SOURCE: Munns, Jessica. “‘The Dark Disorders of a Divided State’: Otway and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.” Comparative Drama 19, no. 4 (winter 1985-86): 347-62.

[In the following essay, Munns shows how Otway portrays authority figures as repressive tyrants, focusing especially on The History and Fall of Caius Marius.]

Thomas Otway's sixth play, The History and Fall of Caius Marius: A Tragedy (Dorset Garden, Autumn 1679), is cast in the form of a Roman history and traces the violent contest between Caius Marius and Sylla (sic) for the war consulship against Mithridates. His Roman materials are drawn from Plutarch's lives of Gaius Marius and Sulla into which are woven scenes from Romeo and Juliet dealing with the forbidden love of Marius jr., son of Caius Marius, for Lavinia, daughter of Metellus, one of the leaders of Sylla's faction. Otway's combination of Plutarch and Shakespeare has tended to strike critics as so odd and audacious that serious criticism of the play is rarely attempted. George Odell describes the combination as an “astounding idea,” and J. C. Ghosh writes the play off as a “clumsy patchwork with the seams staring.”¹ More recently, Kerstin P. Warner, who is sympathetic if confused about the play, finds it “difficult to fathom what inspired Otway … to graft Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet onto such forbidding material.”² As R. D. Hume points out, for modern ears the substitution of Roman names for the household names of Romeo and Juliet—a substitution which produces lines such as “Marius, Marius! wherefore art thou Marius?” (II.267)—can “only seem ridiculous.”³ However, the parts of the play are more successfully harmonized than this suggests. In both his Roman tale and the Shakespearean love tragedy, Otway develops his characteristic themes of the limits of rationality, the failure of discourse, and the collapse of order. The feuding fathers of Romeo and Juliet disturb the peace of Verona and their brawls result in injuries and deaths amongst their kin and households. Otway, using the materials from Plutarch, expands the conflicts engendered by the fathers into civil war and wholesale massacres of the population of Rome. Alongside this development of domestic brawls into civil conflict is the transformation of the lovers from self-assertive and attractive young people growing toward a mature love into confused and sensual children, who, like the people of Rome, are by turns rebellious or cringingly subservient toward their oppressors. Unlike the love of Romeo and Juliet, the relationship of Marius jr. and Lavinia does not represent an alternative to patriarchal and civil violence but partakes of the flaws, the passions and incoherences, which disfigure the public realm.

In drawing upon Plutarch, Otway was using Shakespeare's main source for his Roman plays, and his treatment of the Roman materials indeed seems to be quite consciously Shakespearean. Apart from the Romeo and Juliet scenes, the borrowings are not so much of direct lines as of general ideas and effective theatrical confrontations.⁴ The very scope Otway is aiming at here with his inclusion of the very old and the very young, nobles and citizens, town and country suggests a debt to Shakespeare. Otway uses blank verse for the first time in this play, and in this too he signals a debt to Shakespeare as well as to the trend towards Shakespearean drama and blank verse established by Dryden's All for Love (Theatre Royal, Dec. 1677). In his direct adaptations of Shakespeare—i.e., in the scenes from Romeo and Juliet—Otway is not, however, adapting according to neo-classical canons. He modernizes the language at times and omits some obscenities which by then had become archaic; nevertheless, his treatment of the Nurse is not toned down but rather heightened (with the celebrated transvestite actor, Nokes, taking the role) and coarsened. And certainly no happy ending is supplied. Otway is not simply trying to produce an imitation-Shakespeare blank verse drama with clowns and on-stage battles; the play is in the fullest sense an adaptation. Shakespeare's style and materials undergo a seachange to fit them for the temper of the times.

The times, as Otway indicates in his Prologue, are in decline. He describes with nostalgia the “Ages past (when will those Times renew?) / When Empire flourisht, so did Poets too” (ll. 1-2). Such ages produce poets like Ovid, Horace, and Shakespeare, writers of feeling, thought, and “Fancy” (ll. 5-6, 16, 24), all of whom enjoyed royal or noble patronage. Otway postulates that the future may (possibly) bring a return of such greatness when “Peace and Plenty flourish” and “the joyful Muses on their Hills shall sing / Triumphant Songs of Britain's happy King” (ll. 43-45). But in the present, Otway, the poet of a troubled age mourning his Caesar's absence (l. 35; Charles II was seriously ill during September and October 1679), is aware that his age is seriously deficient in political stability and literary merit. He points out that the audience will readily note the difference between his own style and that of Shakespeare's, which “amidst this baser Dross” will “Shine / Most beautiful, amazing and Divine” (ll. 32-33). This deprecating comment is not humbug. It is central to Otway's sense of the reality of political decline that it affects the quality of thought, feeling, language, and action.

The decline of Empire and the experience of political turbulence were undoubtedly very real to Otway. In 1679 he had returned from a brief and unsatisfactory period of military service in Flanders where Charles II had been unsuccessfully attempting to assert himself in European politics. He came back to an England reeling under the impact of the Popish Plot and probably in time for the elections of February 1679 which gave the country its first new Parliament in eighteen years. This Parliament was swiftly prorogued and then dissolved following Shaftesbury's introduction of the Exclusion Bill in May. As J. R. Jones has pointed out, the election which followed, like the previous one, was both fiercely contested and accompanied by “an unprecedentedly large output of electoral propaganda.” During this second election, such propaganda “depicted those who voted against Exclusion as betrayers of the liberties and religion of the nation.”⁵ As contemporaries fully realized, and modern historians concur, England was, in fact, passing through its most acute political crisis since the civil war.

It seems probable that Otway's demonic “hero,” Caius Marius, is, to some extent, a portrait of Shaftesbury;⁶ however, his opponents, Sylla and Metellus, do not inspire respect. Neither side's policies or actions are endorsed, and it is not possible to read the play as a straightforward Tory attack on the Whig challenge to the court. Rather, “a plague on both your houses,” a line Otway does not use in the play but which must have been in his mind, seems to be the underlying response to factional turmoil. As in his later play, Venice Preserv'd (Dorset Garden, February 1682), Otway has relocated contemporary political unrest to a crumbling republic—a relocation that may remind us of the way modern political analysts create political models or play war games. Republican Rome becomes the laboratory in which the destructive tendencies in politics and society can be shown in their most acute form.

Factional rivalries, electoral contests, accusations of malpractices, treachery, and the betrayal of liberties form more than the background to the play, which is largely enacted in the public realm, the forum, as the two sides struggle verbally and physically for power. Caius Marius opens onto an evocation of political chaos as Metellus calls on the Gods of Rome

To fix the Order of our wayward state,
That we may once more know each other, know
Th' extent of Laws, Prerogatives and Dues;
The Bounds of Rules and Magistracy; who
Ought first to govern, and who must obey?

(I.2-6)

Without such knowledge, in

                                                                                the dark Disorders
Of a Divided State, men know not where
Or how to walk, for fear they lose their way,
And stumble upon Ruine.

(I.147-50)

Failures in knowledge with regard to the self, others, or the state occur throughout the play as Otway firmly links personal and political coherence. As Geoffrey Marshall has pointed out, the question “What art thou,” which (along with its variants) punctuates the play, is “thematic to the entire play”⁷ as the characters challenge each other's identity or simply seek to know the other. Without knowledge of place, form and function identities become blurred. Despite the factions' violent hatred for each other, there is little to distinguish them; Cinna, a rabid anti-Marian in the first act, effortlessly becomes as equally rabid anti-Patrician in the fourth. As a countryman remarks of the power struggle, “'Tis all one to me, I must pay my Rent to some body” (IV.231). There is a confusing equality about the contestants' claims and counter claims over such issues as who really won the Jugurthine war and who supports the peoples' “Liberties and Laws / … Rights and Privileges” (II.437-38) or their “Laws,” “Liberty, and Life” (III.415). It is not surprising that the people sway to and fro with their cries of “Liberty! Liberty! Marius and Sulpitius!” or “no Marius! no Marius! Liberty! Liberty!” (II.1, 490). However, there is no sense here, as in Julius Caesar (III.ii), of the people changing sides as a superior (or at least more emotionally telling) rhetoric wins the day. The changes seem arbitrary and the point about the leaders' rhetoric is that it is entirely hollow. The speakers' own distrust of language is indicated by the fact that both groups come armed to their debates. In their addresses to the people, the leaders assert their patriarchal role, describing themselves as “Fathers” (III.354) or referring to the crowd as “My Sons, my Children” (II.248). Briefly, they woo the “Children” with snatches of their own language of “Rights” and “Privileges” and “Liberty” before falling on them with swords to beat them into obedience. The real contempt both sides feel for the children-people is indicated throughout. The Patricians refer to them variously as “a Licentious Rout” (I.27), a “riotous and unruly Rabble” (I.15), the “Drunken Rabble” (I.31), and “The Monster People” (I.39). Equally cynically, Caius Marius, after he has beaten down his opponents, remarks with satisfaction how

These Slaves,
These wide-mouth'd Brutes that bellow thus for Freedome,
Oh, how they ran before the hand of Pow'r.

(II.490-92)

Force, not language, is the real instrument of persuasion, and the struggle is never really between the people and leaders but simply between the leaders.

Whether intentionally or not, what Otway shows is that the contemporary political language of fatherhood is a thinly disguised language of coercion. The caring element of fatherhood is not sustained, and punishment replaces nurturing. Throughout the play power is symbolized, appropriately to Rome and to the deeper levels of the text, by the axe and fasces. For Caius Marius the fasces are the “Rod of my Revenge” (I.297), and Sulpitius (a debased version of Mercutio) gives an even more overtly sexual and sadistic gloss to the fasces when he gloats following the massacre in Act II that Rome “begins to know the Rod of Power; / Her wanton bloud can smart” (III.2-3). The passing of the axe and fasces from group to group as the two factions briefly grasp power from each other acts as a prelude to proscriptions and massacres. The passage of the axe and fasces is always accompanied by ceremonial entries and procedures; however, the effect is simply to indicate that ceremony no longer functions to socialize and domesticate naked power. Significantly, the most impressive ceremony in the play is a dark ceremony of destruction performed by the temporarily defeated and banished Marians in which they swear by “Th'Infernal Powers” (III.466) to return and sack Rome. This ceremony is, at least in the short-term, successful; they do return, and they do sack Rome. By this time, however, Caius Marius, although demanding ritual acts of homage, has nothing but contempt for “Pageantry” (V.179). He contemptuously dismisses a delegation of old men and virgins, who come pleading for mercy, as a “solemn piece of Fooling” (V.201), whereupon he sends the old men to be executed and the virgins to be raped by his soldiers. The descent into the total anarchy of the last act is therefore accompanied by erosions in language, by inversion, by civil and sexual violations, and by self-destructive denials of patriarchal dignity.

Caius Marius, the would-be Pater Patriae (I.171-77, 196-210), becomes mass murderer and mass rapist. He becomes an emblem not only of the violation of the state but of the unleashed energies of the father. (When threatening “Horrour, Confusion, and Inverted Order” [III.506], Caius Marius compares himself to the Father of all, “Great Jove,” who uses force to make sure “the World obeys” [III.509, 512]). In a much criticized scene, following the meeting with the delegation, a young boy begs Caius Marius, whom he addresses as “cruel man!” (V.222), to let him “Play with your manly neck, and call you Father” (V.227). Caius Marius spares the boy, but his mercy does not function, as Geoffrey Marshall has suggested, as a “sentimental vignette,” nor is the scene, as Warner states, simply an excuse to use a “saccharine child actor.”⁸ As Caius Marius unsentimentally notes, the “Young Crocodile” has “learnt its Lesson well” (V.229, 233), and it is the lesson of total subservience to the cruel father. Caius Marius' perversions and cruelties do not run counter to his fatherliness but indeed spring instead from his desire to embrace the ultimate paternal controls over his people⁹—to engross the females, annihilate the other fathers, and possess and discipline all the children. However, in taking on the role of cruel and avenging father and embracing the contradictions of nurturing and destroying, Caius Marius is also further fragmenting his identity and his world. As he murders other fathers, the senators of Rome, Ancharius, and finally Lavinia's father, Metellus, Caius Marius is also dismantling the patriarchal structure of his society on which his own claims rest. In a sense, he lays bare the coercive structure of the state, pushing the role of absolute ruler to the limit, the point at which there are no “bounds” to “Rules and Magistracy.” Only desire and force remain.

As a patriarch, Caius Marius is a thoroughly unsatisfactory figure since, as his opponents grumble, he does not behave like an old man. Metellus complains that

Ev'n Age can't heal the rage of his Ambition.
Six times the Consul's Office he has born:
How well, our present Discords best declare.
Yet now, agen, when time has worn him low,
Consum'd with Age, and by Diseases prest,
He courts the People to be once more chosen.

(I.97-102)

Another patrician objects not that Caius Marius is worn down with age but that despite his age he outstrips the youth of Rome in “warlike Exercise” (I.106). Caius Marius surrounds himself with young warriors, and, as his enemies have pointed out, his vaulting ambition, violence, and energy are qualities associated with youth. He is, in fact, not totally unlike old Beaugard in Otway's bleak comedy The Atheist (1683), an “old Anti-Abraham, the Father of Unbelievers” (Atheist, V.1002). The moments at which Caius Marius remembers his age and behaves like an old man are his moments of exile and defeat, as when he wanders, an exile in an Edenic countryside, lamenting that he is “poor old Marius” (IV.237). Caius Marius is an anarchic figure not only because of his variations in character but because by the last act he has embraced contradiction. He severs gesture from meaning when he sadistically instructs Sulpitius “Whome're I smile on let thy sword go through” (V.93). His aim now is to “dispeople Rome” (V.85)—the ultimate power fantasy but one which undoes itself. To rule over an empty city is not to rule, and the father who devours his own children ceases to be a father. This point is not lost on Caius Marius, who recognizes that his lust for absolute power is leading him not only to annihilate others but also to his own destruction:

Oh! can the Matrons and the Virgins Cries,
The Screams of dying Infants, and the Groans
Of Murther'd men be Musick to appease me?
Sure Death's not far from such a desp'rate Cure.

(V.94-97)

Love, in general, and the love of Marius jr. and Lavinia in this context, might be expected to counterbalance the self-destructive urges of the wild fathers, as it does in Romeo and Juliet. But Marius jr. and Lavinia participate in the death-infected and contradictory world of their fathers. Their love, far from gaining them entrance into the world of adults, confirms their dependence and inadequacy. Marius jr. sees his love for Lavinia as a weakness and describes it as reducing his manhood and “softening him to Infant Tenderness” (I.306). Some of the greatest deviations from the Romeo and Juliet text involve Marius jr. and Lavinia's assessments of their aroused natures and passion in terms of slavery, exile, and the loss of humanity. Marius jr. describes himself as the “Slave of strong Desires, / That keep me struggling under” (I.339-40) when he seeks to exculpate himself to his father, and throughout he lingers over self-portraits of debasement, slavery, whips, chains, and torments (I.340-44, 379-81, III.227-28, IV.70-71). Unlike Romeo, Marius jr.'s love for his enemy's daughter never leads him to rethink his position in relation to her family. He simply regrets that Lavinia has “Bin born” or wishes that “Metellus had not got her” (I.242-43). However ridiculous a line like “Marius, Marius! wherefore art thou Marius?” (II.267) may sound to modern ears, it makes perfectly good sense in this play since the lovers are totally incapable of surmounting the political rivalry which alienates their families.

Lavinia's love language also follows a strain of abject and perverse imagery. Although she briefly rebels against her father's right to force her into marriage with Sylla, “Into a lawful Rape” (II.107), she responds eagerly to his threats to send her bound to Sylla, “Do bind me, kill me, rack these Lims: I'll bear it” (IV.498). Punishment and humiliation are meat and drink to Marius jr. and Lavinia. When Metellus, taking on both Lord and Lady Capulet's roles, questions Lavinia about her heart, she does not claim to control her passions but sinks under them, painting a harrowing picture of her debasement among humans and her wanderings amidst the inhospitable elements should she be disinherited for disobedience (II.142-58). Even when swearing her love to Marius jr. on the morning after they have consummated their marriage, Lavinia dwells on the humiliation and pain she could experience as punishment for infidelity:

May I be brought to Poverty and Scorn,
Hooted by Slaves forth from thy gates, O Rome
Til flying to the Woods t'avoid my Shame,
Sharp Hunger, Cold, or some worse Fate destroy me;
And not one tree vouchsafe a Leaf to hide me.

(IV.74-78)

Marius jr.'s response to this is a rather puzzled, “What needs all this” (IV.79)—which is a little unfair since he had set the tone for the exchange in a previous speech, imagining himself “hither brought a Captive bound, / T'adorn the Triumph of my basest Foe” (IV.70-71) should be stray from Lavinia. The need for “all this” is partly indicated by an earlier assertion by Marius jr. that Lavinia is pure and “untainted” yet with the “Joy of Sense” (I.321-22). To feel sexual desire is to be tainted, and, once aroused, both lovers know that sexual appetites, like all other appetites, grow insatiable. In a wonderfully apt commercial metaphor, Lavinia, earlier on in the scene, abandons larks and nightingales to image heaven as a banker and sex as money:

Sure, giving Thee, Heav'n grew too far in Debt
To pay, till Bankrupt-like it broke; whilst I,
A poor compounding Creditor, am forc'd
To take a Mite for endless Summs of Joy.

(IV.14-17)

Celestial (but probably empty) cash registers ring up orgasms for this late seventeenth-century Juliet, a Hobbesian appetitive woman who can never be satisfied with the present. Here indeed is a world without transcendence in which the characters are moved by varying desires and impulses amidst social and material decay. Love gives Marius jr. and Lavinia little more than the experience of frustration and a sense of humiliation. For both lovers their relationship is clearly disobedient, the fruit of the forbidden tree, and since they do not and cannot defy the forbidding fathers, love's enjoyments are the pleasures of bondage and the joys of servitude.

The fathers express considerable contempt for their children; “This most inglorious Son of Caius Marius” (III.194), fumes Caius Marius, and Metellus notes cynically that his daughter is “Debaucht already to her Sexe's Folly” (II.100). This contempt cripples the children, leading both to their furtive and debased love and to their cringing dependence on parental approval. It is notable that both fathers threaten their children with disinheritance (II.137-40, III.220-26), but their children cling on. Marius jr. and Lavinia are as eager as the small boy in the last act to be acknowledged by their fathers—in particular, to be fathered by the monstrous Caius Marius. Lavinia only abandons her own father to seek out a substitute in Caius Marius. For both lovers it is impossible to construct an identity in terms of themselves alone or each other. Indeed, Marius jr. is so much more concerned with gaining his father's approval than his wife's love that he offers to forego her bed until his father should “your self present her to my Arms” (III.244). Marius jr.'s definition of Lavinia, when he has married her, typically stresses her status as a daughter: “She's scarce more / Metellus daughter now than Your's (III.214-15). Since Caius Marius would happily wish her dead, she is also scarcely his. By her marriage Lavinia has in fact become that most profound Otwavian vision of woman—an orphan. She is a passionate and placeless drifter in a world ruled by men. Her encounter with Caius Marius during his exile in the countryside enacts the dehumanizing of Lavinia through her experience of sexual passion in a patriarchy.

When she approaches him his first words are “What art thou” (IV.315), and her response is symptomatic of her confused and dependent sense of herself. She is hesitant and indirect, first describing herself as a “poor unhappy Woman” (IV.318) and then, having addressed Caius Marius as “My Father” (IV.324), she explains her right to this relationship tentatively and conditionally: “I am your Daughter, if your Son's my Lord” (IV.329). Although Caius Marius does come to acknowledge the relationship, his first impulse is to repudiate her claim with violence: “My offspring are all Males, / The Nobler sort of Beasts entitl'ed Men” (IV.327). Even when he has accepted her right to call him father, Caius Marius' reaction is to call her a “thing”: “Art thou that fond, that kind and doting thing, / That left her Father for a banish Husband?” (IV.332-33; italics mine). Lavinia is, perhaps, a “thing,” an anomaly, because she is “fond” and “kind and doting”—unusual, and unvalued, qualities in a world in which men, however noble, are “Beasts.” However, in using the word, Caius Marius is also stressing the oddness of her action in fleeing her parental home for her husband. That Caius Marius finds such fidelity strange impugns Lavinia's status and identity as a wife. The word carries the sense, reinforced by Marius jr. and Lavinia's subservient love-language, that her pursuit of love and rejection of home have reduced her to a sub-human level. In fact, Lavinia's various projections of how her passions might lead her to wander an exile through the countryside have come true.

The assertive romanticism to be associated with Lavinia's escape to the wilderness to be with her husband is undermined by her timorous dependence and by Caius Marius' dehumanizing response; finally, it is rendered entirely pointless as Lavinia is easily captured and returned to her father. This Shakespearean interlude in the countryside does not show the characters coming to any understanding of themselves or resolving any problems. Rather, the scene works as a paradox, showing that there is no escape in escape. There are no rejuvenating sources in Nature (Caius Marius feels old in the countryside), and the paradise which Lavinia seems briefly to glimpse (IV.338-40, 343-33) is a subjective reflection of her own (misguided) optimism. Where she finds sustenance, Caius Marius finds only “Drought! parching Drought!” (IV.281). The landscapes around them are projections of their inner mental landscapes, their hopes, fears, and frustrations. The unromantic, non-Edenic (or Forest of Arden) “reality” is indicated by the prosaic (in every sense) conversation of the countrymen (IV.186-208). It is entirely appropriate that this anti-pastoral should draw to a close with Caius Marius' bloodthirsty dreams of revenge on Rome (IV.186-208) and his son's curse on Nature (IV.475-76). However vexed and confused the characters' lives are in Rome, there are no oases for them outside Rome.

Later, in Act V, when Caius Marius has regained the consulship and murdered Lavinia's father, she becomes a complete orphan—and does not now address Caius Marius as “Father” but as “Tyrant” (V.414). The sense that identity is contingent is reinforced as Caius Marius is puzzled to recall either her name or her face (V.414, 417). Now an orphan and a widow (Marius jr. has killed himself), Lavinia no longer defines herself in terms of her relationships but as an abstraction. Replying to Caius Marius' question if she is called Lavinia, she says, “Once I was: / But by my Woes may now be better known” (V.417-18). Her final speech is both a rejection of her earlier desire to be fathered by Caius Marius and a listing of her losses: “You have my Father butcher'd … The Gods have taken too my Husband from me” (V.450, 452). Like Castalio in The Orphan (Dorset Garden, Spring 1680), Lavinia in the end becomes “nothing” (Orphan V.526), and, like another Otwavian heroine, Belvidera, Lavinia signals her entry into the nothingness of death with the abandonment of rationality. With her dying curse Lavinia does not attempt to understand or to articulate her tragedy; instead she embraces irrationality for herself and her world: “Now let Rage, Distraction and Despair / Seize all mankind, till they grow mad as I am” (V.456-57).

Nevertheless, if Lavinia dies alone and mad, she also dies asserting, however negatively, the primacy of the fathers in her world. In a significant alteration of Juliet's suicide, Lavinia does not kill herself with her husband's dagger but with Caius Marius' sword, which is “yet reeking with my Father's Gore” (V.454). Her death, which provides one father with a bloody spectacle and which is performed on the sword he used to kill the other father, is a brilliant stage metaphor for the destructive tyranny of the fathers over the children. In using Caius Marius' sword, Lavinia also firmly links the love tragedy to the larger public tragedy, a link which had already been made by the dying Marius jr. who asserted that death was a welcome escape from “cruel Parents” and “oppressing Laws” (V.383). Lavinia's tomb is by no means inviolate from the outside world. It is to that tomb that Caius Marius has pursued his political enemy; further, in the last moments of the play, more characters tumble into the tomb bringing news of the latest political reversal as Caius Marius' troops have been defeated and Sylla is marching on Rome. The family tomb with its scatter of bodies—Metellus, Marius jr., and Lavinia dead; Sulpitius and Caius Marius dying—provides a fitting concluding scene for the play which has interconnected public and private discords and shown the political and family fathers leading their people and children to destruction and death.

There is about Marius jr. and Lavinia's deaths nothing of the “if only …” of Romeo and Juliet's suicides. The mistakes with drugs and poison become part of their patterns of misfortune, they “stumble upon Ruine” but not part of a tantalizing pattern of mistiming. It is, in fact, typical of the chaotic world Otway has created that heroic deaths, which imply meaning, and unnecessary deaths, which imply waste and loss, should be denied the characters. Metellus dies after a brief undignified scuffle; Sulpitius dies, as he recognizes, deservedly unmourned (V.491-93); and Caius Marius waits at the end, defeated and despairing, for “loathsome Death” (V.482). Had Marius jr. and Lavinia lived, their love would have remained perverse and imperfect and their situation intolerable. Hence Otway's popular innovation, the awakening of Lavinia before her “Romeo” dies but after he has taken poison, does not weaken the end. Their last speeches are, appropriately, about death and not about life (V.378-92); they heighten the dramatic tension but do not change anything. Nor do their deaths, unlike Romeo and Juliet's, hold out any hope of a post-mortem reconciliation of the factions. Caius Marius knew, as Romeo and Juliet's parents did not, that a marriage had taken place uniting him in kinship with his enemy, and this in no way lessened his murderous rage against his daughter-in-law's family and faction. The news at the end that Sylla is marching on Rome would not have boded well for the lovers. There is no third party, no Prince of Verona, to rebuke, arbitrate, and conciliate; here the family is the state; the state is the family; and the contemporary analogy turns sour as primal energies and jealousies merge with public ambitions and rivalries to destroy both family and state.

Caius Marius' final repentance with regard to his ambitious drives (V.477-80) and his maunderings over Metellus' body—“bury Me and all my Sins / Here with this good Old man. … We might have all bin Friends and in one House” (V.462-63, 466)—are, on the face of it, absurd. The volte face is too swift to be convincing: Metellus never was a “good Old man,” and it is impossible to imagine Metellus and Caius Marius amiably sharing a pipe by the fireside. Caius Marius' sudden change of character can be seen as one more indication of his protean and unstable nature. Once before, in exile, he had gone “soft” only to regain his nerve later and resume his bloodthirsty quest for power. Just as the political situation continues its violent upheavals and dislocations, the main character to the end fails to articulate his life coherently. Nevertheless, these lines can be argued to represent, however imperfectly, some degree of tragic peripeteia. A recognition that it is not the public realm which has disrupted the private but rather that it is the eruption of the private (better to have “bin Friends, and in one House”) into the public which has created havoc. This recognition marks one of the differences Otway is dramatizing between his own world and that of Shakespeare. The Prince of Verona blames himself at the end of Romeo and Juliet for “winking” (V.iii.293) at the family feud which has even cost him the life of one of his own kinsmen. His statement involves an implicit assertion that he had the power to stop the bloodshed and also an acknowledgement that the feud was domestic—therefore, until the enormities of Mercutio and Romeo and Juliet's deaths, arguably outside his province. Otway's Rome, however, lacks any clear demarcation between the public and domestic realms, between the claims of kin and claims of state. By fusing together Plutarch and Romeo and Juliet, Otway created a grim world which crashes in on itself. In his Prologue Otway states that Shakespeare wrote in a secure world where a “gracious Prince's Favour chear'd his Muse, / A constant Favour he ne'r fear'd to lose” (ll. 22-23). Constancy, authority, grace, and freedom from fear are precisely the features so notably absent from the world of Caius Marius, and, in their absence, there is no way to “know each other” or to heal the “dark Disorders / Of a Divided State.”

In 1680 Filmer's Patriarcha was to be republished since this pre-civil war defense of absolute and patriarchal rule was to seem deeply relevant to Charles II's divided realm. However, if Otway's play shows a keen sense of the chaos resultant from the absence of an ultimate authority and the necessity of a firm law-giver—and thus seems part of a trend in contemporary political thought—it also questions (probably unintentionally), and even dismantles, the bases of patriarchal authority. In his Prologue Otway looks back nostalgically to the days when “Great Augustus the World's Empire held” (l. 3), and by placing his play in the pre-Augustan era he points implicitly to absolute rule as the only answer to anarchy. However, his depiction of the destruction wrought by militant fathers seeking to impose their authority on their families and people points in other directions. Otway's combination of Shakespeare's domestic tragedy with Plutarch's account of civil conflict, in effect, demystifies the theory of the family as the basis and model of the state and the ruler as the father of his people. Basically, Otway argues himself to a dead end as his drama illustrates both the fearful absence of the authoritative father and the fearful presence of the powerful father.

Otway's fathers are always destructive and intemperate beings. In his previous tragedy, Don Carlos (Dorset Garden, June 1676), the father (who is also the king) actually murders his son (who is also his subject). In his adaptation of Racine's Bérénice (Dorset Garden, December 1676) we see a son deny his being and debase his humanity under the weight of his dead father's injunctions. In his next tragedies, The Orphan and Venice Preserv'd, we find in one play a father, Lear-like, abdicating his duties while his children commit incest and suicide around him, while in the other we find a range of father figures, all of them embodying varying degrees of senile perversity. Caius Marius, who celebrates his period of absolute rule with absolute cruelty, is a powerful emblem of the father-ruler who brings “Horrour, Confusion and Inverted Order” (II.506) to family and state. He presents a terrible image of the Pater Familias turned Pater Patriae; better, indeed, to stay at home and exercise the small-scale tyrannies of the Montagues and Capulets. The family, as Otway presents it, offers a model of negligence and repression. When the family becomes the state, the see-saw of negligence and repression becomes the nightmare of alternating anarchy and tyranny.

It is not surprising that, despite loyal Prologues and Epilogues, Otway never enjoyed a “gracious Prince's Favour” for his “Muse.” His muse was too subversive.

Notes

1. G. C. D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, (London and New York: Constable, 1921), I, 51; The Works of Thomas Otway: Plays, Poems and Love-Letters, ed. J. C. Ghosh (1932; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), I, 46. All citations from Otway are from this edition. All citations from Shakespeare are from The Complete Works, ed Peter Alexander (rpt. London and Glasgow: Collins, 1974).

2. Kerstin P. Warner, Thomas Otway (Boston: Twayne, 1982), p. 92. See also R. G. Ham, Otway and Lee: Biography from a Baroque Age (1931; rpt. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), and H. Batzer Pollard, “Shakespeare's Influence on Otway's Caius Marius,” Revue de l'Universitie d'Ottawa, 39 (1969), 533-61. Batzer Pollard's and Warner's accounts are hampered by an over-literal sense of the play's political significance. Batzer Pollard strongly identifies Caius Marius with Shaftesbury and feeling that he is treated sympathetically at times explains this, unhistorically, by stating that Shaftesbury's political position was unclear in 1679 (p. 541). Warner also identifies Caius Marius with Shaftesbury and, more oddly, identifies Sulpitius with the Duke of Monmouth (p. 34). All these writers see the love interest plot taken from Romeo and Juliet as romantic relief rather than an integral part of the play.

3. R. D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), p. 322. The line also struck Henry Fielding as funny; see Princess Huncamunca's cry “O Tom Thumb! Tom Thumb! wherefore art thou Tom Thumb?” (Tom Thumb, Sc. III).

4. In Act I, lines 424-25 recall Julius Caesar II.i.22-23; Caius Marius' curses and oaths at II.505-07 and III.470-74 and bloodthirsty designs at V.94-96 recall Antony's curse in Julius Caesar III.263-74 and Timon's curse on Athens in Timon of Athens IV.i.1-40. The scene with the Roman ambassadors in Act V is similar in idea but not in result to Coriolanus' reception of the embassy before Rome (Coriolanus V.iii). Otway's use of the rabble also indicates a debt to Shakespeare's Roman and history plays. Shakespeare's treatment of the crowd had already been absorbed by Restoration dramatists; see Eric Rothstein's discussion of Wilson's Andronicus Comnenius (1664) in Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 69-70.

5. J. R. Jones, The Country and the Court: England 1658-1714 (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), p. 210.

6. In the course of the play, Caius Marius' low birth is stressed by his opponents (I.58-61, III.380-81), he is accused of bribery in the elections and characterized as combining ambition and diseased old age (I.100-01). All these points have a source in Plutarch but are also typical of contemporary attacks on Shaftesbury; see satires such as John Caryll's The Hypocrite (1678) and, of course, Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681). When Shaftesbury took office in 1679 he described himself as serving as “Tribune of the People”; the phrase reminds one of the naturalness for this period of casting contemporary events in a classical mold. In the play it is Sulpitius who is Tribune of the People (II.415-16); hence if Otway was aware of Shaftesbury's claim this suggests that he was more concerned with tendencies than direct political lampooning. While it is reasonable to suppose that Caius Marius is at times characterized in a manner which recalls attacks on Shaftesbury, he also fits into the conventional mold of the scheming/ambitious soldier or statesman. Most strongly of all, however, he resembles other of Otway's unreasonable, angry, and ambitious fathers from Tissaphernes in Alcibiades (Dorset Garden 1675) to Pruili in Venice Preserv'd (Dorset Garden 1682). For other critics' views, see note 2, above.

7. Geoffrey Marshall, Restoration Serious Drama (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1975), p. 111. The question “what art thou” is found at II.482, III.359, IV.315, 394, 436. There are variants such as “Who art thou” (II.283), “What are those” (IV.242), “Who are you” (IV.244), and “Whoe're thou art” (V.322).

8. Marshall, Restoration Serious Drama, p. 218; Warner, Thomas Otway, p. 94.

9. Whether or not Otway read Filmer's Patriarcha, in an old edition or manuscript in circulation, it seems relevant to note some of the powers Filmer unhesitatingly gave to the father. Filmer insists on the father's right to punish, by death if necessary, his children, giving the example of Judah ordering his daughter-in-law Thamar to be burnt to death (Patriarcha, ed. Peter Laslett [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949], p. 58). He also states that the father's authority over his children is above civil law (p. 73) and that similarly the King/Father is above human law (pp. 95-96).