “Poetical Genius … is it self a Passion,” and it is the task of the critic to inquire if the passion is “terrible and tender.” Dennis provides a fitting conclusion not only to Otway but also to my discussion of the entire Restoration. An admirer of The Orphan as a play that moves compassion, Dennis was also deeply related to the movement whose beginning I have analyzed. He admired Milton as a Christian writer; and in fact for Dennis the coming of Christ altered nature so that reason and passion need no longer be at war, it being now possible to make the bliss of Eden a desideratum in real life. Dennis admired the fire and force of Nat. Lee, and he was close to Dryden during the last years of that poet's life and seems in fact to have inherited his whole concept of heroic love and pity and to have carried over into criticism the motion of his genius toward forgiveness and Christian sensibility. Like Dryden, he found Virgil, especially in Book 4 of the Aeneid, productive of passion and compassion, and the love verses of Ovid, which Dryden had translated so skillfully and assiduously, he found “soft and … pathetick,” “tender and yet … delicate.” Such language summarizes the course I have followed so far and also looks ahead to the pages that remain.¹⁹

Dennis does not utter new truths so much as give critical support to impulses that were in fact transforming Western culture. Value was being shifted from an external and revealed standard to the arena of man's soul, and along with the subjectivizing and psychologizing of truth went its democratization. If it was revolutionary to discover that all men have souls, it was also revolutionary to discover that these souls could be trusted, emotionally and intuitively, to discover the truth. For Dennis poetry became an instrument of the new psychology. All poetry arouses passion, and this passion is of two large kinds: the “Enthusiastick” (that is, the contemplative, the meditative, which “belong[s] not to common Life”) and the “Vulgar” (anger aroused by an affront, pity by sight of a mournful object). Of these two the more powerful is the vulgar. “Thus there are two sorts of Passion to be rais'd in Poetry, the Vulgar and the Enthusiastick; to which last, the Vulgar is preferable, because all Men are capable of being moved by the Vulgar, and a Poet writes to all” (1:338, 339; cf. 215). The statement is an important critical utterance, anticipating central positions of critics as diverse as Johnson, Wordsworth, and Shelley. Dennis is important in a study of love and sensibility because on the threshold of what has been too often called the age of reason he proclaims the primacy of the passions in art and justifies that primacy by their presence in all men everywhere. Growing inwardness and growing democratization may have characterized all the literature of the next hundred years; they are peculiarly associated with the literature of love. The profundity of that journey into the interior is revealed by the pain and embarrassment that it disclosed. It is therefore understandable that with deepening love-sensibility came morbidity. The price of achieving what Lawrence Stone has called “affective individualism”²⁰ was a frisson of terror as man tried to come to terms with a freer expression of his own erotic nature.

Notes

1. These phrases come from Shadwell's unpleasant verse picture of Otway. See Roswell Gray Ham, Otway and Lee, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931) p. 183.

2. For a brief life of Elizabeth Barry, see John Harold Wilson, All the King's Ladies: Actresses of the Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 110-17.

3. These are printed in J. C. Ghosh, ed., The Works of Thomas Otway, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:475-81 and discussed briefly, ibid., 1:13-14.

4. Ibid., 2:427-32 (“Phaedra to Hyppolytus”), 443-46 (“Epistle to R. D. from T. O.,” 1, 30, 93, 95), 405-26 (“The Poet's Complaint of his Muse,” 53, 107).

5. See Robert D. Hume, “Otway and the Comic Muse,” Studies in Philology 73 (Jan. 1976): 87-116.

6. Works of Otway, 1:174. The line numbers used in quoting this play come from this edition.

7. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4.4. The other quotations in the paragraph are from: Johnson, Life of Otway, Works (1825), 7:173; Goldsmith and Gay, quoted in Aline M. Taylor, Next to Shakespeare: Otway's “Venice Preserv'd” and “The Orphan” and Their History on the London Stage (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1950), pp. 3, 245. See also ibid., pp. 4, 248-52.

8. Life of Otway, Works (1825), 7:175.

9. Quoted by Eugene Waith, “Tears of Magnanimity in Otway and Racine,” in French and English Drama of the Seventeenth Century (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1972), p. 19.

10. Quoted ibid.

11. Eric Rothstein, who believes the action of The Orphan “turns on the idea of Nature,” shrewdly perceives that Chamont's is “a sort of perversely erotic dream that foreshadows the incest in the play.” Restoration Tragedy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 100, 102.

12. I find the evil in this play domestic, even “primal,” to use a modern word; but Aline M. Taylor, in a sensitive reading, finds it to be “the atmosphere of court corruption,” which somehow the old cavalier Acasto has brought with him to the country in his flight from the royal circle. She finds that convention therefore takes on the “external force of Fate.” See her edition of the play in the Regents Restoration Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), p. xxviii. My quotations and the act and line references derive from this edition of The Orphan.

13. David Erskine Baker, ed., Biographia Dramatica, new ed., 2 vols. (London, 1782), 2:266. Voltaire's views are discussed by Ghosh in Works of Otway, 1:51. Clifford Leach vividly summarizes the improbabilities of the plot in “Restoration Tragedy: A Reconsideration,” reprinted in Restoration Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. John Loftis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 154.

14. In the early 1670s the propriety of marriage between first cousins was apparently much discussed. Opposing the papal prohibition, resisting the wave of opposition in England, and arguing that nothing in Scripture or Anglican polity forbids these marriages, Samuel Dugard (?) published in 1673 an interesting tract arguing that such marriage is “very innocent”: The Marriages of Cousin Germans, Vindicated from the Censures of Unlawfullnesse, and Inexpediency (Oxford, 1673), p. 5.

15. On the political allusions in this play, see John Robert Moore, “Contemporary Satire in Otway's Venice Preserved,” PMLA 43 (March 1928): 166-81.

16. Quoted by Ghosh in Works of Otway, 1:59. Act, scene, and line references of Venice Preserved come from this edition (vol. 2).

17. William H. McBurney, “Otway's Tragic Muse Debauched: Sensuality in Venice Preserv'd,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (July 1959): 393.

18. “A Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry” (1695) in George Watson, ed., Dryden: Critical Essays, 2:201. H. James Jensen, quite properly, sees that this play “is not an imitation of an action in the Aristotelian sense but is rather an imitation of a series of motions. Motion in the seventeenth century is equivalent not only to the motion of action but also to emotion.” The Muses' Concord: Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts in the Baroque Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 92.

19. The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939, 1943), 1:1, 47, 127, 133; 2:67, 121, 122, 196.

20. Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Wiedenfield & Nicolson, 1977), p. 4 and passim.