SOURCE: Rogers, Katharine M. “Masculine and Feminine Values in Restoration Drama: The Distinctive Power of Venice Preserved.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 27, no. 4 (winter 1985): 390-404.

[In the following essay, Rogers argues that Venice Preserv'd is one of the only plays of the period that realistically balances the values and motivations of its male and female characters.]

The serious drama of the Restoration offers stimulating intellectual debates (such as Almahide's with Almanzor on the possibility of suppressing passion, in John Dryden's I Conquest of Granada, V.ii) and inspiring displays of manly friendship (such as the reconciliation between Antony and Ventidius in his All for Love, I). It can magnificently dramatize the values which concern or have traditionally been ascribed to men—reason, abstract ideals such as honor and patriotism, assertion of one's rights, friendship, and group loyalties. But its presentation of feminine values—sensitivity, tenderness, love, family ties, and the worth of every human life—is much less effective.¹ Masculine values totally dominate early heroic drama; later, when feminine values do appear, they serve only to weaken the hero or the play as a whole: soft compassion is opposed to rational manly virtue, as in Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus, or saturates the drama in the absence of any contrasting values, as in the plays of John Banks or Thomas Otway's The Orphan.

This inability to balance feminine and masculine values is one aspect of the oversimplification which Norman Rabkin has so acutely analyzed as a radical weakness in Restoration tragedy.² In contrast to Shakespearean tragedy, which, he points out, presents conflicting values with the ambiguity of life itself, that of the Restoration presents one value as clearly superior to the other, even when it treats the latter with sympathy. For example, All for Love simplifies Antony and Cleopatra by suggesting “that the necessary choice, no matter how painful, is clear-cut, that there is a right point of view which the audience shares with the playwright” (p. 71). If public values are given unquestioned precedence in All for Love, they are vitiated in Otway's Venice Preserved, where nothing counts but personal relationships; thus the play is no more than a sentimental drama, lacking the resonance of tragedy (pp. 72-81). While I agree that this elimination of ambiguity weakens the emotional power of many Restoration dramas, I shall argue that Rabkin has not done justice to Venice Preserved. This play does dramatize a conflict between sets of values that are equally valid, a conflict inherent in human society and universally significant. What made this possible, I suggest, was Otway's unusual confidence in feminine values. In Venice Preserved he does not merely parade them to elicit tears from the audience, but affirms their validity in balance with masculine ones.

It is typical of Dryden, a particularly male-oriented author in a male-oriented age, that he could not appreciate the conceptual basis of Venice Preserved. Though he admired Otway's ability to evoke the passions, he went on to suggest that “there is somewhat to be desir'd in the Grounds of them.”³ I believe, however, that the passions of Venice Preserved could not move as deeply as they do without the solid “ground” supplied by a thematic conflict which accounts for the characters' emotions within the play and makes them relevant even today. This conflict between love and self-assertion, peace and glory, spontaneous tenderness and abstract ideals, loyalty to individuals and loyalty to groups, is one that affects us all, if not as individuals, then at least as members of a human society. And its outcome has usually been, as in Venice Preserved, the destruction of gentleness by a patriarchal society which professes allegiance to abstract ideals but is animated more powerfully by its appetite for violence and retributive justice.

It is obvious that Pierre, the soldier, speaks for fearless assertion of rights and masculine bonding, while Belvidera speaks for love and tenderness. In fact, the whole play is worked out in terms of this masculine-feminine opposition. The tragedy is set off by an abuse of patriarchal authority. Priuli is outraged by his daughter's marriage to Jaffeir because he had evidently considered her his property. He sacrifices her and his own love for her to his concept of manliness, a manly father being one who does not tolerate independent action in his daughter: if he is “a man,” he must cast her off (I.i.71-72). Thus, by marrying the man she loved, without consulting him or regarding family advantage, she has violated “The Honour of my House” (I.i.12). Jaffeir accepts his situation, but Pierre, who sees passivity as unmanly, urges him to assert his rights (I.i.278-88). Honor prompts a man to seek redress for an affront and to concern himself with public issues.⁴ Though Jaffeir's natural inclination is toward peaceful resignation and content in private life, he can still (like most men) be roused to self-assertion, desire to get even, and enthusiasm for political slogans. But when his wife appears, we see that neither ambition nor wealth are really important to him; domestic love is the supreme value for both Belvidera and Jaffeir; it can console them for all other sorrows and alone can suffice to give them happiness (I.i.375-95).

Immediately afterward we see what love means to Pierre, as he berates his devoted mistress, the prostitute Aquilina—whom he loves after his fashion—gives her orders, and refuses to answer her questions because only a fool confides in a woman (II.i.54-57). (Belvidera, in contrast, assumes that the man who does not open his mind to the woman he loves “despises” her, III.ii.76). Pierre then enlists Jaffeir in a revolutionary plot whose ostensible (and partly genuine) aims are the achievement of ideals such as liberty, justice, and elimination of class privilege in favor of status based on worth, defined as manly valor and resolution (II.i.153-71). This recruitment is the devil's work, Otway makes clear through Jaffeir's opening speech (II.i.66-76), because it is against his nature to participate in a conspiracy which entails wholesale slaughter. His inability to carry out his commitment will cause the destruction of his friend, himself, and his wife. Jaffeir had said that his bankruptcy was “the worst” that could befall him (I.i.269), but this proves to be ironic, for “the worst” will be his self-betrayal in joining the conspiracy.

Once Jaffeir actually meets with the conspirators, their talk of “Manly Vertue” so intoxicates him that he places Belvidera in their custody as a pledge of his commitment. This action, far-fetched in realistic terms, makes symbolic sense: he is putting aside the values she represents so that they cannot influence him. But he cannot stay away from her, and soon after he rejoins her, she persuades him to tell her everything. He does so with a brutal ineptitude which reveals his ambivalence and the falsity of his appearance of extreme virility. Appalled, she sees nothing but debasement and cruelty in the plot: the conspirators are simply ruffians, with whom it is dishonorable to associate, and no end whatsoever can justify slaughtering people (III.ii.138-65). Jaffeir's misgivings are confirmed when Renault's detailed instructions to the conspirators force him to recognize the cruelty and callousness inherent in their manly plot, and simultaneously the destruction of his own peace of mind (III.ii.371-72). He goes to Belvidera for solace, but, by insisting that he inform the Senate, she ensures that he will not find peace again. She is as convinced that she has persuaded him to behave honorably as he is that he has forever forfeited his honor (IV.i.1-19).

His self-condemnation is confirmed when he confronts Pierre before the Senate, as he abjectly begs forgiveness while Pierre, too one-sided to suffer from self-doubt, displays a heroic refusal to compromise. He spurns Jaffeir for betraying his lofty ideal of friendship; he cannot imagine any motive for revealing the conspiracy except a mean desire to save his skin (IV.i.276-348). Jaffeir is consumed with personal humiliation, but when Belvidera—characteristically, preoccupied with compassion—tells him that Pierre will suffer execution as a traitor, Jaffeir's guilt prompts him to avenge Pierre by killing her in the name of a sterile concept of retributive justice (IV.i.500-02). He calls himself a coward for his inability to do this, but amply vindicates himself on Pierre's scaffold in a scene where masculine values are thrillingly affirmed. Pierre demonstrates his unshakable courage as he faces a painful death, his steadfast truth to himself as he rebuffs the priest, and his generosity as he forgives Jaffeir for betraying him (V.i.371-410). Jaffeir redeems his manhood by stabbing Pierre (to save him from shameful death) and then himself. The hero has saved his honor in both Belvidera's and Pierre's sense—by preventing a bloodbath and by demonstrating virile constancy and contempt for death.

Dryden or Lee would have dropped the curtain there. But Otway would not leave that comforting resolution. Instead, he brought on Belvidera, the only character untainted by selfishness and cruelty—bereft and insane. She can have no uplifting death but is forced to the very opposite extreme from understanding and acceptance of her fate. For the values which give meaning to Jaffeir's and Pierre's deaths have none for her. Jaffeir has achieved inner harmony by limiting himself to masculine values—but how much has been lost! Our sympathy for Belvidera's personal tragedy is deepened by our awareness that the values she represents—love, compassion, humanity—are so often destroyed, as she has been, in a man's world.

Throughout the play, masculine and feminine values are balanced so that we can see the truth and the limitations of each view. For Belvidera, no wrong can justify wholesale violence. Caring nothing for ambition or political ideals, she can live with social injustice as long as she can peacefully enjoy the company of those she loves, and she is convinced that this course would be best for Jaffeir as well. Both she and Pierre want Jaffeir to realize their ideal of him; both are concerned for his honor; but while Pierre means bravery, resolution, and loyalty to male friends, Belvidera means respect for human life. Belvidera relies on Jaffeir's “Constancy … Courage and … Truth” (III.ii.123), just as Pierre does, but she would have them lead to an opposite course of action. Nature to Pierre means natural rights as opposed to the artificial distinctions and restrictions imposed by society: “the great Call of Nature” should prompt men to assert their freedom against the ruling classes who exploit them (I.i.162-64). To Belvidera, nature is natural affection and natural compassion. As Jaffeir begins to see the conspiracy from her point of view, he exclaims, “What a Devil's man, / When he forgets his nature” (III.ii.303-04). Belvidera brings Priuli back to his nature by making him see that being a father means to love and cherish, not to dominate; she brings Jaffeir back to his by eliciting his natural horror of human suffering.⁵

Pierre constantly uses the words “man” and “friend.” Of course, he never associates manliness with humane feeling, as Jaffeir does when persuaded by Belvidera; nor does he suppose that a friend might be female. When Pierre exhorts Jaffeir to “be a Man,” he means he should be worthy “to mix with Men / Fit to disturb the Peace of all the World, / And rule it when it's wildest”; Jaffeir assures him that he will, citing his readiness to “chase / All little thoughts, all tender humane Follies / Out of my bosom” (II.i.185-94). It would never occur to Pierre that, as Belvidera insists, a man's best friend could be his wife (IV.i.79). Jaffeir's concern for his wife's feelings seems effeminate to Pierre, who actually gives him money “to buy Pins” (II.i.98)—a reference to a wife's pin money tantamount to calling him a woman. Pierre urges him to keep away from Belvidera while the plot is hatching and twits him for listening to her when he catches them together. How can he bother with a woman when he is about serious and manly business, namely “the Destruction / Of a whole People”? What can a wife possibly have to say to him except fussy “feminine” warnings against unaired shirts and thin-soled shoes (III.ii.223-28)?

Jaffeir, more complex than the others, can recognize the value of both ideals. Alone among the conspirators, he is capable of concretely visualizing the suffering which will occur if they succeed (III.ii.322, 339-40). Unlike Belvidera, he understands the ignominy of breaking his oath and betraying his associates and his cause. Belvidera assumes that they can live together happily after he has done this; he realizes that an essentially honorable man cannot live without honor (V.i.275-305). It is plausible that Jaffeir would be so outraged by social injustice, embodied in the suffering of his wife, that he would let himself be drawn into a revolutionary conspiracy against his nature and also that his sensitivity and tenderness would cause him to recoil from its necessary results. Once he has been led into his false position by circumstance and traditional ideals of masculinity, there is no way out. He must betray the values of wife or friend and die to expiate that betrayal.

Nowhere else in Restoration drama is the conflict between masculine and feminine values developed in so moving and balanced a way, for other plays either celebrate only masculine values or display feminine ones in such a form that they cannot command respect. Though nominally focused on the dichotomy of love and honor, heroic drama actually endorses masculine values by presenting them as more reasonable and more harmonious with the social order. The depiction of romantic love in heroic drama is too wildly extravagant to have any application to the real world. When Lee's Statira vows to abjure Alexander forever because he has once been unfaithful to her, and he and his entire army kneel to beseech her to relent (The Rival Queens, III.i), we are not prompted to reassess our values, but can only gasp in wonder. Moreover, even within the play, Alexander's sentimental devotion to Statira has no effect on his behavior in general, which is violent and tyrannical. Those heroines who do influence their men do not move them toward distinctively feminine values, but, rather, bring them into line with the patriarchal social order: Almahide persuades Almanzor to respect her empty legal marriage (I Conquest of Granada, IV.ii) and Indamora persuades Aureng-Zebe to obey his selfish father's orders and give her up (I.i), both at the expense of natural affection. Though the hero of heroic drama is a great lover as well as a warrior, there is little concern for tenderness and humanity in the plays. Though the heroine is a paragon of self-sacrificing virtue and is regarded with exaggerated admiration, there is little recognition of the feminine point of view. Love is a noble passion in the heroic play because it inspires the hero to glory.

In Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus, on the other hand, there is a clear conflict between masculine and feminine values. Titus is torn between his love for Teraminta, an altogether amiable and loving woman, and the claims of the state, voiced by his father, Brutus. Brutus forbids Titus to marry Teraminta, solely because she is related to the tyrant Tarquin: the woman's individual characteristics mean nothing; only the family she belongs to matters. When he discovers that Titus has already married her, he is outraged that his son dared to take this step without asking paternal consent; caring so much about a woman proves him to be soft and effeminate. Instead of protesting, Titus effusively expresses his adoration of his father (I.i.198-262).⁶ Titus sends Teraminta away at his father's order, but is forced to join a counterplot against him and the republic in order to save her life—a decision that he identifies with abandonment of reason and morality:

… laugh[ing] at all the gods.
Glory, blood, nature, ties of reverence,
The dues of birth, respect of parents, all,
All are as this, the air I drive before me.

(III.iii.138-41)

He repents almost immediately, but not in time to avoid getting caught and condemned by his father to die as a traitor. Everyone pleads for Titus's life because of the extenuating circumstances, but Brutus is too virtuous to permit anything less than the strictest justice. Titus confirms his father's judgment by his eagerness to die to expiate his sin (IV.i.479-82). Teraminta dies almost unnoticed; Titus redeems his manhood by rejecting love in favor of his father's ideals and resolutely dying; and Brutus, after dismissing the troublesome pleaders for Titus's life (who include his own wife, Titus's mother), denies that there is any occasion for grief (“woman's brawls,” V.ii.192) and closes the play with an edifying patriotic speech. Throughout, Brutus is virtually deified by every right-thinking character for his love of liberty and public spirit. The tragic reconciliation comes from the recognition and reestablishment of the highest, meaning masculine, values in Titus and the state. The play coherently develops a tragic theme, but the harsh ideal it extols is too one-sided to be morally acceptable. We long, moreover, for the honest penetration of Otway, who would have recognized the egotism and callousness that taint Brutus's idealism.

Otway made his Pierre a brave, honest soldier, revolted by the injustice and corruption of his society, genuinely idealistic in wanting liberty and a society where position is determined by merit rather than privilege of birth, and rightly seeing through the hypocrisy of a ruling class which uses law and religion to keep the people submissive (see, e.g., his first speeches, I.i.125-64). But he also showed Pierre using his valid cynical insight to rationalize away his moral and legal obligations. Though Pierre really cares about liberty, he uses it as a cloak for envy and rage against the privileged class. What has activated his idealism is outraged sexual jealousy, as Jaffeir inadvertently reveals when he interrupts Pierre's righteous political tirade by naming Aquilina, the mistress taken from him by a senator (I.i.165); neither man is rational enough to notice any discrepancy between Pierre's professions and his actual motives. Pierre's ideals are worthy in themselves, but tainted by the self-interest and shortsightedness inherent in human nature. Penetrating as he is about society's hypocrisy, he is self-deluded about his own motives, as terrorists and militarists have so often been.

Because Pierre cannot offer clear moral values, as, say, Ventidius does in All for Love, Jaffeir's choice becomes more realistically complex than Antony's. “Honor” obligates Jaffeir to be loyal to his friends and to protest against social injustice rather than to support it by passive acquiescence. At the same time, if he chooses “honor,” he will sacrifice not only his love (as would Antony) but his human decency. When Jaffeir, despite his suspicion that Belvidera will not keep his secret, breaks his oath and confides in her, she confirms his suspicion and ruins him by forcing him to reveal it to the Senate. However, the irony is reversed when we recognize that he should have done what he did to prevent a bloodbath. Pierre, like Ventidius, wants to rouse his friend to proper manliness, but the definition of this term, assumed in All for Love, is questioned in Venice Preserved. Throughout Otway's play, use of such key words as “man,” “nature,” “honor,” and “virtue” with opposing meanings undermines our faith in catchwords.

Not only does Otway question the motives of individual political activists, he also questions the very ideal they claim to be serving. In Venice Preserved, as in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar (to which, as Rabkin has shown, Otway pointedly alludes in Venice Preserved, III.ii.61-71), there are no unequivocally noble public ideals to set against private emotions. The established order is corrupt and oppressive; yet any attempt to overthrow it is apt to produce even greater injustice and suffering. All types of government are liable to corruption, and all parties include evil and incompetent leaders. The conspirators often sound plausible as they denounce the oppression and ineffectiveness of the existing government and argue that their end of correcting abuses justifies the violent means they must use (III.ii.366-70, 382-88), but Otway offers no assurance that their replacement would be any improvement. Political ideals are all too easily twisted into rationalizations for selfish ends.

If neither loyalty to the government nor zeal for liberty can be accepted as ideals, perhaps one had better trust to personal feelings such as love and compassion. Otway's distrust of all political professions was not unthinking or simplistic, as Rabkin argues in contrasting Venice Preserved with Julius Caesar (p. 76),⁷ but reflected the cynicism characteristic of his age. With a corrupt and irresponsible government (Renault's description of Venice in II.i.265-71 applied equally well to England) and an opposing party which had just tried to seize power through the vicious Popish Plot, it was natural to lack faith in political ideals. But this does not mean that Otway “constructed a political tragedy without politics” (p. 76) as, for example, Banks did in his plays on Lady Jane Grey and Anna Bullen. Rather, Otway exposed the dangers of doctrinaire ideology more realistically than any other contemporary serious dramatist.

There is no such questioning in All for Love, for example, even though it applauds the triumph of love over ambition and public spirit. Despite Cleopatra's personal appeal, the play does not make us doubt the rightful supremacy of masculine values, nor does it imply that they should be tempered by feminine ones. As Rabkin correctly says, “Dryden insists that we sympathize with the plight of his protagonists, staging scene after scene in which tears are the appropriate response, but he never for a moment leaves us in doubt as to how to judge the action” (p. 67). The play's most moving scene is Antony's reconciliation with Ventidius, as the most moving scene in Don Sebastian, another ostensible love tragedy, is that between Sebastian and Dorax. What carries emotional force in Dryden's plays is friendship between virile men, not love between men and women.

While Dryden and Shakespeare both emphasize the irrationality of Antony's and Cleopatra's love, Antony and Cleopatra neither holds up reason as the highest human standard, nor identifies it with values such as manly honor and military glory. All for Love, on the other hand, suggests no reservations about Ventidius's virtue and right-mindedness, no suspicion that lofty political principles might be hypocritical. Cleopatra takes pride in her lack of reason (II.i.16-22), while Ventidius presents convincing arguments. If Antony were rational or moral, he would abandon the role of lover for the socially useful ones of “Emperor!” “Friend!” “Husband!” and “Father!” (III.i.362-63). The characteristically masculine emotions which animate Ventidius and Lee's Brutus—loyalty to one's leader, patriotic zeal, soldierly ambition, and devotion to political ideals—have traditionally been associated with rationality, perhaps because that too has traditionally been attributed particularly to men. Abstract ideals relating to public life are supposed to be derived from rational principles, while love and compassion are merely personal feelings, unsanctioned by reason. Characters like Ventidius and Brutus are shown to be strong and controlled, while those who make love the supreme value or feel sympathy without regard to justice are weak, effusive, and self-indulgent.

Otway, more realistically, showed all his characters driven by emotion, usually self-interested. He saw that abstract ideals alone cannot move people to action: Jaffeir and Pierre want to fight the injustice of their society because their personal rights have been infringed upon by members of the privileged class. Pierre and the other conspirators pride themselves on their control of emotion, but are in fact as much governed by it as Jaffeir and Belvidera: it is only that their emotions are different. The prevailing sexuality of the play—though generally characteristic of the period⁸—reinforces the point that, however human beings like to exalt their motives, we remain animals activated by emotion and desire. On the other hand, as Otway shows, the sexuality which undercuts some ideals can also raise people to one of the highest ideals, selfless love.

When love conflicts with honor in Dryden's play, it is at best an amiable weakness; a sufficiently strong and patriotic Antony would have been able to resist Cleopatra. Antony the lover, as Dryden shows him, is so completely demoralized that he no longer has the capacity to choose to be a Roman leader and warrior. Evidently he has been unmanned by his love, as were Lee's Titus and Alexander the Great; all three lovers constantly throw themselves on the ground. Jaffeir's love, on the other hand, is not opposed to his best self, and he retains the strength to struggle over a choice between compelling loyalties. Moreover, the feminine values to which Antony yields are diminished to sentimental pity and self-indulgence. Cleopatra cannot offer Antony a love of marvelous vitality and fascination, as Shakespeare's Cleopatra offers, but the devotion of “a silly, harmless, household dove” (IV.i.92). Nor can she offer the support and inspiration that a wife like Belvidera can, but mere constancy and dependence. When Octavia argues that Cleopatra cannot love Antony because she has debased him, Cleopatra can only retort that she loves more than Octavia because she has made greater sacrifices; she is not more deserving than Octavia, only more pathetic (III.i.450-67). Her only concern is to elicit Antony's pity for herself; she seems to have no interest in his integrity. Belvidera, on the other hand, persuades Jaffeir to act in accordance with what she believes right. Octavia would do the same for Antony, but her concept of right is defined in masculine terms: her “wife's virtue” is to promote her husband's honor and, when she is finally provoked to leave him, to devote herself to his children (III.i.261-66, IV.i.423-26). Belvidera exerts a moral claim on Jaffeir above and beyond personal pity, for she appeals on the grounds of general humanity and kindness; she is, moreover, a representative of distinctively female values. (Perhaps it is for the strength of her claim that Byron, an admirer of the play, disliked her so intensely.⁹) Cleopatra does not even represent the feminine value of family affection, since Dryden opposes her to Octavia and Antony's children, not mentioning those of Antony and Cleopatra. Thus her claim is reduced to nothing more than self-indulgent erotic attachment. To the extent that the feminine element dominates All for Love, it debilitates it. Cleopatra plays an important role, but it is only to generate pity; Antony is more weak than sensitive. Despite its fine construction, great poetry, and rousing intellectual debates, All for Love fails to move as Venice Preserv'd does, largely because, while centering on feminine values, it does not realize them in a vital and convincing way.

Debility is far more obvious in the “she-tragedies” of Thomas Southerne and John Banks, and even Otway's own The Orphan, where there is no tragic conflict and where feminine values, again reduced to appeals to pity, prevail only by the absence of any others. Heroines like Southerne's Isabella (The Fatal Marriage) and Banks's Anna Bullen (Vertue Betray'd) are destroyed by simple villainy rather than opposing values, for the only value recognized is romantic love. Pure passive victims of other people's machinations, they are free of guilt and responsibility for their ruin. (Dryden's Cleopatra, almost equally innocent, was made a mistress by “Fortune,” IV.i.94.) Belvidera, on the other hand, while innocent is not passive, for, by pressuring Jaffeir to betray the conspiracy, she precipitates his destruction and her own. Actively promoting the values she believes in, she wins respect as well as sympathy. She would not say, like Southerne's Isabella when a servant asks her what she will do as the creditors seize her goods, “Do! nothing, no, for I am born to suffer.”¹⁰ The plays of Southerne and Banks may elicit pleasurable sadomasochistic sensations in the theater, but are too obviously one-sided to be taken seriously as a representation of life. Though specifically focusing on an appealing heroine and on issues of concern to women, they do so by relegating them to a sentimental never-never land and thus evade rather than deal with these issues. The plights of these amiable heroines, victims only because they unfortunately became involved with evil people, tell us nothing about enduring conditions. Moreover, these dependent, ineffectual creatures, uninterested in anything but romantic love (in The Innocent Usurper Banks reduced Lady Jane Grey from a dedicated scholar to an ordinary lovesick girl), can appeal only to patronizing pity.

In The Orphan, his own utterly sentimental play, Otway seems to have been groping toward the balanced vision of Venice Preserved. But in The Orphan, feminine values are represented by Monimia, who is simply a passive victim; and masculine ones, embodied in Polydore, appear in the form of callousness toward women. While Castalio marries Monimia because he is “Betray'd to Love and all its little follies,” the virile Polydore would possess and abandon her (I.i.362-77, II.314-19). Moreover, Otway did not ground his characters' ruin on fundamentally opposed values or on anything inherent in nature and society. Avoiding public concerns, the traditional interests of men, he had to fabricate a lethal conflict from the private relations of three basically well intentioned people attached to each other. They can only be victims of spectacularly unfortunate chance. So Castalio conceals his marriage to Monimia for no reason, and Polydore takes Castalio's place in Monimia's bed for what he assumes is an illegitimate tryst but what turns out to be incest with his brother's wife, thus producing a final orgy of remorse and three suicides. The political background in Venice Preserved is an essential foil to the love plot, set in the external world, where people do not live for love, and suggesting that there are countervalues which have their legitimate weight. Without such recognition, we cannot respect the picture of life presented as realistic or be convinced by the conclusions drawn. With it, we can appreciate the real power of love and be moved by the real obstacles it faces.

Furthermore, though the private focus of The Orphan might make it seem woman-oriented, it does not affirm feminine values. Polydore is never criticized for his indiscriminate abuse of women or his assumption that Monimia is his to take (I.i.340-51, 362-77); his only offense is violating a woman who is his brother's property. Otway does not draw the connection between Polydore's exploitative attitude, so common as to be acceptable in his society, and the destruction of Monimia. By the time he wrote Venice Preserved, he saw a larger significance in the victimization of women and clearly recognized the consequences of neglecting the values they represent.

Because of the assumed opposition of feminine values to reason, the “she-tragedies” show little attempt to meet ordinary standards of plausible motivation or reasonable morality. Motivation in The Orphan is inadequate and inconsistent, and its morality is evasive, since Otway never acknowledges Polydore's baseness in callously exploiting Monimia. Venice Preserved, on the other hand, in which feminine values are not assumed to be hopelessly subrational, has a sufficiently sound basis to satisfy the intelligence. It is, of course, a pathetic tragedy, with its emphasis on the suffering of an innocent victim, its prolongation of emotional scenes, and its failure to give its characters self-knowledge even at the end; but its feelings, even if sometimes exploited, are firmly rooted in character and situation. It is securely based on a realistic conflict, not the factitious ones of sentimental writers who had somehow to contrive misfortunes for characters who were in no way responsible. Hence its feelings are not generated simply to titillate the audience, but arise inevitably from the dramatic situation. Sometimes Otway blatantly invokes our sympathy for his characters, but he also recognizes their responsibility for what happens to them: to Pierre for trying to destroy ordered society, to Jaffeir for going against his nature to join a violent conspiracy, to Belvidera for clinging to values which cannot survive in a society ruled by force. Even if the characters are not enlightened by the action, we are. We do not get the traditional affirmation of tragedy, since Otway chooses to end with Belvidera's suffering, thus emphasizing the cost of Jaffeir's regained integrity and peace of mind. But we do get a heightened awareness of the appeal and the danger of abstract political ideals and the value of what is often sacrificed to them.

Jaffeir is not the pure sentimentalist some critics see, despite his devotion to his wife and preference for domestic life. He has honor and loyalty for Pierre to respect, as well as courage to show before the Senate (IV.i.141-68); his virile end, united with Pierre, is in character. The play strongly affirms the value of love, but not to the exclusion of other values. The masculine ideals of the conspirators can sound very convincing, so long as they are not exposed to other viewpoints (e.g., II.i.222-40); and Pierre's ideal of friendship is as appealing as Belvidera's of love (II.i.309-16, IV.i.258-60). Throughout, Otway is exploring the tragic difficulties of moral choice in a world where opposing viewpoints may both be right.

This intellectual basis distinguishes Venice Preserved from most of the “she-tragedies” of its own and other periods, where plausible motivation and a balanced view of life are liable to be sacrificed to intense emotional effects. Even in so fine an example as John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, where the heroine is destroyed by a male-dominated society because she wants to marry the man she loves and live peacefully with him and their children, the heroine's brothers persecute her mainly, it appears, from pure malignity. (It is true that they are angered by her marrying without their permission or regard to family advantage, since they consider her their property, but this motive is not consistently developed.) In Venice Preserved, on the other hand, the major lines of motivation are all explicable, and the sacrifice of Belvidera is necessitated by the male-oriented ideals of patriarchal society. Venice Preserved is consistently focused on a conflict which is as old as Antigone and which must be resolved if our own society is to survive, the conflict between the values of honor, public loyalty, and assertion of oneself and one's rights and those of love, loyalty to kin, peace, and forbearance. This conflict is truly tragic because it is universal and inevitable, rooted in society as we know it and in the divided nature—the masculine and feminine impulses—of human beings. Venice Preserved forces us to consider the extent to which Belvidera's values are sacrificed in our own world.

Notes

1. Antigone, The Mill on the Floss, A Doll House, and To the Lighthouse are among the many works which have developed this theme. Woman's association with the values I have listed results from her historical restriction to the sphere of the family and from the philosophical convention (among the Neoplatonists, etc.) that has linked her with emotion and the concrete and man with reason and abstract ideals. Carol Gilligan, a psychologist, analyzes the characteristic differences between men's and women's moral perceptions in In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

2. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

3. Preface to Dryden's translation of Du Fresnoy's De Arte Graphica, quoted in The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1: 17. All references to Venice Preserved and The Orphan will be to this edition.

4. Jean Elizabeth Gagen has shown that the traditional ideal of honor involved public rather than private virtues—justice, valor, and “reasonable,” i.e., retributive, anger; “the humanist code was strictly masculine” (see “Love and Honor in Dryden's Heroic Plays,” PMLA, 77 [1962]: 210-12). See also Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).

5. Hazel M. Batzer Pollard, From Heroics to Sentimentalism: A Study of Thomas Otway's Tragedies (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974), p. 255. Ronald Berman has acutely analyzed the ambiguities of the word “nature” in this play, though he does not develop them in terms of masculine and feminine viewpoints. See “Nature in Venice Preserv'd,” ELH, 36 (1969): 529-43.

6. Nathaniel Lee, Lucius Junius Brutus, ed. John Loftis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967). All references are to this edition. The Lucrece subplot of the play reaffirms its patriarchal theme, since her rape is seen as a plot on her husband's honor which she, as a virtuous woman, must atone for, even though he graciously forgives her (I.i.402).

7. While Rabkin's comparison of Julius Caesar with Venice Preserved is illuminating, I believe he goes too far in reducing the later play to a feeble imitation of the earlier. He sees Belvidera simply as the victim who occasions Jaffeir's decision to join and then abandon the conspirators and as “the voice of loyalist sentiment” (p. 80), and he interprets her death solely in terms of the plot: “Belvidera, left to fend for herself, expires unaided only, apparently, because the play has reached its end” (p. 77). Actually, she is the voice of the values which the conspirators would destroy and is thus far more important thematically than Portia. There is no evidence that Portia opposes the conspiracy against Caesar; indeed, her pride in being “Cato's daughter” suggests that she would approve of the assassination of a potential tyrant. Her irresolution and restlessness on the day of the assassination (II.iv) probably indicates “womanly” weakness rather than disapproval of the act. I suggest that Portia serves not to articulate or represent distinctive values, but to show that her husband has a human breadth and depth not evident in the other men of the play. Both she and Belvidera claim that loving, honorable wives have a right to their husbands' confidence and insist that women have sufficient constancy to keep secrets. Otway, however, proceeds to complicate the situation ironically: Belvidera cannot in fact be trusted to keep the secret, but she can be trusted to do something that requires stronger resolution—namely, to pressure Jaffeir to do what she believes to be right (Julius Caesar, II.i; Venice Preserved, III.ii.57-71, 109-26, IV.1-13). Shakespeare and Otway raise the same questions about the validity of political ideology and possible justification for overthrowing the government by violence, but only Otway raises them mainly through his leading female character.

8. Unfortunately, Restoration authors could not seem to represent female influence without resorting to lush sexuality: compare Lee's Titus, who expresses much more emotion about missing his first night with Teraminta than about the pain and loss entailed on both of them by casting her off permanently as his father orders (II.i.407-15).

9. Byron called Belvidera “that maudlin bitch of chaste lewdness and blubbering curiosity … whom I utterly despise, abhor, and detest” (letter to Murray, 2 April 1817, quoted in Aline Mackenzie Taylor, Next to Shakespeare: Otway's Venice Preserv'd and The Orphan and Their History on the London Stage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1950), p. 67).

10. Thomas Southerne, The Fatal Marriage (London: J. Tonson, 1735), p. 36.