SOURCE: DePorte, Michael. “Otway and the Straits of Venice.” Papers on Language and Literature 18, no. 3 (summer 1982): 245-57.

[In the following essay, DePorte argues that Venice Preserv'd offers no solutions to the problems that it depicts and no answers or lessons to ease the pain of uncertainty.]

Venice Preserv'd is a play about betrayal: betrayed oaths, betrayed secrets, betrayed bonds of family and friendship, and, not least, betrayed expectations.¹ The play is disorienting from first to last, for the audience as well as for the characters, because in many ways it skews familiar patterns of comedy. The heroes are young lovers oppressed by old men; however, as the action unfolds we find that the old men never lose the upper hand; they survive and the heroes die. When the play begins Pierre has been “cuckolded” by Antonio; at its close Antonio “dies” in perverted ecstasy while Pierre is led off to execution. Jaffeir has won Belvidera away from Priuli, but Belvidera's continuing loyalty to her father costs him his life. In scene after scene there is an air of alarming dissonance.

In the opening exchange between Jaffeir and Priuli, Jaffeir has come to beg Priuli's forgiveness for having eloped with Belvidera three years before; the conversation, however, is oddly at cross-purposes. Priuli accuses Jaffeir of having wronged him and Jaffeir offers no defense of the elopement in reply. He says only that were he the sort of man capable of wrongdoing he would not now stoop to ask Priuli for money; he would presumably just rob him. This evasion sets the tone for everything that follows in a play where it is impossible to sustain a fixed view of the central characters.

From the start Jaffeir is the most equivocal of tragic heroes; in many respects we are encouraged to think well of him. As the argument with Priuli develops, we learn that Jaffeir saved Belvidera from drowning, that he gained her affections honorably, that he has been a devoted husband, and that Priuli himself once liked and respected him. We also learn other things. In the first place, it seems clear that Jaffeir's attempt at reconciliation is mostly prompted by his impending bankruptcy; in the second, that much of what he says does not add up. Jaffeir tells Priuli that he ought to be grateful, because by saving Belvidera he has kept Priuli's name from extinction. How, though, is Belvidera to keep her father's name alive unless Jaffeir agrees to change his name? He says, too, that he has ruined himself by living beyond his means in order to keep Belvidera in the lavish style to which she had been accustomed, proving that he did not marry her for money. One wonders whether Jaffeir did not continue to live extravagantly on the assumption that Priuli would eventually soften rather than see his daughter and grandson reduced to beggary—a suspicion, reinforced by Jaffeir's regret on his own behalf at the prospect of poverty:

There's not a Wretch that lives on common Charity
But's happier than me: for I have known
The Lucious Sweets of Plenty; every night
Have slept with soft content about my head;
And never waked but to a joyful morning.

[1. 97-101]²

That Jaffeir comes off as sympathetically as he does in this scene is mostly because Priuli is so much worse. Priuli speaks of Belvidera as his most precious possession—the darling of his old age. But Jaffeir says that when their ship was sinking Priuli made for the lifeboat and left Belvidera to be washed overboard. And the way Priuli repeatedly describes Jaffeir as a thief who has stolen Belvidera makes him sound a lot like Shylock bemoaning the loss of Jessica; he chiefly laments her as a lost possession. After all, Jaffeir has not taken Belvidera to another country or even to another town. Priuli could see her as often as he pleased were her company all he wanted. What he evidently resents is loss of ownership.

The scenes which follow raise more questions about Jaffeir's character than they answer. He is unaccountably deaf to his friend Pierre's sarcasms about honesty being a cheat and Pierre himself a “bold-faced villain” (1. 143), and he is strangely unsettled in his attitude toward Belvidera. He tells Pierre that he loves Belvidera beyond all else and that the worst of his afflictions is the pain he suffers on her behalf:

Ah Pierre! I have a Heart, that could have born
The roughest Wrong my Fortune could have done me:
But when I think what Belvidera feels,
The bitterness her tender spirit tasts of
I own my self a Coward.

[1. 270-74]

Moments later Belvidera promises Jaffeir that neither cold nor hunger will lessen her devotion to him, and he replies that now he is sure of her love he will embrace poverty with a light heart—having saved his “choicest Treasure” (1. 391) he is determined to scorn fate. What, then, should we make of the decision he reaches almost immediately thereafter to join the conspiracy and thus spare Belvidera and himself from putting their vows to the test? How are we to regard Jaffeir's professions of concern for Belvidera's feelings considering his willingness to take part in murdering her father? And after he joins the conspiracy what should we think of his readiness to hand her over to the plotters as a token of his good faith?

Pierre and Belvidera are not all they seem, either. Belvidera is affectionate, constant, and pure. But she is also resourceful and cunning, unscrupulous even, in pursuing what she wants. To get the secret of the rebellion out of Jaffeir she threatens to share her suspicions with the senate. She waits till they are in bed together and gets him to turn informer in “the hour of love” (5.85). To secure her father's help in saving the conspirators' lives Belvidera stops at nothing: she tells Priuli that for three years she has been “Expos'd to the outrages of Fate” (5.17), when we know that Jaffeir has been squandering his small fortune to keep her in comfort. She plays on Priuli's passion for her dead mother:

                                                            by all the joys she gave you
When in her blooming years she was your treasure,
Look kindly on me; in my face behold
The lineaments of hers y'have kiss'd so often,
Pleading the cause of your poor cast-off Child

[5. 42-46]³

and she lies shamelessly about Jaffeir's sense of filial respect:

                                                            Oh, do not curse him!
He would not speak so hard a word towards you
On any terms, how e'er he deal with me.

[5. 61-63]⁴

Nor is Pierre quite the bluff, honest man of action he would be taken for. His first allusion to the conspiracy contains no hint of murder; he tells Jaffeir only that if the cause of justice could find enough friends, then “Priuli should be taught humanity, / And learn to value such a son as thou art” (1. 219-220). Later Pierre speaks of the conspiracy as a bold play to give the citizens of Venice liberty by destroying the despotic senate. But when, on the eve of the revolt, he chides Jaffeir for meeting with Belvidera, his revolutionary vision is rather different:

                    Damnation! that a Fellow
Chosen to be a Sharer in the Destruction
Of a whole People, should sneak thus in Corners
To ease his fulsom Lusts, and Fool his Mind.

[3. 2. 225-28]

Moreover, Pierre's subsequent advice to Jaffeir, that he show restraint in dealing with Renault and delay vengeance for the sake of the common cause, hardly squares with what he has told Jaffeir earlier about Antonio's role in setting him against Venice: “A Souldier's Mistress Jaffeir's his Religion, / When that's prophan'd, all other Tyes are broken … (1. 199-200). How are we to judge a man that is so many things by turns—a prickly soldier of fortune, an idealist, a shrewd Machiavel who exploits his friend's distress, a heartless avenger? We see him, finally, as rather pitiable. Though Renault and the other conspirators apparently die “like men” (5. 423), Pierre cannot bear the thought of the wheel and begs Jaffeir to kill him. There are no larger-than-life characters in Venice Preserv'd; its world is one in which, as Renault says, “there's nothing pure” (3. 2. 384). Accordingly, the conventions of heroic tragedy do not quite hold: the worst die heroically, while the best come close to losing their nerve.

But it is Jaffeir who is most radically unstable, who most consistently keeps us off balance. He is a man whose judgments depend altogether on impulse. Though he has barely met the conspirators he insists to Belvidera that they are all men of the strictest virtue, “honest as the Nature / Of Man first made, e're Fraud and Vice were fashions” (3. 2. 169-70). Before Renault's attempt on Belvidera, Jaffeir embraced their cause as totally just and accepted the coming slaughter with equanimity. After the attempt he shrinks with horror from the prospect of “shedding native blood” (3. 2. 271), and begins to wonder whether an oath to such men is really binding. No sooner has he betrayed them, however, than his regret takes other forms, none of which show him to much advantage. He blames Belvidera for his decision to inform: “Hark thee, Traitress, thou has done this; / Thanks to thy tears and false perswading love” (4. 495-96). Pierre's rebuke overwhelms him with shame; but he seems to worry less about what will happen to Pierre than about the blow Pierre has struck him, which he regards as an affront to his honor so frightful he can scarcely speak of it to Belvidera: “first swear / That when I've told thee, thou'lt not loath me utterly” (4. 424-25). And in his final encounter with Pierre on the scaffold that strange denseness evident in their first conversation returns. Though Jaffeir senses that Pierre wants something from him he consults only his own guilt and thus loses all feeling for Pierre's desperation. His eagerness to please results in a promise as chilling as it is off the mark:

                                        Thy wishes shall be satisfi'd,
I have a Wife, and she shall bleed, my Child too
Yield up his little Throat, and all t'appease thee.

[5. 454-56]

Most readers seldom, if ever, admire Jaffeir for anything; they can sympathize with him only as a man torn on the horns of a terrible dilemma.

Yet it is the terribleness of that dilemma which makes him memorable. To the extent our sympathies are engaged by it we also find ourselves ensnared and at a loss. His dilemma differs from Hamlet's in that there is no “right” choice to be made. Hamlet agonizes a long time over the killing of Claudius. First he is not sure whether the ghost's tale of murder is true; then he cannot decide on the best time to kill his uncle. Yet he does, in the end, settle on a course of action he knows to be just. Moreover, the dilemma itself is clear cut; either the ghost is telling the truth, in which case Claudius deserves death, or the ghost lies, in which case Hamlet should leave Claudius alone. Shakespeare shows that discovering the truth can be a difficult and perilous business; still, there is never a doubt that truth exists. Otway, on the other hand, complicates Jaffeir's dilemma so hopelessly that we end in wondering whether there are single truths underlying human affairs. While some have argued that Jaffeir's mistake is to have betrayed the conspiracy, and a few that his mistake lies in ever regretting that betrayal, neither view is supported by the experience of the play.⁵ The treatment of such love-honor conflicts in many Restoration plays has a didactic aim: in a tragedy like All for Love, to delineate both the temptations of passion and the consequences of surrendering to it; in a heroic play like Aureng-Zebe to show how an intelligent, steadfast hero can bring these rival claims on his soul into harmony. But if Venice Preserv'd has a didactic point one is hard put to see what it might be. Everything is too finely balanced.⁶

Is love the issue? Jaffeir loves both Pierre and Belvidera, and both have a right to his loyalty. At one point Jaffeir is so torn by this conflict that he wishes they could somehow be a single person:

                                                            Oh Pierre, wert thou but she,
How I could pull thee down into my heart,
Gaze on thee till my Eye-strings crackt with Love.

[2. 424-26]

Justice? Senators and conspirators are alike corrupt. Otway certainly could have made matters easier to sort out, had he wished, by showing that Pierre is not so loyal to Jaffeir as Jaffeir thinks, or by making the senate more magnanimous in its treatment of the captured plotters, or by making Renault the sole conspirator with questionable motives.

In fact, Otway is at pains to intensify Jaffeir's quandary, to make it seem as irresolvable as possible. The senate does not merely execute the conspirators, it has them tortured to death. The chief conspirators are, with the possible exception of Pierre, nothing more than adventurers, most of them foreigners to boot. They have no interest whatever in the welfare of Venice. Pierre talks boldly to Bedamar of ten thousand men armed to do battle “for the freedom of the World” (2. 282). What he says in the next breath, though, suggests that these recruits to the cause of liberty are actually hired mercenaries:

This wretched State has starv'd them in its service,
And by your bounty quicken'd, they're resolved
To serve your Glory, and revenge their own!

[2. 283-85]

Not only would the conspirators replace the senate with a government equally venal and corrupt (the parallel between Antonio and Renault has often been noted), they would murder women and children in the bargain. The conspirators want plunder, not political reform. At the same time, Otway makes clear that however Pierre may have worked on Jaffeir's feelings to draw him into the intrigue, he is genuinely devoted to him. Pierre introduces Jaffeir to the conspirators by saying, as Jaffeir had said of Belvidera, that he is the most precious thing he has left in the world: “I've brought my All into the publick Stock; / I had but one Friend, and him I'l share amongst you!” (2. 310-11). Furthermore, Pierre risks his life to silence the conspirators' doubts about Jaffeir at the very moment Jaffeir is resolving to betray them all to the senate. “Oh,” Pierre says, in one of the play's cruelest and most calculated ironies:

          what a dangerous precipice have we scap'd!
How near a fall was all we had long been building!
What an eternal blot had stain'd our glories,
If one of the bravest and best of men
Had fallen a Sacrifice to rash suspicion,
Butcher'd by those whose Cause he came to cherish.

[3. 2. 477-82]

There is a certain implausibility about this speech that is characteristic of many speeches in the play. Its power comes more from the way it makes us conscious of an agonizing predicament than from anything it reveals about the speaker. We must not think too much here about how, given what Pierre has just seen of Jaffeir's rage at Renault and that he has seen Jaffeir slip off without a word of explanation, he could possibly believe Jaffeir still cherishes the cause. Or about why, if Pierre does not so believe, he is covering for Jaffeir now when hours before he said he would tear out Jaffeir's heart if the conspirators found him unworthy of their trust.

The speeches of Jaffeir and Belvidera often seem even more implausible. Jaffeir's revelation to Belvidera of what the conspirators are up to is a case in point:

I've bound myself by all the strictest Sacraments,
Divine and humane …
                                                                                To kill thy Father …
                                        Nay the Throats of the whole Senate
Shall bleed, my Belvidera: He amongst us
That spares his Father, Brother, or his Friend,
Is damn'd: How rich and beauteous will the face
Of Ruin look, when these wide streets run blood;
I and my glorious Partner's of my Fortune
Shouting, and striding o're the prostrate Dead;
Still to new waste; whilst thou, far off in safety
Smiling, shalt see the wonders of our daring;
And when night comes, with Praise and Love receive me.

[3.2. 138-49]

What sort of husband could say such things to his wife? Granted, Jaffeir is not a man of the steadiest character. Still, one would scarcely expect him to begin his confession by telling Belvidera the one thing most likely to turn her against the rebellion and thus increase his own anguish. And what explains his stupefying insensitivity in imagining that Belvidera will smile on the massacre by day and by night welcome him, stained perhaps with Priuli's blood, to her bed? Is he angry at Belvidera for extracting his secret and out to show her that she would have done better to leave it alone? Anger might well account for throwing Priuli's murder in her face, but unless Jaffeir's later lines are read as sadistic irony, anger cannot account for the entire speech. And if we do see the entire speech as an outpouring of anger how are we to explain the magnitude of that anger? Should we search Jaffeir's former professions of love for signs of buried resentment or is Jaffeir merely testing Belvidera's resolve? Possibly, but if so we must conclude that Jaffeir's ignorance of his wife's character is, to say the least, astonishing.

Belvidera's speeches are every bit as perplexing. She could, for example, hardly choose a worse way to inform Jaffeir of the senators' bad faith:

If his [Pierre's] sufferings wound thy heart already,
What will they doe tomorrow …
When thou shalt see him strech'd in all the Agonies
Of a tormenting and a shamefull death,
His bleeding bowels, and his broken limbs,
Insulted o'r by a vile butchering villain;
What will thy heart doe then?

[4. 451-57]

Is she as insensitive to his feelings as he is to hers? Is she paying him back for what he made her suffer before? The more questions of this kind one asks the less probable the characters of either Belvidera or Jaffeir begin to seem. If one looks for psychological credibility in these speeches one can only end in doubting Otway's ability as a dramatist. But if one sees the speeches as directed primarily at the audience, their purpose becomes clear: they are designed not so much to reveal Jaffeir or Belvidera's state of mind as to afflict us with horror.⁷ It is in this light, surely, that we should regard Jaffeir's final request that the dagger with which he has just stabbed himself be sent to Belvidera as a “token” that with his dying breath he “blest her, / And the dear little Infant left behind” (5. 476-77)—a request which otherwise appears inexplicably vindictive and perverse. For Venice Preserv'd is really a tragedy of situation, not of character, and Otway lets slip no chance to impress upon us how unbearable that situation is.

In many tragedies the horror derives from a sense that disaster might have been averted. If only Othello had not believed Iago. If only Lear had listened to Kent, or never hit on the foolish scheme of dividing his kingdom. If only Oedipus had been more wary of killing travellers at crossroads and of marrying freshly widowed queens, or Pentheus more tolerant of new religious cults and exotic, long-haired strangers. There are, perhaps, a few “if onlies” which might make for happiness in Venice Preserv'd. If only Priuli had accepted the marriage of Jaffeir and Belvidera, or been less determined in his anger. But none of these “if onlies” have to do with Jaffeir himself. Suppose he had not joined the conspiracy? What sort of life could he have led with Belvidera considering the terms of the play? Could they have lived on love alone? Might not they and their child have died of starvation or disease as Priuli hoped? Suppose Jaffeir had not informed the senate of the plot. Could his marriage have survived the murder of Belvidera's father? Would Belvidera have been safe from Renault under the new regime? Venice Preserv'd is unsettling precisely because there seems no possibility of right choice. Nor in the end is it clear that Jaffeir has saved Venice. For when he is dragged before the senate we learn that Priuli has already been warned by “unknown hands” of a “dark conspiracy” (4. 119, 124). J. C. Ghosh sees this news as an instance of Otway's carelessness, an afterthought designed to explain why the senate knows about the conspiracy before Jaffeir tells them of it. Ghosh argues that even if “Otway meant that the hands were those of Belvidera—no hint of this is given—it destroys the very foundation of the tragedy, viz. Jaffeir's voluntary betrayal of his friends.”⁸ Whether one agrees with Ghosh depends on the sort of tragedy one thinks Otway is writing. My feeling is that the sudden news of an unknown informer is not evidence of clumsy construction, but of Otway's desire to give the knife another appalling twist, to deprive us of any consolation we might have in thinking that though Jaffeir betrayed his friends, he saved the city. It is quite in keeping with the desolating spirit of the play that we should be allowed to suspect that Jaffeir's tormented deliberations may have been for nothing. The tragedy of Venice Preserv'd is thus not one in which the mistake of the hero is of crucial importance. By showing the insufficiency of all choices Otway draws attention away from the weakness of individuals to the weakness of society.

The anti-Whig sentiments of the play are usually evident to readers, as Otway attacks Whig politics generally and Shaftesbury in particular. Nevertheless, the treatment of the conspirators has been problematic—Addison thought they were far too appealing, and in 1795 the Lord Chancellor banned performance of Venice Preserv'd because he feared the acting of Pierre might stir up dangerous revolutionary sympathies.⁹ By setting the action in a republic, Otway is able to mount a two-pronged assault: Whig subversion is savaged in the conspirators, while the Whig idea of republican government is ridiculed through the conduct of the senate. Or, to put matters another way, the play can be seen as an apocalyptic vision of what might happen if the Whigs got their way: a corrupt and venal government would in turn provoke corrupt and venal rebellions, leaving the nation prey to an endless cycle of repression, misery, and bloody reprisals.¹⁰ Yet in the bleakness of its vision Venice Preserv'd goes beyond attacks on Whig policy. Indeed, the political themes give rise to another betrayal of expectation in that they encourage one to look for Tory norms when none really exist.¹¹ The closest thing to an ideal of government described anywhere in the play contains no hint whatever of Tory values; it is the society of merit briefly envisioned by Pierre as the aim of the conspiracy:

All Venice [shall be] free, and every growing Merit
Succeed to its just Right: Fools shall be pull'd
From Wisdoms Seat; those baleful unclean Birds,
Those Lazy-Owls, who (perch'd near Fortunes Top)
Sit only watchful with their heavy Wings
To cuff down new fledg'd Virtues, that would rise
To nobler heights, and make the Grove harmonious.

[2. 165-71]¹²

Jack D. Durant has suggested that Tory ideals are metaphorically present in the play inasmuch as the family, and by inference the monarchy, emerges as the most natural and desirable model for government. This does not seem very persuasive, however, given what we see of families.¹³ To be ruled by the Venetian senate or by a father/king like Priuli offers little to choose between: there are no visible choices. Thomas B. Stroup and Robert D. Hume are right, I think, to stress Otway's pessimism.¹⁴ The darkness of his plays, comedies and tragedies alike, is not easily exaggerated. The comedies typically end with a forced reconciliation which affords little prospect for the continued happiness of anyone, while the tragedies typically conclude in unredemptive anguish and despair. In Titus and Berenice, for instance, wretchedness is foretold on a spectacular scale. Having lost Berenice, Titus declares that he intends to inflict his desolation on everyone:

Henceforth all thoughts of pitty I'le disown,
And with my arms the Universe ore-run;
Rob'd of my Love, through ruins purchase fame,
And make the world's as wretched as I am.

[3. 476-79]

There is nothing special about Titus' words in themselves; they are the commonplaces of Restoration tragedy. What is special is the emphasis Otway gives them: they are the last words of the play and are spoken, moreover, by a man actually in a position to carry them out. In the mouth of a Roman emperor, threats we might ordinarily dismiss as conventional rant suddenly take on alarming meaning. Chamont's final speech in The Orphan, on the other hand, has an air of pious resignation which seems to keep the suffering of the play within bounds:

                                                                                                                                                      I go
To search the means by which the Fates have plagu'd us.
'Tis thus that Heaven it's Empire does maintain,
It may Afflict, but man must not Complain.

[5. 527-30]

Yet the language of this speech—the fates plague and afflict us so that Heaven may maintain its empire—belies that resignation. There is an undercurrent of skepticism and indignation which is far removed from piety and which carries us beyond the world of the play. Perhaps we dare not accuse powers that are so awesome. But can we truly accept the will of a Heaven which manifests itself in such cruel and arbitrary ways?

The darkness of Otway's plays comes of seeing problems with great clarity while remaining unable even to imagine solutions. Venice Preserv'd raises a series of revolutionary questions—why cannot merit be rewarded? Why is it that “every slave that heaps up wealth enough / To do much Wrong, becomes a Lord of Right” (1. 182-83)? Why should the laws be “corrupted to their ends that make 'em” and “serve but for Instruments of … Tyranny” (1.213-14)?—while at the same time rejecting revolutionary answers. No doubt government should be equitable in the ways Pierre suggests, but nothing in the play hints that it can be. And a good deal of what Pierre says about the rebellion indicates that he does not believe that it can be either. Venice Preserv'd is curiously like The Country Wife in this respect. Implicit in Margery's naive responses is an astute criticism of society: why must women, particularly women without children, remain married to men like Pinchwife? Implicit in Lady Fidget's tipsy song about husbands forsaking their wives for the bottle is another: why should women be judged by different standards than men? To these questions there is no answer except that this is how society has been set up and is likely to remain. The Country Wife contains no suggestion that the system can be changed, only that it may be accommodated: Margery can learn to dissemble like the rest; Lady Fidget and her friends can sneak off to drink with Horner.

Venice Preserv'd offers considerably less hope. As Stroup aptly says, “the audience are not purged of pity or fear, but left to stew in them.”¹⁵ Belvidera dies of heartache and shock at the sight of Jaffeir's and Pierre's bloody ghosts. Priuli, overcome by remorse, vows perpetual grief:

Lead me into some place that's fit for mourning;
Where free Air, Light and the chearful Sun
May never enter: Hang it round with Black;
Set up one Taper that may last a day
As long as I've to live: And there all leave me.
                    Sparing no Tears when you this Tale relate.
                    But bid all Cruel Fathers dread my Fate.

[5. 511-17]

Priuli speaks of himself as a warning to other fathers, and we are perhaps tempted to see in his lament some hard-won lesson. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet, after all, bring their fathers to their senses: Montague and Capulet resolve to patch up their quarrel and end the bitter enmity between their families. But how has Priuli profited from his mistakes? Once he was willing to sacrifice a daughter to his resentment; now he nurses his despair and forgets her orphaned child. No one in Venice Preserv'd learns anything of use; nothing remains out of which any good is likely to come. Life will continue to be as sordid and unjust as before. The power of the play derives, finally, from the relentless, often subtle, way Otway traps us in a dark and uncertain world, a world for which Priuli's black room, with its lone, guttering candle, is an appropriate metaphor.

Notes

1. The number of broken oaths in the play has been commented on often. See, for example, David R. Hauser, “Otway Preserved: Theme and Form in Venice Preserv'd,” Studies in Philology 55 (1958): 484-85.

2. All citations are to The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford, 1932).

3. Belvidera goes on to press this appeal in a way that is strongly sensual: “take me in your dear, dear Armes, / Hover with strong compassion o'r your young one. …” (5. 56-57). The importance of sexual motivation in the play is discussed by William H. McBurney in “Otway's Tragic Muse Debauched: Sensuality in Venice Preserv'd,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (1959): 380-89; and by Derek W. Hughes in “A New Look at Venice Preserv'd,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 11 (1971): 437-57.

4. Though Belvidera has not heard Jaffeir curse Priuli, it is worth noting that he has in fact done so handsomely:

                                                                         Kind Heav'n! let heavy Curses
   Gall his old Age; Cramps, Aches, rack his Bones;
   And bitterest disquiet wring his Heart;
   Oh let him live 'till Life become his burden!
   Let him groan under't long, linger an Age
   In the worst Agonies and Pangs of Death,
   And find its ease, but late.

   [2. 109-15]

5. A detailed case for the latter view has been made by Jack D. Durant in “‘Honor's Toughest Task’: Family and State in Venice Preserv'd,” Studies in Philology 71 (1974): 484-503.

6. For an excellent consideration of Otway's fondness for presenting alternatives that are almost exactly balanced, see Thomas B. Stroup, “Otway's Bitter Pessimism,” in Essays in English Literature of the Classical Period Presented to Dougald MacMillan, ed. Daniel W. Patterson and Albrecht B. Strauss, Studies in Philology extra series 4 (1967): 71-73.

7. Otway's concern with the effect of the play's action on his audience is discussed, to somewhat different ends, by Eric Rothstein in Restoration Tragedy (Madison, 1967), pp. 108-9.

8. The Works of Thomas Otway, pp. 59-60.

9. Addison remarked that Otway “founded his Tragedy of Venice Preserv'd on so wrong a Plot, that the greatest Characters in it are those of Rebels and Traitors” (Spectator 39, 14 April 1711). For the Lord Chancellor's decision to ban the play see Aline Mackenzie Taylor, Next to Shakespeare: Otway's “Venice Preserv'd” and “The Orphan” and Their History on the London Stage (Durham, N.C., 1950), p. 199. Taylor's study also contains a fine analysis of the political themes of Venice Preserv'd in which she shows how the identification of Shaftesbury with both Antonio and Renault would have caused little difficulty for a Tory audience in the 1680s. See especially pp. 39-59. Ronald Berman considers Otway's disparagement of Whig ideas in “Nature in Venice Preserv'd,” ELH 36 (1969): 529-43. Matthew H. Wikander persuasively argues that Otway's Venice is a Tory's notion of hell. See “Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd as Tory Drama” in Polit 1 (1977): 77-89. Less persuasive is his view that Jaffeir, Belvidera, and Pierre are “people of deep inner principle” (p. 87).

10. The instability of republics is also a central theme of The History and Fall of Caius Marius, which Otway wrote three years before Venice Preserv'd: Marius, the upstart and demagogue, wrests power from the Roman senate, is at once faced with a rebellion led by those he ousted, and in turn defeated.

11. Malcolm Kelsall notes some of the problems of reading Venice Preserv'd as a “Tory political allegory” in the introduction to his edition of the play (Lincoln, 1969), pp. xiii-xiv.

12. Bessie Proffitt suggests that the likening of the senators to foul birds here and elsewhere in the play is part of a design to make Venice seem absolutely evil by linking her with the Whore of Babylon, who is described in Revelation as “a cage of every unclean, hateful bird.” See “Religious Symbolism in Otway's Venice Preserv'd,” PLL 7 (1971): 29-31.

13. “‘Honor's Toughest Task,’” pp. 499-500.

14. See Stroup, “Otway's Bitter Pessimism,” and Hume, “Otway and the Comic Muse,” Studies in Philology 73 (1976): 87-116. Anne Righter touches on the nihilism of Venice Preserv'd in “Heroic Tragedy,” Restoration Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-Upon-Avon series 6 (New York, 1965), pp. 156-57.

15. “Otway's Bitter Pessimism,” p. 74.