[In the following essay, Moore argues that Venice Preserv'd is principally an attack on the Earl of Shaftesbury and that much of the play cannot be understood without a grounding in late-seventeenth-century English history.]

From the accession of Charles II, English drama manifested a continuous strain of political satire, most of it in favor of the Court party. The Roundheads, the citizens, the Presbyterians, the opposers of the Crown, above all the foremost Liberal of the day,¹ Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the Earl of Shaftesbury, were fair game to be attacked in a prologue, an epilogue, and even at times in a full-length character portrayal or an entire play.

Especially was this true during the troublous years 1678-1682, during which five of Otway's plays were produced. The two struggling theatres of the time, dependent alike on Court patronage and Court sanction, with audiences drawn chiefly from the Royalist faction,² became openly partisan. During these four years, few plays were produced which were not largely political in their allusions, if not in their entire plots. Of these plays many served their factional ends and have been forgotten. Otway's Venice Preserved, through its passion and its beauty, has so completely outlived its contemporary allusions that the modern reader is likely to slight them, and the modern editor who approaches the play without special study of the history of the period is sure to misunderstand them.

The Cavalier Parliament of 1661-1678, though monarchist in sentiment and loyal to Charles personally, did not support all of his policies: it opposed the French rapprochement and the Dutch Wars, and it demanded the continuance of the repressive acts against Catholicism. Moreover, it was opposed to the creation of a standing army, and during the eighteen years of its existence it came gradually to demand the control of appropriations, primarily for the sake of thwarting the King's desire for a standing army.

But despite its partial independence, the Cavalier Parliament had stood as a buffer between the King and the Country party; its successor was so certain to be less favorable to Charles that not until 1678 was the Opposition able to force a dissolution, which was followed by an overwhelming Whig victory at the polls. In 1677 Shaftesbury, after an ineffectual attack on the constitutionality of so prolonged a session, was confined in the Tower for a year without trial, and was able to secure his freedom only by an abject apology to the House of Lords.³ But long before 1678 Charles, depending more and more upon secret grants from France to maintain his freedom from Parliamentary control, had extended his arbitrary power and had prorogued the Parliament from time to time, although he dared not dissolve it.

The King was repulsed for a time by the Parliamentary inquiry into the Popish Plot in 1678, when “the truths that would have saved the Whigs remained hid, but a liar came to their deliverance;”⁴ and it was not until after more than three years of life-and-death struggle with the Whigs, headed by Shaftesbury,⁵ that the King triumphed in the main purpose of his tortuous policy—the absolute supremacy of the Crown.

Venice Preserved was first acted in February, 1682, at a time when the struggle of Charles for arbitrary power was being rewarded with success. The Oxford Parliament had been dissolved by the King nearly a year previously; and, with a three-year pension from Louis XIV, Charles was able to rule England for the remaining years of his life without summoning a parliament.⁶ Shaftesbury, the former Lord Chancellor but never a real confidant of Charles, had for nine years known of the King's secret adherence to the Catholic religion;⁷ and during that time he had come gradually to surmise much of the underlying policy of his royal master.⁸ As late as 1679 there had been hopes of drawing Shaftesbury back into the party of the King,⁹ but before the dissolution of Parliament in March, 1681, the breach was final. Soon afterwards Shaftesbury was arrested on a charge of treason supported by suborned witnesses,¹⁰ and was brought before a grand jury in London. But he was saved from certain sentence to death (he would have been tried by a special jury of peers of the King's own choosing¹¹) when the grand jury refused to declare a true bill. Even after this virtual acquittal Shaftesbury was held, at first in confinement and later on bail, until February, 1682, the month in which Otway's play was produced. Within the year following, Shaftesbury had failed as a revolutionary leader, had escaped to Holland, and had died in exile.

It is against the party of Shaftesbury that every line of contemporary satire in Venice Preserved is directed. The Popish Plot is attacked or belittled—in the Prologue as a fraud, in the play itself as a thing of no consequence. Parliament, dissolved by the King in the preceding year, is held up to scorn. And Shaftesbury himself, the chosen friend of John Locke, and for all his faults, the chief Liberal leader of the age, is attacked in every conceivable way, both as a malicious leader and as a doting fool, as a man of unbridled licentiousness and as an impotent weakling. Dryden, with more skill as a satirist, could concede that there was some truth in the Popish Plot, and that Shaftesbury was a man of great native ability and of real integrity as a judge;¹² with Otway there is as little attempt at artistic restraint as at truth or consistency. Every charge which more than forty years of public life had raised against Shaftesbury is hurled at him with frightful vehemence.

With such exceptions as Davies, who, to some degree, followed fairly direct traditions, and Genest, who followed Davies in part, later commentators have taken their history from such partisan sources as Dryden's satires on Shaftesbury; and they have repeated from one edition to another the incorrect or at least inadequate explanations of their predecessors. For this the historians are partly responsible; there was no authentic life of Shaftesbury until a half century ago, and special study of the Popish Plot has been even more backward. As one historian says, “There is nothing in English history of equal importance with the Popish Plot of which so little is known.” However, the main events of the time can perhaps be followed with sufficient clearness for most of our present purposes.

Otway seems to have been on principle a Tory and a Royalist; in addition, he was a Court poet. During a period of four and a half years, the King, on account of the excitement of the Popish Plot, attended the theatre much less than usual. Of the twelve plays he is known to have seen, six were by Otway.¹³ He saw Venice Preserved in February, 1682, perhaps, according to his custom, at the first night's performance. None of Otway's plays would seem to have been withheld from performance by the King's order, as was the fate of many other plays of the time (even including one of Dryden's). It was no easy task for the playwright to suit the exacting political requirements of the Court. Tate complained bitterly of the suppression of his Sicilian Usurper on the third day, despite his careful wrenching of the plot so that “every scene is full of respect to Majesty, and the dignity of Courts, not one altered page, but what breathes loyalty.”¹⁴

The two royalist poets who seem to have given most satisfaction at this time were Dryden and Otway, both of whom, according to tradition, followed hints from Charles himself for the attacks directed at Shaftesbury.¹⁵ The frequency and the tone of Otway's political allusions in his other plays are indicated by the citations in the footnotes.¹⁶ Of Venice Preserved it is usually stated that Otway attacks Shaftesbury under the character of Antonio, and that the Prologue and the Epilogue are attacks upon him and upon the conduct of the inquiry into the Popish Plot. The sub-title of the play, A Plot Discovered, has been repeatedly pointed out as a reference to the Popish Plot. Further attempts to trace allusions have been halting, and often utterly erroneous.

In six respects contemporary allusions may be traced farther and more precisely than previous students of the play have done: (1) in the frequent recurrence of formal swearing; (2) in the portrayal of Shaftesbury as Renault; (3) in the more open assault on Shaftesbury as Antonio; (4) in the explicit references to the Popish Plot; (5) in the reduction of the serious aspects of the conspiracy, which in Otway's source (Abbé Saint-Réal's historical romance, Conjuration des Espagnols contre la république de Venise en 1618, either in the original French text of 1674 or in the English translation of 1675) was of vast magnitude, to a bubble which collapses at the first push, and against which the senators are forewarned by an anonymous letter even before Jaffeir comes to betray the conspirators; and (6) in the scornful presentation of the Senate, apparently with reference to Parliament.

(1) A unique feature of the play is the vast amount of offering and taking of formal oaths of loyalty and of truth, without a parallel in English drama. In addition to frequent reference to vows, repeated protestations of loyalty, and a fair proportion of ordinary swearing for the sake of emphasis, no less than nine passages—129 lines in all—are devoted to the formal act of swearing, only one of which is derived from Otway's source,¹⁷ while several serve no apparent purpose in the story. Accordingly, it seems possible to regard these passages as allusions to the trials for the Popish Plot, which from first to last were conducted by the use of questionable or suborned witnesses,¹⁸ and which are, as Pollock has said, “a standing monument to the most astounding outburst of successful perjury which has occurred in modern times.”¹⁹ This conjecture is supported by the satirical references to swearing in Otway's next play, The Atheist, which was produced in the year following.²⁰

When the public had for two and a half years been agitated so deeply by the discussion of the Plot,²¹ and had at last begun to discredit the oaths which were sworn to establish its existence, such passages as these would have great contemporary interest:²²

Were truth by sense and reason to be tried,
Sure all our swearers might be laid aside:(23)
PIERRE:
Well said! out with't; swear a little—
JAFFEIR:
                                                                                Swear!
By sea and air, by earth, by Heaven and hell,
I will revenge my Belvidera's tears!
Hark thee, my friend; Priuli—is—a senator!(24)
PIERRE:
… Swear that thou wilt be true to what I utter;
And when I have told thee that which only gods
And men like gods are privy to, then swear
No chance or change shall wrest it from thy bosom.
JAFFEIR:
When thou wouldst bind me, is there need of oaths?

.....

PIERRE:
… There's no religion, no hypocrisy in't:
We'll do the business, and ne'er fast and pray for't;

.....

Swear then!(25)
BELVIDERA:
Shall I swear?
JAFFEIR:
No! do not swear. I would not violate
Thy tender nature with so rude a bond;
But as thou hop'st to see me live my days
And love thee long, lock this within thy breast.(26)
JAFFEIR:
… I must have the oaths
And sacred promise of this reverend council,
That in a full assembly of the Senate
The thing I ask be ratified. Swear this,
And I'll unfold the secrets of your danger.
ALL:
We'll swear.
DUKE:
                                                                      Propose the oath.
JAFFEIR:
                                                                                                              By all the hopes
Ye have of peace and happiness hereafter,
Swear!
ALL:
We all swear.
JAFFEIR:
                                                                      To grant me what I've asked,
Ye swear.
ALL:
We swear.(27)
JAFFEIR:
By all that's just—
PIERRE:
                                                                                Swear by some other powers,
For thou hast broke that sacred oath too lately.

.....

All I received in surety for thy truth,
Were unregarded oaths—and this, this dagger,
Given with a worthless pledge thou since hast stol'n:
So I restore it back to thee again,
Swearing by all those powers which thou hast violated. …(28)
AQUILINA:
… Swear that my love shall live,
Or thou art dead!
ANTONIO:
Ah-h-h-h.
AQUILINA:
                                                                                Swear to recall his doom—
Swear at my feet, and tremble at my fury.
ANTONIO:
I do. [Aside.] Now, if she would but kick a little bit—
one kick now, ah-h-h-h.
AQUILINA:
Swear, or—
ANTONIO:
                                                                      I do, by these dear fragrant foots
And little toes, sweet as—e-e-e-e, my Nacky, Nacky, Nacky.(29)

The ghost of Hamlet's father, with its insistence on Hamlet's taking the oath, no doubt has amused the unthinking spectators. How much more amusing must such an orgy of swearing³⁰ have been, when it was at last safe for the triumphant Court to laugh at the Popish Plot!

(2) Davies,³¹ and Genest³² after him, seem to be alone in conjecturing that Renault may represent a serious satire on Shaftesbury, to supplement the facetious picture drawn in the character of Antonio. This plausible conjecture deserves much more attention than it has received. In the Prologue, these two characters alone are described in words which call for contemporary application. Frederick and James W. Tupper conjecture³³ that the description of Renault in the Prologue applies to Lord Stafford, and express surprise that the parallel has not been noticed before. But surely Otway would not have made Stafford the butt for ridicule, since Stafford's conviction was regarded as a blow to the cause of the King,³⁴ who might even have pardoned him if he had dared.³⁵ Indeed, the desire of Charles to spare him from the grosser indignities meted out to a traitor provoked a satirical reply from the Commons.³⁶ Finally, the lines do not fit Stafford, who had died fifteen months before this play was produced. On the other hand, they distinctly describe Shaftesbury as his enemies represented him:

Here is a traitor too, that's very old,
Turbulent, subtle, mischievous, and bold,
Bloody, revengeful, and to crown his part,
Loves fumbling with a wench, with all his heart;
Till after having many changes passed,
In spite of age (thanks Heaven) is hanged at last.(37)

An examination of the speeches of Renault makes this identification seem certain. The other conspirators are all quite as favorably portrayed as anyone in the Senate, except Eliot, the Englishman, who is introduced in the play to be gratuitously held up to scorn for treason, in a jibe against the Whigs.³⁸ So far from being represented as a band of cut-throats, they are on the whole rather sympathetically drawn, especially in the heroic Pierre, who stands out as a lofty figure in the midst of the cruel and cowardly senators. But Renault has all of the faults and vices popularly attributed to Shaftesbury: excessive ambition, duplicity, an infirm body, licentious tastes, personal cowardice, and a fondness for speech-making.

His first words are in the form of a soliloquy on ambition (II, iii, 1-7). Next he boasts of his superior integrity (1. 15). (Charles and James called Shaftesbury in satire “little Sincerity.”)³⁹ Shaftesbury's own part in pressing the Popish Plot is referred to (11. 19-20) and his age (1. 36). When Pierre compares his cause with that of Brutus, Renault puts in for Catiline (1. 54). Genest⁴⁰ misunderstood this passage, assuming that the conspirators do not distinguish between Brutus and Catiline. But this is clearly not the sense of the passage; Pierre, for all his willingness to shed blood, has a notion of freedom in his head. He calls for “a battle for the freedom of the world” (1. 86); and he says with real nobility, when he learns that he has failed,

                                                                      So! Then all's over,
Venice has lost her freedom, I, my life.

(IV, ii, 155-6)

Shaftesbury's ascent from the ranks of the gentry to those of the nobility is perhaps glanced at in Renault's hatred of the nobles and the Senate (11. 79-80, 81-2). Powerful as he was at this time in the Commons, Shaftesbury had only four years before been obliged to apologize abjectly to the Lords in order to secure his release from the Tower. His physical infirmities and his reputed lust are stressed throughout the passages dealing with his attempt on Belvidera: “the old hoary wretch … ghastly with infernal lust … that old son of mischief … that vile wretch approached me … with my cries I scared his coward heart, Till he withdrew and muttered vows to hell. … That mortified, old, withered, winter rogue … the old fox.” (III, ii) His cruelty is stressed by Jaffeir:

Oh, reverend cruelty! damned, bloody villain!

(III, ii, 321)

Merciless, horrid slave!—Aye, blood enough!
Shed blood enough, old Renault.

(III, ii, 338-9)

His duplicity is emphasized by his calling on the conspirators to embrace,⁴¹ after he has expressed his contempt for embracing, in a speech aside (“I never loved these huggers”) (II, iii, 145), and shortly before he opens his attack on Jaffeir as a traitor. His cowardice is strongly emphasized throughout the passage in which Pierre defends his absent friend.⁴² His unusually long sharp features are referred to in Pierre's words, “that lean, withered, wretched face!” (III, ii, 457) Belvidera refers to him as

                                        that infernal devil, that old fiend
That's damned himself, and would undo mankind.

(IV, i, 30-1)

Perhaps this may allude to the supposed Deism of Shaftesbury, about which many stories were in circulation.⁴³

Most curious of all, Renault, so carefully held up to scorn in such multitudinous ways, and given both a character and an importance in the plot quite unlike anything in Otway's source, is dropped from sight when Antonio appears in the same scene. It is now Antonio who represents Shaftesbury, and the elaborate portrayal of Renault is discarded. After the conspirators are captured, Pierre becomes their spokesman, and Renault subsides into a very subordinate part. He utters only one sentence, in which he echoes Pierre's desire for death rather than captivity;⁴⁴ and he seems to be included in Pierre's subsequent eulogium,

          they've all died like men, too,
Worthy their character.(45)

The real leader of the conspiracy in the historical novel which served as Otway's source, Bedamar, the Spanish ambassador, is here kept out of sight most of the time. Renault is given a prominence in the drama which is only partly justified by making him the cause of Jaffeir's defection. The ferocity with which he is attacked, the consistency with which he is charged with the supposed vices of Shaftesbury, the prominence which is given to him when no action is going forward, and the complete obscurity into which he falls after Antonio appears on the stage with him, can hardly be explained except in terms of contemporary satire. This explanation is definitely established if the explicit reference to Renault in the Prologue is taken to allude to Shaftesbury.

(3) The character of Antonio is usually thought of as an odious picture of the depravity of old age;⁴⁶ but it goes much farther than that. In a dissolute age, it was customary for Shaftesbury's enemies to satirize his appearance of an unusually moral life in two different ways: Dryden, for instance, refers to him as having “an eunuch face,”⁴⁷ but adds in seeming contradiction, “His open lewdness he could ne'er disguise.”⁴⁸ Otway has divided the two conceptions in his two characters of Renault and Antonio. Antonio is a harmless but extremely offensive old dotard, enfeebled in body and perverted in instincts. He is rich; he flaunts his purse of gold before the eyes of Aquilina,⁴⁹ and many other references are made to his wealth. Shaftesbury was one of the rich men of the age, with a clear income which has been estimated as high as £7,000,⁵⁰ and large holdings in the West Indies, at sea, and in English mines and other speculations.

Oliver Cromwell had nicknamed Shaftesbury “Cicero.”⁵¹ The decline of the Whig power dated from the defeat of the Second Exclusion Bill a little more than a year before, after “an oratorical duel between the two most effective speakers of their generation,” Shaftesbury and Halifax, “and it was the almost unanimous verdict of listeners that Halifax was the victor.”⁵² According to Bishop Burnet, an avowed enemy, Shaftesbury

had a wonderful faculty in speaking to a popular assembly, and could mix both the facetious and the serious way of arguing very agreeably … he triumphed in a rambling way of talking, but argued slightly when he was held close to any point. He had a wonderful faculty at opposing, and running things down; but had not the like force in building up. He had such an extravagant vanity in setting himself out, that it was very disagreeable.⁵³

In view of these facts and opinions, the picture of Antonio ceases to be merely repulsive and nasty, and becomes a piece of intensely personal satire. Antonio's second attempt at a speech,⁵⁴ in its silly references to the sun and moon, seems to glance at Shaftesbury's notorious interest in astrology.⁵⁵ It also represents his desire to keep the Plot before the public (as recently as October 28, 1680, two members of Parliament had been expelled for discrediting the Plot);⁵⁶ and in its last lines it refers to the cruelty with which Shaftesbury was repeatedly charged, from the Civil War on. He speaks coolly of the death of Pierre:

          he's to be hanged, little Nacky—
Trussed up for treason, and so forth, child.

(V, i, 216-7)

He is immensely frightened by the sight of a dagger (V, i, 191)—a hit at the reported attempts to assassinate Shaftesbury,⁵⁷ as well as at his reputed cowardice. But when Aquilina tells him that he will be hanged (a direct allusion to the very recent attempt to indict him for treason, as well as an old joke among his enemies, dating back at least as far as the third part of Butler's Hudibras,⁵⁸ in which it is elaborately developed), he takes it as a jest:

Hanged, sweetheart? Prithee, be quiet. Hanged, quoth-a; that's a merry conceit, with all my heart. Why thou jok'st, Nacky; thou art given to joking, I'll swear.

(V, i, 178-181)

This passage may be taken as an additional reason for coupling the descriptions of Renault and of Antonio in the Prologue.

It has been observed by many critics that the age assigned to Antonio is sixty-one. Although at this time Shaftesbury was not exactly at that age, as editors are in the habit of saying, he was well on in his sixty-first year; and as early as 1677 he had referred to himself as “an old infirm man.”⁵⁹ For years he had attributed his continued life to the skill of his physician, John Locke.⁶⁰ Nearly two and a half years after his death he was brought on the stage by Dryden (Albion and Albanus), to be ridiculed for the abscess in his side which was kept open by a silver tube. The same infirmity gave rise to the Court nickname, Count Tapski; and it serves to explain the allusion to Poland in Otway's Prologue.⁶¹

It is just possible that there is some suggestion of the Meal Tub Plot in the whole situation at Aquilina's house, so different in tone from its analogue in Saint-Réal's romance. The Catholic spy, Mrs. Cellier, was at this time suspected of having been used as a tool by Shaftesbury, as well as by the Catholic party. She kept an establishment not entirely unlike that of Aquilina in Venice; she doted on a handsome young conspirator named Dangerfield; and her house was freely used in the conspiracies of the day, and sheltered the witnesses sent over from the Jesuit school, St. Omers, to testify in the trials of the Popish Plot. She was supposed to have visited Shaftesbury's house with the intention of stabbing him.⁶² This is but a conjecture, and one which I am unable to confirm; but there is in the two situations enough similarity to arrest the attention of any student acquainted with the affairs of the period.

(4) The explicit references to the Popish Plot are very detailed in both Prologue and Epilogue, but are much less frequent in the play. The word plot seems to have been avoided in most speeches by intent; for it occurs only eight times during the play, seven times in speeches by the foolish Antonio, and once in a line in which the Duke seems almost constrained by the exigencies of the verse.⁶³ The pat phrases which were used from the first to characterize the Popish Plot occur satirically in the speeches of Antonio. He describes Jaffeir as “a damned bloody minded fellow”⁶⁴ and the plot as “a bloody, horrid, execrable, damnable, and audacious plot,”⁶⁵ quite in the cant language of the day; as on November 1, 1678, a joint resolution of Parliament had voted that “there hath been and still is a damnable and hellish Plot.”⁶⁶

(5) The conspiracy itself, which in Otway's source assumes a vast scope and an extraordinary complexity, is kept in the background. None of the conspirators (except Renault, Pierre, and Jaffeir) is characterized. Eliot, the Englishman, is apparently introduced only for a jibe at the Whigs in a speech which is otherwise inappropriate to the situation. The plot itself seems curiously nebulous and unreal. The senators are forewarned by an anonymous message even before Jaffeir betrays his fellow-conspirators; and the conspiracy collapses as soon as the leaders appear in the street. Of the ten thousand soldiers who were pledged to the revolt (II, iii, 84), no further mention is made. A few officers are able to pick up all of the active conspirators in the street like a handful of night-brawlers. This is quite unlike Saint-Réal's romance, in which a desperate stand is made by some of the conspirators, and their plans fail of achievement only by a matter of hours.

Three reasons may be assigned for this subordination of the conspiracy in Otway's treatment. His adherence to the unities, together with the limitations necessary for any stage treatment, would explain it in part. His own predilection for scenes of emotional intensity rather than for the progressive action of a tragedy⁶⁷ would tend in the same direction; in Venice Preserved as in The Orphan, and even in some of his lesser plays, he is chiefly concerned with the isolated passages of intense feeling. An additional reason is that he did not wish to emphasize the real danger of the conspiracy. The investigation of the Popish Plot had given the Whig party its temporary triumph against the growing power of the King; as a member of the Court party, Otway would be consistent in minimizing the peril of the nation. He could not subordinate the conspiracy further without giving up his tragedy entirely; but in his vivid delineation of the emotional states of Pierre, Jaffeir, and Belvidera, he leaves us no such sense of dramatic development of the story as we would expect in a Shakespearean play.

In summary, then, it seems to me (1) that the unexampled prominence given to the act of swearing faith has in part a satirical reference to the professed revelations of the Popish Plot under solemn oath. (2) The character of Renault, both in the Prologue and in the Play itself, is almost certainly meant for Shaftesbury, and is in some ways a more fierce attack on him than his portrayal as Antonio. (3) In the character of Antonio the minor and more contemptible qualities attributed to Shaftesbury are ridiculed, as the major ones are in Renault; and some glancing allusion, at least, is possibly intended regarding the entanglement with Mrs. Cellier with which his enemies charged him. (4) The allusions to a plot, by that name, are, almost without exception, of a satirical nature; and nearly all of them are put in the mouth of Antonio. (5) The plot against Venice, although not itself ridiculed, is reduced in magnitude; and from an affair of international scope it has become, in extent at least, something like what Tatlock and Martin call it, “the attempt by a gang of foreigners to wreck a great historic state.”⁶⁸

(6) A more general phase of the play is the continual and ferocious attack on the Venetian senate and the senators. Pierre, Renault, Jaffeir, Aquilina, and later Belvidera, have only scorn and loathing for the senate. The foolish boast of Antonio is that he is a senator;⁶⁹ and so often is this repeated that the reader comes to think of him as more or less typical. Pierre describes the senators as

          those baleful, unclean birds,
Those lazy owls, who (perched near fortune's top)
Sit only watchful with their heavy wings
To cuff down new-fledg'd virtues. …

(II, ii, 102-5)

McClumpha, quite unmindful of the struggle between Charles and Parliament, identifies their interests: “The parallelism between the dangers of the Venetian Republic and those of their own King and Parliament was readily understood by the theatre-goers of that day.”⁷⁰ He quotes the fatuous surmise of Genest⁷¹ that Otway “evidently meant to insinuate that the persons at this time in opposition to the Court were as unprincipled as the conspirators in his Tragedy.” But the play is surely an attack on Parliament, on its investigation and prosecution of the Popish Plot and its stubborn resistance to any extension of the royal prerogative by Charles, which resulted in numerous prorogations and a final dissolution of Parliament until the death of the King. If Otway meant to represent the conspirators as the enemies of Charles, and the senate as the Court party (as Genest supposed), he went strangely about his purpose of flattering the Court.

Notes

1. Shaftesbury is variously described by friends and foes as “the great Liberal” and as “the wickedest man of a wicked age.” More reasonable is the estimate of G. M. Trevelyan: “A sceptic who believed in civil liberty and religious Toleration for all Protestants. … Sometimes the servant, sometimes the enemy of Cromwell and of Charles II., he was always the servant of civil freedom and the enemy of a persecuting State Church” (England under the Stuarts, 9th ed., 1920, p. 364).

2. The influence of the Court on Restoration Drama is especially well treated by Allardyce Nicoll, in Chapter I of A History of Restoration Drama, Cambridge, 1923.

3. W. D. Christie, A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, London and New York, 1871, II, 259.

4. Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 382.

5. John Pollock, The Popish Plot: A Study in the History of the Reign of Charles II, Lond., 1903, p. 260: “In the panic of the Popish Plot and the wild agitation of the Exclusion bill that struggle, exasperated by the Dover treaty and the Catholic intrigues, came to a head. Its consequence was the Rye House Plot, the perfection of Whig failure. In that struggle too the conflicting principles found their absolute exponents in the two wittiest and two of the most able statesmen in English history, each gifted with a supreme political genius, each exclusive of the other, each fighting for personal ascendancy no less than for an idea, for principle no less than for power, Charles II and the Earl of Shaftesbury.”

6. Pollock, op. cit., pp. 256-57. Richard Lodge, The History of England from the Restoration to the Death of William III. (1660-1702), Lond. and N. Y., 1912, Chapter X.

7. Christie, op. cit., II, 87-88. Lodge, op. cit., p. 123.

8. Christie, op. cit., II, 136.

9. Ibid., II, 352. Burnet's History of My Own Time, ed. Osmund Airy, Oxford, 1900, Part I, II, 248, note 1.

10. Christie, op. cit., II, 419-426.

11. Ibid., II, 427.

12. Absalom and Achitophel, Part I. Montague Summers, the latest editor of Otway, apparently adopting the precept that “the Devil was the first Whig,” ignores all contemporary evidence in Shaftesbury's favor and denies him all excellence except in the degree of his crimes (The Complete Works of Thomas Otway, Lond., 1926, III, 277-8): “that lewd and hateful wretch, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, who may not untruly be said to have been one of the founders of the Whig faction. Patron and friend of the vile Titus Oates, true to no principles … steeped himself in every species of disloyalty, treachery, and crime … branded with the brand of Judas and of Cain, he found it convenient to fly to Holland in November, 1682, and there in the following January this execrable monster breathed his last, leaving ‘A Name to all succeeding Ages curst’.”

13. Nicoll, op. cit., p. 311; records from the Lord Chamberlain's department of the Public Record Office.

14. J. Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, etc., Bath, 1832, I, 294.

15. Lodge, op. cit., 462. The Hon. Roden Noel, Thomas Otway, London, 1888, pp. 288-89. Ibid., p. xlvii: “But Otway, to use his own words, only got ‘the pension of a prince's praise’; and a gracious permission to lampoon the greatest statesman of the age, which he did accordingly.”

16. In the five plays by Otway (1675-78) which precede the agitation over the Popish Plot, political allusions are doubtful and infrequent. The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1679) exalts the Duke of York in the Prologue; but the supposed satire on Shaftesbury is questionable. The accusations against Marius as proud, base-born, a leader of the mob, and a free dispenser of bribes may perhaps be oblique hits at Shaftesbury; but the play is not closely topical in its allusions, and most of it is remote from contemporary affairs. The Orphan (1680) exalts the Duke of York in the Prologue, contains two passages expressing intense loyalty to kings, and jibes at the Dissenters in the Epilogue.

    But it is in Otway's three last plays that contemporary allusions become most frequent and bitter. The Soldier's Fortune (1680) contains ten passages attacking Shaftesbury's party, false swearing, and the Plot. Venice Preserved (1682) intensifies and extends the attack on Shaftesbury. The Atheist (1683) contains ten passages, some of several pages, ridiculing the Dissenters, rebellion, false swearing, and the Plot, the Epilogue exulting in the discomfiture of those who

                                                                                                                                      “were never sparing
    To save the land, and damn yourselves, by swearing.”

17. The oath sworn by the senators when they promise immunity to Jaffeir and life to his associates.

18. Pollock, op. cit., pp. 312, 313, 328, 334, 345, 346. Burnet, op. cit., Part I, II, 198.

19. Pollock, op. cit., p. 265.

20. See note 16 above.

21. Venice Preserved, Prologue, ll. 3-5:

    When we have feared three years we know not what,
    Till witnesses begin to die o' th' rot,
    What made our poet meddle with a plot?

22. The text of Venice Preserved cited throughout is that of D. H. Stevens, Types of English Drama 1660-1780, Boston, 1923.

23. Prologue, ll. 11-12.

24. I, i, 296 ff.

25. II, ii, 72 ff.

26. III. ii, 132 ff.

27. IV, ii, 59 ff.

28. IV, ii, 229 ff.

29. V, i, 219 ff.

30. Burnet, op. cit., Part I, II, 292: “hearing that England was at that time disposed to hearken to good swearers, they thought themselves well qualified for the employment.”

31. Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, Lond., 1785, III, 228-29.

32. Genest, op. cit., I, 353. Since this article was written, the surmise of Genest has been quoted with approval by Summers (op. cit., I, lxxxviii).

33. Representative English Dramas from Dryden to Sheridan, N. Y., 1914, p. 438.

34. Pollock, op. cit., p. 368; Christie, op. cit., II, 382.

35. Pollock, op. cit., p. 369.

36. Ibid., pp. 369-70.

37. Prologue, ll. 23-28.

38. “You are an Englishman: when treason's hatching
    One might have thought you'd not have been behindhand.”

    (II, iii, 20-21.)

39. Burnet, op. cit., Part I, II, 213, Note 2.

40. Genest, op. cit., I, 353.

41. III, ii, 342.

42. III, ii, 433-38.

43. Bishop Burnet believed the charge against him: “He was, as to religion, a deist at best.” (Op. cit., Part I, I, 172.)

44. IV, ii, 165.

45. V, iii, 54-55.

46. The often-maligned praise which Taine has given these scenes is due in part to his entirely different conception of Antonio. To him, Antonio is not the doting pervert, but a statesman playing truant—“the busy man eager to leave his robes and his ceremonies … a clown who had missed his vocation, whom chance has given an embroidered silk gown. … He feels more natural, more at his ease, playing Punch than aping a statesman” (History of English Literature, New York, 1875, Book III, 25-6). This is curiously like some of the contemporary estimates of Shaftesbury, who was noted for wit and for practical joking. Pepys, for instance, says of him (May 15, 1663) that he was “a man of great business and yet of pleasure and drolling too.” Nicoll, op. cit., p. 154, calls the scenes “marring features,” “not because they are badly written, but because they do not harmonize well with the general theme of the play.”

47. The Medal, l. 23.

48. Ibid., l. 37.

49. III, i.

50. Dict. Nat. Biog., XII, 111.

51. Christie, op. cit., I, 134.

52. Lodge, op. cit., p. 175.

53. Burnet, op. cit., Part I, I, 172-73.

54. V, i, 122-57.

55. Burnet, op. cit., Part I, I, 172.

56. Pollock, op. cit., p. xviii. For a somewhat different statement see Burnet, op. cit., Part I, II, 262, Note 3.

57. Christie, op. cit., II, 348-49.

58. Hudibras, III, Canto 2, ll. 379-420.

59. Christie, op. cit., II, 253.

60. Ibid., II 48.

61. Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 423.

62. Christie, op. cit., II, 349.

63. IV, ii, 32.

64. IV, ii, 55.

65. V, i, 146.

66. Pollock, op. cit., p. 171.

67. W. J. Courthope represents Otway as incapable of presenting the historical conspiracy (A History of English Poetry, Lond., 1903, IV, 430): “no conspirators off the stage ever acted from such motives, or proceeded in such a manner, as Otway imagines … except for the pathetic scenes between Jaffeir and Belvidera, on the one side, and Pierre and Jaffeir, on the other, the entire action of Venice Preserved is as improbable as a nightmare; the stage situations caused by the conflicts between love and conscience, love and friendship, public and private duties, are admirable; but of the nature of man in society, as it is represented to us in Julius Caesar, all trace has disappeared.”

68. John S. P. Tatlock and Robert G. Martin, Representative English Plays, N.Y., 1916, p. 459.

69. III, i, 25, 28, 65, 110; V, i, 124, 128, 153, 211.

70. The Orphan and Venice Preserved, ed. Charles F. McClumpha, Boston and Lond., 1908, p. xxxiv.

71. Op. cit., I, 353.