SOURCE: McBurney, William H. “Otway's Tragic Muse Debauched: Sensuality in Venice Preserv'd.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (1959): 380-99.

“What a beautiful, most painful, and in some respects disagreeable play is this Venice Preserv'd!” wrote Leigh Hunt after seeing Fanny Kemble in the role of Belvidera at Covent Garden in October, 1830. “Otway's genius, true as it was to nature, had a smack in it of the age of Charles II. … Sensuality takes the place of sentiment, even in the most calamitous passages. The author has debauched his tragic muse; brings her, as he does his heroine, among a set of ruffians; and dresses her in double tears and mourning, that her blushes may but burn and her fair limbs be set off the more, to furnish his riotous imagination with a gusto of contrast.”¹

That Otway's masterpiece should have “a smack in it of the age of Charles II” hardly seems surprising. However, the Venice Preserv'd that Hunt and Romantic audiences knew was essentially an eighteenth-century creation, considerably removed in both content and tone from the original play. Early stripped of the Nicky-Nacky scenes and the anticlerical elements, the tragedy was constantly refined according to the tastes of successive audiences and the fortes of various actors. Stage versions became less gross, indecorous lines were deleted, blustering speeches were toned down, and, in Bell's text of 1777, Renault and the conspirators were made less bloodthirsty. Even so, throughout the eighteenth century there was increasing uneasiness about the pervasive erotic element in the play, as the attempts at textual purification show. In May, 1748, the Universal Magazine found that Belvidera “often speaks immodestly,” while the London Magazine (March, 1768) felt that Jaffeir “talks of the connubial intercourse between himself and his wife in a manner that must be extremely disagreeable to a delicate auditor.”² With these critics Dr. Johnson agreed in his declaration that Venice Preserv'd is “the work of a man not attentive to decency nor zealous for virtue.”³

Despite these objections, Venice Preserv'd continued to hold the stage, and it remained for a drastic change in tragic acting styles under the “naturalistic” leadership of Edmund Kean to release spectators from the visual enchantment of performance and to enable critics to see the play apart from the obscuring praises which the preceding age had, in general, lavished upon it.⁴ Hunt's review in part merely reflects the growing dissatisfaction with the “tragedy-reader” school of acting, which was soon to cause the play to be removed from stock repertoire. His criticism, however, is especially significant as one of the first, if not the first, explicit statements of the “painful” and “disagreeable” aspects of the play—that is, of the neglected but pivotal importance of sensuality in the total impact of the play as Otway wrote it. The accusation of deliberate exploitation of erotic appeal was, in fact, a version of the standard complaint about the immorality of Restoration comedy. To apply it, as Hunt did, to the tragic chef d'oeuvre of “the tender Otway” was a daring stroke.

That serious and comic drama of the Restoration period were two faces of the same coin is now a critical commonplace. Much recent scholarship has been spent in revealing the tragic bases of comedy. Less obvious but no less valid is the reverse of the proposition, especially in the case of Otway, where the genres tend to fuse under the influence of a common cynicism, and whose tragedies show a surprising use of type-characters, patterns of action, erotic imagery and diction, and an almost clinical preoccupation with sexual behavior which were largely, in the Restoration, restricted to the comic stage. The validity of Hunt's statement becomes more apparent if Venice Preserv'd is examined in the light of Otway's two early original comedies and without the screen of sentimental reputation with which Victorian and modern critical indifference has reinvested the tragedy.

Friendship in Fashion (1678) is chiefly of interest because of its bitterly satirical treatment of the friendship theme which had become a stock addition to the love-and-honor heroic drama. The fashionable “friendship” of Goodvile, Truman, and Valentine is actually no friendship but mutual deception, with sardonic laughter directed at the treacherous Goodvile who is eventually and justifiably cuckolded. Of the gross intrigue Ghosh remarks: “Nothing is easier than to hoist [Otway] with his own petard.”⁵ Early in the play Lady Squeamish declares that

Comedies now a days are the filthiest things, full of Bawdy and nauseous doings which they mistake for raillery and intrigue; besides they have no wit in 'em neither, for all their Gentlemen and men of wit, as they style 'em, are either silly conceited impudent Coxcombs or else rude ill-mannerly drunken Fellows.

(I.430-35)

Even more pertinent to the present topic is the same fashionable prude's formula for success in the field of tragedy:

Oh Cousin, if you undertake to write a Tragedy, take my counsel: Be sure to say soft melting tender things in it that may be moving, and make your Ladies Characters vertuous what ere you do.

(III.i.145-48)

Although Friendship in Fashion has little to recommend it, Otway's next comic attempt, The Souldiers Fortune (1680), deserves detailed attention as a reflection of contemporary tastes and as an expression of certain attitudes of the dramatist toward the society which he depicts.

The comedy opens with a conversation between Courtine and Beaugard, two recently disbanded officers. Courtine rails at the world which is “so throng'd, and cramm'd with Knaves and Fools, that an honest man can hardly get a living in it.” Beaugard admits that “Loyalty and Starving are all one,” but takes a more optimistic view and offers to introduce his friend “into good company.” He also shares with him money which he has mysteriously received. Courtine is immediately won over and declares himself ready to bargain with the Devil. Beaugard's “good company” is fashionable London “where Cuckoldom's in credit, and lewdness laudable, where thou shalt wallow in pleasures and preferments, revel all day, and every Night lye in the Armes of melting beauty.” More specifically, he reveals a plot, headed by Sir Jolly Jumble, a degenerate and “very reverend pimp,” to cuckold his equally perverse friend, Sir Davy Dunce. Actually Lady Dunce has initiated the conspiracy, for she is Beaugard's former mistress who in his absence has been forced to marry the wealthy old knight. Courtine, meanwhile, has been singled out for marriage by Sylvia, a more virtuous but equally enterprising young heiress.

The action proceeds in a series of plots and counterplots borrowed from Wycherley, Molière, and Scarron.⁶ Sir Davy is made the unwitting go-between by his wife, who feigns utmost aversion to Beaugard. When discovered with him by her husband, she describes the “attempted rape” vividly and, lapsing into slightly concealed blank verse, begs that Sir Davy stab her with her lover's sword:

Pierce, pierce this wretched Heart hard to the Hilts, dye this in deepest crimson of my Blood, spare not a miserable Womans life, whom Heav'n design'd to be the unhappy object of the most horrid usage Man e'r acted.

(III.546-49)

Sir Davy is successfully deluded but in turn plots to have Beaugard murdered by a professional cutthroat who is, however, in the pay of the original conspirators. The “murder” takes place and Sir Davy is frightened into putting his wife to bed with the “dying” Beaugard as a means of bringing him to life. Lady Dunce pretends to resist this proposal but at her husband's insistence the cure is attempted, to the mutual satisfaction of the lovers. Eventually Sir Davy learns the truth and must be content with his horns. Courtine, after various drunken misadventures, is cajoled into marriage by Sylvia as the only means of enjoying her and her fortune.

Once again, Otway's lack of wit, his bitter raillery, and obvious pilfering of situations reveal a lack of true comic talent, but Betterton's company of actors received “great Profit and Reputation” from The Souldiers Fortune. Charles II was so pleased with the character of Sir Jolly Jumble that he saw the comedy three times⁷ and dubbed Anthony Leigh who played the role “his actor.”⁸ Leigh was aided in his ribald triumph by James Nokes, as Sir Davy, “so dextrously … that every scene between them seemed but one continued rest of excellence.” Numerous pro-Tory allusions and the sexual plain-dealing of Lady Dunce—acted by Mrs. Barry who had recently starred as Otway's pathetic Monimia in The Orphan—were also to the taste of the audience at the Duke's Theater in Dorset Garden.

From this comic success Otway turned to the composition of Venice Preserv'd. Writing for the same audience and for the same actors, he understandably adapted to the purposes of his tragedy specific characters and situations which had been proved on the stage. The most obvious borrowing can be seen in the character of the Venetian senator, Antonio, whose perverse antics largely accounted for the immediate popularity of the play. Otway's Tory audience welcomed Leigh's portrayal as a hilarious caricature of the discredited Whig leader, Shaftesbury. Actually, however, this political identification had been grafted by the dramatist onto the characters of Sir Jolly Jumble and Sir Davy Dunce who had displayed such sexual abnormalities as masochism, sadism, voyeurism, and homosexuality.⁹ Otway had, moreover, hinted at the combination of sexual and political corruption in Sir Davy.¹⁰ The same sources may be cited for Renault, the conspiratorial version of Shaftesbury, and for the relatively undeveloped traits of the fatuous “hugger,” Bedamar, who heads the Spanish plot against Venice.¹¹

Such parallels in characterization extend beyond the obviously comic scenes in Venice Preserv'd. Pierre and Jaffeir, in basic outline as well as in their opening conversation on honesty, reflect Beaugard and Courtine of The Souldiers Fortune—the resourceful soldier and his ineffectual fellow-rake who rails at the world of knaves and fools. Like Beaugard, Pierre is clearly the late Restoration man of honor with the fashionable attitudes of the day toward love and marriage.¹² In much the same way, vestiges of Jaffeir's origin in Courtine help to explain what otherwise seem unaccountable lapses in taste or in consistent characterization. For example, there is his refusal to swear an oath because “Green-sickness Girls lose Maiden-heads with such Counters,” which is inserted parenthetically in his midnight heroics on the Rialto. This rakish aphorism is worthy of his comic predecessor, as is his retort to Pierre's questioning of his basic allegiance: “May not a Man then trifle out an hour / With a kind Woman and not wrong his calling?” (III.229-30). His bitter remark, “I believe / My self no Monster yet: Tho no Man knows / What Fate he's born to” (III.252-54) is transferred from the London of The Souldiers Fortune “where Cuckoldom's in credit,” as is the scene in which he bullies Renault as both Courtine and Beaugard had earlier outblustered Sir Davy.

In much the same way Otway's Lady Dunce and Sylvia foreshadow attributes and attitudes of Aquilina and, surprisingly enough, of Belvidera. Despite her disguise as a rampant Greek courtesan, Aquilina is obviously a London lady of quality. Her conversation, like that of Pierre, is modish in its attempts at wit and raillery, and she echoes a long succession of discontented young wives of Restoration comedy in her attitude toward Antonio:

The worst thing an old Man can be's a Lover,
A meer Memento Mori to poor woman.
I never lay by his decrepit side,
But all that night I ponder'd on my Grave.

(II.27-30)¹³

Belvidera does not fulfill the role of confidante geometrically prescribed for her by contemporary comedy.¹⁴ She does, however, provide a tragic variation of the technically virtuous Sylvia, and she is significantly made to repeat Lady Dunce's lamentation on her threatened honor as well as her melodramatic request that she be stabbed with the sword of the man she loves.¹⁵ Belvidera's similar gift for vivid sensual description will be discussed later.

Whether conscious or unconscious, such echoes of the earlier comedies are too numerous to be ignored. Indeed, it can be said not only that The Souldiers Fortune “must be understood if an insight is to be obtained into the emotional material which forms the basis of the later tragedy,”¹⁶ but also that the backgrounds of the two plays are identical. By 1680 Venice was a familiar symbol for Whig governmental policy,¹⁷ and Otway's Italian city is a very thinly disguised version of his comic setting, the London of the Popish Terror with its political disillusion, social cynicism, and sexual debauchery. The Arsenal, the Secque, and St. Mark's may figure in the conspirators' plans, but the “wide streets” of Venice which are to run with senatorial blood are clearly those of the English capital with its “tatter'd Fleet, a murmuring unpaid Army, / Bankrupt Nobility, a harrast Commonalty, / A Factious, giddy, and divided Senate” (II.268-70).

This background against which Otway's hero and heroine move may be divided into political and domestic levels, the Spanish conspiracy and the foreclosure, which threaten and eventually destroy their personal happiness. A close examination of this dual background shows that both are essentially comic and linked by a dominant poetic image, that they are somber but hardly “grandiose … in design,” as Dobrée has stated.¹⁸ On the political level, the dramatist presents an unrelieved picture of corruption, which is equaled in English tragedy only by the Italianate settings of certain Jacobean plays. The most obvious contributions to this atmosphere of political decadence are the Nicky-Nacky prose interludes which Dr. Johnson condemned as “vile scenes of despicable comedy.”¹⁹ It is important to remember, however, that Otway's audience found them extremely amusing, and one may doubt that they saw in Antonio what Taine calls a quasi-Shakespearean revelation of “la grande buffonerie amère, le sentiment cru de la bassesse humaine.”²⁰ However, if Taine's impressive apology for these scenes overshoots the mark, his statement is valuable for indicating the underlying political cynicism, which is far more important than the topical Whig-Tory ambivalence.²¹

According to the title, the political action is comic rather than tragic. A dangerous plot against the Venetian state is discovered, the conspirators are apprehended and executed, and Venice is saved. Despite the “happy ending,” in the course of the action every political value is confused or debased. The conspirators are unquestionably what they appeared to Belvidera—“hired Slaves, Bravoes, and Common stabbers, / Nose-slitters, Ally-lurking Villians” (III.ii.162-63). Nominally headed by the demonstrative Spaniard Bedamar, their real leaders are Renault, a sadistic lecher, and Pierre, a soldier of fortune who is basically motivated by anger at the loss of a prostitute's favors. Even before Renault's attempt on the heroine's virtue, the conspiratorial cause is “tainted vilely” by the “Cankerworm call'd Letchery” (III.ii.233-34). Nor does Otway present the intended victims in a more sympathetic light, for he focuses attention on the treacherous Duke and two of the senators—Priuli, who unnaturally persecutes his only child, and the notorious Antonio. The Venetian nobility is described as bankrupt and “nurs't up equally with Vices / And loathsome Lusts” (III.ii.368-69), while the commoners are dismissed as an easily deluded “Rowt, whom smarting will make humble” (II.277). Pierre, who is the dramatist's chief political spokesman, sums up the situation in a striking metaphor, which is the basic image of the play: Venice, personified by the Duke, shrinks trembling in its luxurious palace, powerless before the fleet of Spain, and watches its “Wife, th'Adriatick, plough'd / Like a lew'd Whore by bolder Prows” (IV.237-38). The marriage of the city-state and the sea—at whose wedding, incidentally, Jaffeir won his future wife's love—has been violated. The unprotected bride is forcibly degraded to the status of a prostitute; the husband is the impotent cuckold of comedy.

Between these two groups, which are nicely balanced in political and sexual corruption, stand the hero and heroine. Possibly, as Mrs. Taylor suggests, “a balance of sympathy is maintained … only when ill wishes shift freely back and forth between the senate and conspirators.”²² It is nevertheless true that Jaffeir must choose between the equally unworthy causes and that either choice will make him a political dupe. Either conspiracy against or preservation of the state is “a gigantic fraud,”²³ fatal to the protagonists in outcome, but comic in essence. The entire political milieu expresses “la grande buffonerie amère … de la bassesse humaine,” a bitter farcicality which may have brought laughter of release to Otway's audience which had just escaped from four years of political hysteria.

“The vast amount of offering and taking of formal oaths of loyalty and of truth, without a parallel in English drama” has been noted by J. R. Moore as a satirical reflection of the trials for the Popish Plot.²⁴ A more subtle source of humor is the stage manipulation of Jaffeir's dagger. This traditional masculine ornament and arm is first mentioned by Pierre as a potential instrument of revenge against Priuli's domestic tyranny. Jaffeir, in turn, transforms it into one pledge of his political honor which is to be used to destroy his second hostage, Belvidera, if he proves unfaithful to the conspirators. In Renault's hands it becomes symbolic of “a false Husbands love” when he attempts to frighten the heroine into sexual compliance. Seized by Pierre as he defends his friend's life, it is contemptuously returned to Jaffeir—as a symbol of honor lost and friendship betrayed—after the discovery of the plot to the Senate. In the crucial Dagger Scene which follows immediately, Jaffeir's use of the stage property both parallels and reverses the attempted rape by Renault. Once again the dagger threatens the white bosom of the heroine and once again the threat leads to an embrace—in this scene, to the willing embrace of fervent conjugal passion. Belvidera begs it as a last gift in the Parting Scene, but Jaffeir first uses it to save his friend's honor and to redeem his own. Finally it is sent as a “Token that with my dying breath I blest her” (V.476), only to arrive as Belvidera's madness ends in death.²⁵

In a sense, the symbolic changes of the dagger as it changes hands may be said to unite the three levels of action in the play—political, domestic, and personal—as well as the triple theme of love, honor, and friendship. Ironically, its ubiquity mainly serves to underscore the insufficiency of the hero, for its one constant value is negative, that of potential or real destructiveness. Indeed, this ambivalence is further accentuated by the introduction on the comic level of a grossly sexual parody of the passionate Dagger Scene—the scene in which Aquilina points her poniard at Antonio's breast in an attempt to save Pierre's life but procures only ineffectual promises and the fetishistic senator's ecstatic “death” at her feet.

The larger picture of national decadence in which political and sexual menace are linked by imagery and symbolic action is duplicated on the domestic level in equally ambiguous detail. The destruction of Jaffeir's household by the foreclosure for debt is unquestionably the factor that drives him to action, into the tragicomic fraud of the conspiracy. The pathos of this dispossession is skilfully exploited and Shakespearean stature is attempted by deliberate verbal echoes of Othello.²⁶ Viewed dispassionately, however, the domestic ruin is not tragic. The clandestine marriage, contracted in filial disobedience and betrayal of hospitality, has continued for three years in heedless pleasure and extravagance. As the play opens, the bankrupt Jaffeir pleads with his father-in-law for financial aid, while the foreclosure order, signed by “Priuli's cruel hand,” is actually being executed. Pierre's description of this act of “public Rapine”—like his later summation of the Venetian political dilemma—has unmistakable sexual overtones:

Here stood a Ruffian with a horrid face
Lording it o're a pile of massy Plate,
Tumbled into a heap for publick sale:
There was another making villainous jests
At thy undoing; he had ta'ne possession
Of all thy antient most domestick Ornaments,
Rich hangings, intermixt and wrought with gold;
The very bed, which on thy wedding night
Receiv'd thee to the Arms of Belvidera,
The scene of all thy Joys, was violated
By the course hands of filthy Dungeon Villains,
And thrown amongst the common Lumber.

(I.238-49)

From this scene of violation Belvidera emerges in tears, supported by “two young Virgins.” They are also weeping and

Even the lewd Rabble that were gather'd round
To see the sight, stood mute when they beheld her;
Govern'd their roaring throats and grumbled pity.

(I.264-66)

The general effect is far more sensual than sentimental, as is Pierre's almost gloating emphasis on the seizure of the marriage bed—the domestic variant of the national rape and a significant foreshadowing of the relationship between hero and heroine.

In addition to forcing Jaffeir into the conspiracy, the foreclosure increases the atmospheric isolation of the action. Except for the Hostage Scene in Aquilina's house, the lovers must meet in unspecified surroundings, against a conventionally neutral background for which any “street” with colonnades in perspective available at Dorset Garden no doubt originally served. This removal from particularized reality is further increased by the nocturnal timing of the three central acts of the tragedy.²⁷ In Racinian or heroic drama this isolation in time and space would tend to elevate and magnify the protagonists, and Otway does occasionally imply that the spectator should see in Belvidera and Jaffeir the “captive queen” and disinherited prince of his own Don Carlos and other heroic plays.²⁸ Such identification, however, is impossible, for the political scene is not one of “reeling Glory” and, even with such details as the “pile of massy Plate” tumbled in the Venetian street, the legalized looting of their home is not the sack of a royal palace. Emotional intensity is attained, but it is largely factitious and takes the form of pathetic sensuality rather than of tragic sublimity or even of sentimentality.

Ostensibly Jaffeir and Belvidera are menaced by dire poverty and several poetic devices are employed to solicit pity for their economic distress. On the simplest level are the repetitions throughout the play of emotionally charged words—dear (32 times, often in the sense of valuable), poor (18), pity or pitying (16), sad (12), and Fortune or Fate (49). A number of images deal with economic loss or employ the language of speculative risk, and there are passages of vivid description of beggars, beds of straw, bleak whistling winds, and winter frosts, which seem to have been drawn directly from the impecunious dramatist's own observation.²⁹ More usually, however, Otway depends upon such conventional personifications as Want, the “hungry, meager Fiend,” which pursues Jaffeir, or the “desert” variation of the neoclassical pastoral retreat:

Oh lead me to some Desart wide and wild,
Barren as our Misfortunes …
Though the bare Earth be all our Resting-place,
It's Root's our food, some Clift our Habitation,
I'l make this Arm a Pillow for thy Head.

(I.348-49, 375-77)

The perfunctory quality of these passages doubtless results from the fact that they are largely, if not entirely, gratuitous. Belvidera has not been left, as she claims, to dire necessity for three years by her father's inhumane treatment. Within a few hours of the seizure of their home Jaffeir is provided with money by Pierre. And once the conspiracy has been joined, there is every reason to believe that the imminent revolution will restore their material prosperity. It should be noted, however, that many of the passages dealing with poverty focus upon the bed, and that the most conventional rhetorical figure tends to be tinged with sensuality, e.g., “smarting Poverty” threatens to embrace Belvidera's “Limbs, / Fram'd for the tender Offices of Love” (I.360-62). Perhaps the most significant proof that Venice Preserv'd is not a forerunner of eighteenth-century domestic tragedy is Otway's cavalier treatment of the two-year old child with which “Heav'n has already crown'd [the protagonists'] faithfull Loves.”³⁰

Despite their involvement in the political situation through ties of blood and friendship and despite their marital status, Jaffeir and Belvidera are obviously conceived of by Otway primarily as lovers. And it is upon their passionate physical attachment that the play centers. The real threat to this love is, appropriately enough, neither political tyranny nor domestic distress but degenerate lust which materializes, in the form of Renault, from the very sources of their apparent relief. One may hesitate to agree with Mrs. Clement Parsons that the tragedy of Venice Preserv'd is “the shame and downfall brought upon an originally noble nature, by excessive uxoriousness—a unique theme … in acting drama,”³¹ but there can be little doubt that the play is outstanding among the traditional masterpieces of English tragic literature in its insistent physicality. This aspect would be doubly apparent in presentation, for Otway emphasizes the verbal eroticism of the play by a staggering number of passionate embraces which, rather than oath-taking, is the key symbolic action of the play. No less than thirty physical embraces are indicated by the text, usually by the word thus (“While thus I cling”; “Thus hug my little, but my precious store”; “to lean thus on thy breast”; “O that my arms were rivetted thus”). There are also thirty-five additional descriptions of embraces past or anticipated. From Jaffeir's rescue of the drowning Belvidera to the heroine's fatally triumphant grasp at her husband's ghost (“Oh now how I'll smuggle him!”) the gesture is so universal that one is tempted to agree with Renault's aside on Bedamar, “I never lov'd these huggers.” Even external nature, which Otway rarely mentions, is characteristically anthropomorphized when, in the initial rescue, “the sawcy Waves” throng and press round Belvidera so impudently that they must be dashed aside.

Although several of the embraces are part of conspiratorial greetings or vows, the majority are exchanged by the protagonists and are so pointedly passionate that an eighteenth-century reviewer complained of “those luscious love scenes” in which the hero and heroine are “continually flying into each other's arms.”³² These embraces are usually accompanied by tears, which increase both pathetic and erotic appeals and foreshadow the later sentimental exploitation of a device which falls “in the border region between the soul and the senses.”³³ Certain verbal repetitions, too, further underscore the passionate quality of the central relationship. These were probably related visually, by conventions of Restoration feminine costume and stage gesture, to the dominant embrace. Bosom, breast, and breasts (indulgent, kind, white, poor, panting) are referred to thirty times, and there is an overwhelming emphasis on the heart, which is mentioned eighty-four times and variously qualified as sad, poor, bleeding, melting, pitying, sting'd, and aching. Also closely allied by anatomy and emotion is the recurrent “pregnancy” image in which the breast or heart is described as swelling, loaded, heavy, or laboring.

As noted earlier, Lady Squeamish's cynical formula for success in tragedy called for a combination of “soft melting tender … moving” speeches and feminine virtue “what ere you do.” Tender, the word traditionally attached to Otway's name, is here associated with soft, melting, and moving which, as part of the conventional poetic vocabulary of love, were indicative of warm passion and sensual yielding and should not be interpreted in the light of later sentimental usage. It may further be pointed out that the combination of such speeches with virtuous heroines is not intended as a logical equation by Lady Squeamish but as a piquant juxtaposition of unlikely elements. That Otway took his own advice is evident in both The Orphan and Venice Preserv'd where virtuous characters are given speeches of more specific sensuality than can easily be found outside of contemporary comedy.

Presumably Pierre's modish libertinism affords a contrast to Jaffeir's sentimental attachment, just as Aquilina's mercenary ardor should serve as a foil to Belvidera's marital virtue. In actuality, however, Pierre's anticipation of his mistress's favors is far surpassed in warmth by the connubial passion of Jaffeir:

How could I pull thee down into my heart,
Gaze on thee till my Eye-strings crackt with Love,
Till all my sinews with its fire extended,
Fixt me upon the Rack of ardent longing:
Then swelling, sighing, raging to be blest,
Come like a panting Turtle to thy Breast,
On thy soft Bosom, hovering, bill and play.

(II.425-31)

And it is difficult to distinguish between the courtesan's “eager clasps” and Belvidera's “eager Arms.” Indeed Aquilina's simile of the Ephesian matron is decorous in comparison to the heroine's vivid recollection of “a thousand thousand dear times,”

When our sting'd hearts have leap'd to meet each other,
And melting kisses seal'd our lips together,
When joyes have left me gasping in thy armes.

(V.247-49)

Perhaps because they are married and therefore outside the restraining code of fashionable love, Otway's hero and heroine are allowed more liberty of expression than is enjoyed by the male and female rake of comedy. Perhaps this curious ardor results from the dramatist's inability to communicate the “newer sentimental or romantic view [of marriage]”³⁴ for which no vocabulary had yet been formulated. Whatever the cause, the combination of technical virtue and sensual speech reinforces rather than refines the impact of the neoclassical clichés which Jaffeir and Belvidera use. The result is oddly prurient. Jeremy Collier called Monimia “Smutty,” and such a dissimilar critic as Lord Byron denounced Belvidera as “that maudlin bitch of chaste lewdness.”³⁵

Not unnaturally, the action of Venice Preserv'd is also affected by Otway's borrowing from the comic mode. That the Pierre-Aquilina-Antonio subplot is an undeveloped version of the classic triangle of Restoration comedy of manners is obvious. Renault, the threat to the happiness of Jaffeir and Belvidera, is also a degradation of the amorous old man of comedy—he is described in the Prologue as “very old” and as one who “Loves fumbling with a Wench, with all his heart.” Jaffeir, who retains vestiges of the rakish Courtine, thus finds himself in danger of being cuckolded—and even murdered, like Beaugard—by the traditional comic dupe. In a sense, Venice Preserv'd offered to the jaded audience of 1682 a serious parody or wishful reversal of the basic Restoration comic plot—a young and passionately faithful husband, a madly infatuated wife, and a sexually abhorrent old libertine, who threatens the unusual couple not with horns but death, not with pleasure but with rape.

In 1721 John Dennis remarked that “Rape is the peculiar Barbarity of our English stage” and continued:

I would fain know … for what Reason the Women, who will sit as quietly
and passively at the Relation of a Rape in a Tragedy, as if they thought that
Ravishing gave them a Pleasure, for which they had a just Apology, will
start and flinch … at the least Approach of Rem to Re in Comedy.(36)

The distinction is indeed slight, and Mrs. Taylor has perceptively noted that in the plot of The Orphan, “that culminates in rape and incest and concludes with three suicides, he [Otway] has introduced a motif of deception proper to comedy.”³⁷ The same incongruity can be seen in Venice Preserv'd where the dramatist's obsession with sexual violation, real, attempted, or fancied, caused him to make it the main-spring of his greatest tragedy, even though he perilously approaches the farcical brutality of his own comedies. Nowhere is this proximity more plain than in the crucial Hostage Scene, which caused Leigh Hunt to accuse Otway of deliberately furnishing “his riotous imagination with a gusto of contrast.” That the virtuous heroine should be lodged by her doting husband in Aqualina's “house of fair Reception” is highly ironical. But that, at a midnight rendezvous of the conspirators (and immediately after a quarrel between Eliot and Renault on the subject of whoring), Jaffeir should introduce his wife into their midst, apparently in the charming disorder of night dress,³⁸ must have seemed to Otway's original audience risible if not incredible. Further excess follows, for Belvidera is delivered to Renault, who leads her back to bed. There “in Virgin sheets / White as her bosom,” as the house echoes to the howls of the degenerate Antonio, she is predictably threatened with her husband's dagger and with rape. Upon this lurid off-stage event the tragedy depends. Here all the basic elements of the play coincide. Love, honor, and friendship are each simultaneously threatened, perverted, and betrayed. Here, too, the basic poetic symbol of the play—rape—which has been noted on the political and domestic levels in the prostitution of the Adriatic by Spain and the “violation” of the marriage bed at the foreclosure is made explicit.³⁹

What saves Venice Preserv'd from being the victim of its obvious comic elements is, in part, the pall of verbal horror and loathing which hangs over the play. Leigh Hunt also complained that Fanny Kemble's interpretation was too much “of the tragedy-reader school,” but admitted that a completely natural performance would probably produce an effect “too dreadful.” Again and again one is reminded that Otway was the contemporary of Wycherley and the Earl of Rochester. The basic misanthropy and disillusion of his tragedy are strongly reminiscent of The Plain Dealer and the Satyre against Mankind. Bestial sexuality is coupled with a sinister odor of disease and decay. Antonio and Renault, the “domestic spoilers,” are described as a goat and a fox, rank and stinking in heat. To Pierre, Jaffeir is a dull hound following the “cold” scent of Belvidera, and there is a taint of “fool” about Aquilina, which has resulted from her physical contact with Antonio. Her footmen, she threatens, shall be “poison'd like Rats: Every Corner of the house shall stink of one of you” (III.140-42), while Jaffeir declares that the “Senators should rot / Like Dogs on Dunghills; but their Wives and Daughters / Dye of their own diseases” (II.120-22). Priuli echoing the bitter verses of Rochester, declares that “The vilest Beasts are happy in their offsprings, / While onely man gets traitours, whores and villains” (IV.15-16). Incurable disease, he says, “has seiz'd upon my memory, / To make it rot and stink to after ages” (V.7-8). Nor should one, in this context, omit the aphrodisiac effect of Aquilina's “dear fragrant foots and little toes, sweet as, e e e e. …” This enveloping atmosphere is intensified by the frequent use of the words villain (36 times), wretch (23), and blood (29) and an almost intolerable recurrence of such verbs as wither, crush, smother, prophane, curse, destroy, violate, spoil, taint, dull, blot, foul, blast, rip, strike, stab, kill, and rot.

Dobrée has remarked that in Venice Preserv'd Otway seems to be exploiting his characters' “capacity for feeling, even for self-torture” and that he “seems to be indulging in a debauch of his own pains.”⁴⁰ Even if one ignores the six love letters to Mrs. Barry, which may be as apocryphal as the stories of Otway's pathetic death, there can be little doubts of the dramatist's conscious interest in abnormal psychological states, or that his taste was shared by his audience. Even with the indulgence granted by topical identification, the character of Antonio strains the limits of comic laughter, and Renault exceeds them in his “Shed blood enough” exhortation. Nor is this obvious perversity limited to the villains of the play. Renault's charge is curiously foreshadowed by Jaffeir's exulting boast to Priuli's daughter:

                                                  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 the glorious Partner's of my Fortune
Shouting, and striding o're the prostrate Dead.

(III.ii.140-46)

Belvidera, too, displays an interesting lack of tact as she pictures Pierre “stretch'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” (IV.453-56). And her description of the anticipated sack of Venice far surpasses those of Jaffeir and Renault. Its skilful combination of pathetic and erotic detail with masochistic terror deserves full quotation:

                                                                      Save the poor tender lives
Of all those little Infants which the Swords
Of murtherers are whetting for this moment;
Think thou already hearst their dying screams,
Think that thou seest their sad distracted Mothers
Kneeling before thy feet, and begging pity
With torn dishevel'd hair and streaming eyes,
Their naked mangled breasts besmeard with bloud,
And even the Milk with which their fondled Babes
Softly they hush'd, dropping in anguish from 'em.
Think thou seest this, and then consult thy heart.
                                                                      Think what then may prove
My Lot! the Ravisher may then come safe,
And midst the terrour of the publick ruine
Doe a damn'd deed …

(IV.48-58, 63-66)

Bloody-Bones, the hired cutthroat of The Souldiers Fortune also revels in blank-verse massacre when he is “rageing mad.” Obviously Otway did not intend to show his hero and heroine as psychologically perverse, but there is an evident tendency to exploit not only comic-tragic transferences but also any emotional appeal, whether or not it is appropriate to the speaker. For example, Renault may talk savagely about exterminating “these Tyrants,” and four lines later describe

The raging furious and unpitying Souldier
Pulling his reeking Dagger from the bosoms
Of gasping Wretches …

(III.ii.378-80)

This vignette of “all that sad disorder can produce / To make a Spectacle of horror” (as he continues) is clearly meant to arouse sympathy for the victims. Or one may cite the passage in which Jaffeir outlines Belvidera's Intercession Scene with her father:

Speak to him with thy Eyes, and with thy tears
Melt the hard heart, and wake dead nature in him;
Crush him in th'Arms, and torture him with thy softness:
                    Nor, till thy Prayers are granted, set him free
                    But conquer him, as thou hast vanquish'd me.

(IV.533-37)

These are instructions by which a heroic captive queen might overcome a conquering tyrant—in fact, Belvidera's seductive use of her veil is identical with that of Almahide in The Conquest of Granada when she first confronts Almanzor. In context and in connotations, Jaffeir's orders are shocking; in isolation the scene between daughter and father in Act V is very effective, though Otway has his heroine insist unnecessarily upon the quality of Priuli's “chaste paternal kisses.”

The results of such verbal excesses are neither comic nor tragic. The horrors of political and sexual corruption which surround Jaffeir and Belvidera lead to an amazing vitalization of the conventions of neoclassical dramatic poetry. Jaffeir's “Rack of ardent longing” takes on new psychological reality in the shadow of the senatorial rack upon which he may suffer, not like “a panting Turtle” but “stretch'd in all the Agonies / Of a tormenting and a shamefull Death.” The stings of love which pierce Belvidera's bosom are made ominously vivid by the ubiquitous dagger “Ready to leap and sting thee to thy Heart.” Jaffeir, as he had predicted in the simile of the infatuated lamb which, when slain by the enticing priestess, “hardly bleats, such pleasure's in the pain” (IV.94), expires on the scaffold with the words, “I'm quiet.” Belvidera, having also predicted her madness, ends with a death-cry of amorous endearment and physical agony as she is dragged in a phantom embrace “to the bottom”—“Down to one Grave, as our last bed” (V.277). Thus the tragedy ends on the dual notes of erotic and physical violence, at once desired and feared. Seen against the larger setting of quasi-comic national fraud and rape, their deaths achieve a certain catharsis of horror, if not of pity and fear, a resolution that results from the cessation of partly self-inflicted terror rather than a tragic purgation.

To emphasize the inescapable sensual and comic elements of Venice Preserv'd is not to diminish the stature of Otway's masterpiece but to restore it to its original dimensions, to show it as a different play from the emasculated and sentimentalized creation of the eighteenth century. The apparent weaknesses in characterization and construction, the hysterical emotionalism, the contradictions in tone fall into place to reveal it as a somber indictment of the late Restoration world, as a dark satiric tragedy worthy of the Jacobean dramatists. R. G. Ham is correct in calling Venice Preserv'd “the finest tragedy composed since Ford and Webster.”⁴¹ That Otway had no true successors is not surprising, for he is, in many ways, a culmination rather than a beginning. And only his particular age and temperament could have produced the combination of conventions of heroic drama and bitter comedy with an atmosphere of universal decadence which resulted in the “debauching” of his tragic muse.

Notes

1. “Criticisms from ‘The Tatler,’” [October 7, 1830], Dramatic Essays, ed. Archer and Lowe (London, 1894), pp. 154-55. Of this production Fanny Kemble later wrote: “Placed as Belvidera is in the midst of sordidly painful and coarsely agonizing circumstances, there was nothing in the part itself that affected my feeling or excited my imagination; and the miserable situations into which the poor creature was thrown throughout the piece revolted me, and filled me with disgust for the men she had to do with.”—Records of a Girlhood (London, 1879), II, 85-86.

2. For these and many other details, as well as for valuable advice, I am indebted to Mrs. Aline Mackenzie Taylor of Newcomb College and to her study, Next to Shakespeare: Otway's “Venice Preserv'd” and “The Orphan” and Their History on the London Stage (Durham, N. C., 1950).

3. Lives of the Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), I, 245.

4. Taylor, op. cit., p. 267.

5. The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford, 1932), I, 44. All quotations are taken from this edition.

6. Allardyce Nicoll, Restoration Drama (Cambridge, Eng., 1923), p. 177.

7. Nicoll, op. cit., p. 311.

8. Colley Cibber, An Apology for His Life (Everyman ed., London, 1938), p. 80.

9. Sir Jolly [Squeaks like a Cat and tickles Beaugard's Legs] “… A pretty fellow, odd a very prety fellow, and a strong dog I'll warrant him: how dost do dear heart? prithee let me kiss thee, I'll swear and vow I will kiss thee, ha, ha, he, he, he, he, a Toad, A Toad, ah Toa-a-a-ad” (I.240-46); “shan't I hold the door, shan't I peep hah, shan't I you devil, you little dog shan't I?” (I.277-79); ‘tickle me a little Mally—tickle me a little Jenny—do, He he he he he he” (I.369-70); Lady Dunce speaks of Sir Davy: “he has other divertisments that take him off from my injoyment; which make him so loathsome no Woman but must hate him” (I.413-16).

10. “… he is one of those Fools forsooth, that are led by the Nose by Knaves to rail against the King and the Government, and is mightly fond of being thought of a party; I have had hopes this twelve month to have heard of his being in the Gate-House for Treason” (I.462-66); “get me the Gold Medal too and Chain which I took from the Roman Catholik Officer for a Popish Relick” (III.447-49).

11. Even Aquilina's whip as a cure for Antonio's canine misbehavior under the table had been suggested in The Souldiers Fortune by Sylvia's maid as a means of dealing with the lecherous Courtine who is tied to a couch “like an ungovernable curr to the frame of a table”:

    MAID:

    Shall I fetch the Whip and the Bell, Madam? and slash him for his roguery soundly?

    COURTINE:

    Indeed, indeed! do you long to be ferking of man's flesh, Madam Flea-trap? does the Chaplain of the Family use you to the exercise, that you are so ready to it?”

    (V.28-32)

12. Cf. his bantering reference to Belvidera (“I hope a man may wish his Friends Wife well, / And no harm done”) and his later sarcastic “Catharrs and Tooth Ach” speech (III.ii.218-28). Admittedly, Pierre and Jaffeir also resemble Polydore and Castalio in The Orphan.

13. See Lady Dunce's lament (The Souldiers Fortune, I.529-30): “to lye by the Image of Death a whole Night.”

14. In the case of Belvidera it may be argued that Otway in his parallel arrangements of male and female vice and virtue was drawing from the contemporary stockpile of heroic conventions—e.g., Solyman-Alphonso, Roxalana-Ianthe in The Siege of Rhodes; Abdalla-Almanzor, Lyndaraxa-Almahide in The Conquest of Granada. Such diagrammatization—of fashionable and unfashionable love—was more typical of Restoration comedy of manners.

15. Those who are irritated by Belvidera's frequent “Whither, whither?” cries may be pleased by the earlier parallel of Lady Dunce's mock-lament: “Y'ave ruined me, your Family, your Fortune, all is ruin'd: where shall we go, or whither shall we flye?” to which Sir Davy replies succinctly, “Where shall we go, why we'll go to bed you little Jackadandy: why you are not a Wench you Rogue, you are a Boy, a very Boy, and I love you the better for't” (IV.579-84).

16. Bonamy Dobrée, Restoration Tragedy, 1660-1720 (Oxford, 1929), p. 138.

17. Taylor, op. cit., p. 57.

18. Dobrée, op. cit., p. 144.

19. Lives of the Poets, ed. cit., I, 245.

20. Histoire de la littérature anglaise (Paris, 1863), II, 654.

21. For the best study of the political aspects, see Aline Mackenzie, “Venice Preserv'd Reconsidered,” Tulane Studies in English, I (New Orleans, 1949), 81-118.

22. Taylor, op. cit., p. 68.

23. Ibid., p. 58. Mrs. Taylor says elsewhere, however, that “if there is no significance in the opposition of the senate and conspirators … the whole play becomes politically little more than an elaborate hoax” (p. 57).

24. PMLA, XLIII (1928), 170. Moore cites the statement of John Pollock (The Popish Plot [London, 1903], 265) that these trials produced “the most astounding outburst of successful perjury which has occurred in modern times.”

25. In 1808 Mrs. Siddons apparently had the arrival of the messenger with the dagger precipitate the death agonies (Taylor, op. cit., p. 195).

26. The antecedent action is reminiscent of Othello, and in Priuli's opening denunciation there are definite echoes. Elsewhere the similarity is never more than verbal. Priuli lacks Brabantio's reason for opposing the marriage of his daughter on racial grounds. Pierre in his relation with Aquilina recalls the Cassio-Bianca episodes, but at times is clearly cast in the role of Iago (especially in the midnight Rialto temptation scene and his contemptuous attitude toward Jaffeir's marital infatuation); and Jaffeir is far from the noble Moor, even in the quality of his passion, for “the young affects” in him are decidedly not defunct.

27. The two key interviews of the play—in which Jaffeir is won over to the conspiracy by Pierre, and seduced to betray it by Belvidera—occur at midnight. The hour is connotatively unfortunate in either case, especially since the hero declares that “desperate Wretches, like my self, / Have wander'd out at this dead time of Night / To meet the Foe of Mankind in his walk” (II.71-73).

28. Don Carlos, who resolves to join the rebels in the Netherlands because of his father's injustice, is a further example of Otway's repetition of basic characters.

29. Especially effective is Pierre's simile: “What starve like Beggars Brats in frosty weather, / Under a Hedge, and whine our selves to Death!” (I.279-80).

30. Priuli evidently does not know of his grandson's existence, but promptly incorporates him in his curse, for pathetic effect. After this initial use, the child is ignored or forgotten. Belvidera leaves her home without him and even in the Persuasion Scene (Act IV) when she describes the imminent slaughter of the Venetian innocents, he is not mentioned. Only as the final catastrophe approaches is he remembered by the mother and then, interestingly enough, serves as the excuse for the lovers' final passionate embrace. Jaffeir belatedly refers to the child three times, urging that he be brought up in ignorance of his father's fate, offering to slit the “little Throat” to appease Pierre's anger, and finally making him co-heir of the dubious “Token” which he expiringly bequeaths to Belvidera.

31. The Incomparable Siddons (London, 1909), p. 82.

32. The Connoisseur, March 14, 1754, quoted by Taylor, op. cit., p. 177.

33. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Doubleday Anchor Book, 1957), p. 350. Ten bursts of tears seem indicated by the text (Jaffeir, Pierre, and Priuli weep as well as Belvidera) and there are twenty other references.

34. Taylor, op. cit., p. 35. She is referring to Castalio.

35. Letters and Journals, ed. R. E. Prothero (London, 1922), IV, 91.

36. Original Letters, Familiar, Moral, and Critical (London, 1721), pp. 63-64.

37. Taylor, op. cit., p. 10.

38. “Oh! I have slept and dreamt, / And dreamt again: where has thou been thou Loyterer?”

    (II.359-60)

39. Throughout the play the attention of the audience is focused on the bed—by the nocturnal setting, by twenty-four specific references to beds, and by an interesting series of bed-nest analogies which contribute to the Otwavian mixture of pathos and sensuality. The nest is first implied in Jaffeir's description of his creditors “Watchfull as Fowlers when their Game will spring” (I.115). He pictures himself as “a panting Turtle” and a “Travell'd Dove” who will come to Belvidera's arms at midnight. The heroine figuratively returns to the parental nest when she begs Priuli to “Hover with strong compassion o'r your young one, / To shelter me with a protecting wing” (V.57-58). Pierre, too, describes himself as a bird—a hunting hawk “ready to stoop and grasp the lovely game,” while Antonio is called a “Haggard Owl,” “a Worthless Kite of Prey,” a “filthy Cuckoo” who in Pierre's absence “with his foul wings sayl'd in and spoyl'd my Quarry,” “crept into my Nest … spoyling all my Brood of noble Pleasures” (I.177-79, 189-91). The bird metaphor is extended to the political level in the description of the unjust Venetian rulers as “those baleful unclean Birds, / Those Lazy-Owls” (II.167-68), and Venice itself is “a nest of Fools and Knaves” (II.174).

40. Op. cit., pp. 141-48.

41. Otway and Lee: Biography from a Baroque Age (New Haven, 1931), p. 184.