Conclusion
[In the following essay, Dodds examines Southerne's place in the history of English drama.]
In him the poets' Nestor ye defend!
Great Otway's peer, and greater Dryden's friend.
—Prologue to Money the Mistress
Thomas Southerne emerges from a candid appraisal of his life and work with a greater importance in the history of the English theatre than he has hitherto been granted by the critics who have touched him only in passing. … [The] esteem in which the poet's work was held by his contemporaries, as well as the unexpectedly long and continuous stage history of his two best plays, would alone support such an estimate. Moreover, his most effective work bears the test of a close critical scrutiny. This is not to say that such an examination reveals in Southerne unsuspected depths of genius, yet it is significant and not a little surprising to find how closely the quality of his most enduring drama approaches the best of its kind. But lest his advocate be accused of a critical myopia not unknown to special pleaders, it is advisable to draw together here the threads of Southerne's activity, and to place them in perspective against the background of the Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre. Thus it will be possible to illuminate with greater clarity his successes and his failures, and more importantly, to indicate his place in the development of English drama.
A “PRACTICAL” DRAMATIST
We find Southerne a man capable, beyond most of his fellow-craftsmen, of adapting himself to a difficult age. His dramatic activity extended over a span of forty-four years, and the history of his artistic life in that period is one of lightly-poised sensitiveness to public taste and opinion. Politically and professionally he was an opportunist; if such a philosophy reflected invidiously on his artistic integrity, it at least brought him financial competency and a high degree of theatrical success. Nor was any taint of hypocrisy his; a character singularly honest and straightforward in its personal relations brought him to his grave as full of honor as of years. He conquered the environment that had beaten down Lee and Otway, greater geniuses than he, and had checkered even Dryden's life with disappointment. That Southerne succeeded where better artists failed makes him a fascinating object of study against the background of the Caroline and Orange theatre.
Not the least of his good fortune came from an ability to find harbor with generous patrons, a feat which he accomplished by sailing with the prevailing political wind. He began his career on the stage as a loyal Jacobite. The Loyal Brother, or The Persian Prince (1682) was a spirited defense of James and a thinly-veiled attack on Monmouth's ambition. On the accession of James to the throne, Southerne entered the king's army and was on the verge of preferment when the Revolution swept down and destroyed all such hopes. When he returned to the theatre, discretion seemed the better part of political wisdom for an ambitious young dramatist. The Wives' Excuse, therefore, he dedicated to Thomas Wharton, who had voted for the Exclusion Bill in 1680 and had been named privy counsellor and comptroller of the household as soon as William became king. In 1695, with Oroonoko, he sued for the patronage of William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, who had also been active in advocating the Exclusion Bill and was privy counsellor under William and Mary. Such trimming to the wind of patronage did not escape the eye of contemporary satire. In some verses purporting to represent The Last Will and Testament of Mr. Tho. Brown, published in A Letter From the Dead Thomas Brown, to the Living Heraclitus (1704), Southerne is attacked for his inconstancy:
Item. To S———rn, who for Gain
And Place of Trust, turn'd Cat in Pan
And a good Cause declining left,
Because of present Pence bereft,
I give my Inconstancy of Temper,
To prove that he's not Idem semper,
But with each Point of Mind can vary,
And several hooks at several Seasons carry.(1)
The Tryal of Skill, or, a New Session of the Poets, published the same year, satirizes his opportunism in the same manner:
Tom S—Petition'd the next, and besought
The Court, that he must be preferr'd,
For he two Fat Places already had got,
And most grievously wanted a Third.
When the Judges amaz'd at his Temper and Suit,
Remanded him back to White-hall,
And declar'd, who had lost his Esteem and Repute,
Was not fit for their Business at all.
…
Such a Question as this drew the Blood into's Face,
And away from the Querists he ran,
Well knowing how near it came up to his Case,
That so lately had turn'd Cat in Pan.
The theatre, so hard a task-master to many a starving playwright, proved rich in financial reward to this fortunate Irishman. From the very first, when he “raised the price of prologues” by paying Dryden twice as much as had ever been given for one, he was active in obtaining the highest possible returns for his labors.2
The changing morality in Southerne's play is another evidence of his sensitiveness to new dramatic fashions. Between 1690-93, when the comedy of manners was still the accepted comic tradition, he turned out in rapid succession three plays that were conventionally ribald in conception and execution. He wrote them with a pen dipped in the common well of Restoration cuckoldry and wenching. Double-entendre, cynical attacks on the church, fifth-act victories for debauchées, a sparrow-like concentration on the one all-important business of sex—these were there in abundance. Even the sub-plots of The Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko were comedies of manners in miniature. By 1695 Southerne had written five plays all stamped with the formula of lubricous wit. It was the fashion.
Then in 1698 the storm of Collier's Short View descended on this infected stage and sent the worried playwrights scurrying for shelter. The extent of their baffled rage may be determined by anyone who will examine Vanbrugh's or Congreve's disconcerted replies to the indictment. Accepting tacitly the parson's premise that “the business of Plays is to recommend Virtue and discountenance Vice,”3 they found his position impregnable, and went down to a fore-doomed argumentative defeat. To be sure, the stage was not reformed overnight—some of the most brilliant examples of the comedy under fire came after 1698—but Collier had brought to the surface purgative tendencies that had been running underground for over a decade, and were ultimately to result in a drama made safe for sensibility. For us, the important thing is Southerne's reaction to the dispute.
Collier does not include Southerne in his survey of iniquity. Our poet was as liable as any to attack, but Collier was gunning after bigger game. For his share of the general abuse Southerne had to wait until 1719, and Arthur Bedford's Serious Remonstrance In Behalf of the Christian Religion, Against the Horrid Blasphemies and Impieties which are still used in the English Play-Houses, etc. In this strident and extravagant book—the reductio ad absurdum of Collier—Southerne is included with the other innumerable heretics. Chapter and verse of The Fatal Marriage are cited to show “The Devil honour'd by the profane Cursing of the Stage,” and “The Scriptures perverted to the Honour of the Devil.” Type examples selected for anathema are such phrases as “Confusion,” and “The Devil is in it.” But in spite of the fact that he was not singled out by Collier for attack, Southerne sensed that a new scale of values was entering the theatre, and forthwith he gave up comedy, turning instead to a form least likely to give offense—classical tragedy.
Southerne's acceptance of the new code is pointed out in Charles Boyle's Prologue to The Fate of Capua.
But he despairs of pleasing all the nation,
'Tis so debauch'd with whims of reformation.
He's done his best: here is no wanton scene
To give the wicked joy, the godly, spleen.
Not one poor bawdy jest shall dare appear,
For now the batter'd, veteran strumpets, here
Pretend at least to bring a modest ear.
By 1726 the reformation was almost complete, and in Money the Mistress Southerne gave himself over to moralized comedy, where the sentiments were “honourable and virtuous” and the manners “instructive of youth.”4
Even if Southerne had not declared his purpose to write down to the public taste, a survey of his plays in chronological order would show his progressive attempt to adjust his methods to popular demand. When he began to compose plays in 1682, the heroic wave, whose crest had just broken with Dryden's rejection of rhymed tragedy, was still strong, and a heroic manner seemed the most logical for a young dramatist to adopt. In two years he followed The Loyal Brother with The Disappointment, a curious medley of intrigue, comedy, and sentiment, which showed him fumbling for a suitable medium and at the same time anticipating in a striking way the drama of sensibility. Then, after six years of silence, there came the rapid succession of his comedies of manners, each run from the same mold. Then a turn to tragedy and within two years The Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko, tragi-comedies similar in mood and effect. The mingling here of a serious and a humorous action was in accordance with what Southerne considered the popular demand5 and with Dryden's pronouncement in his Preface to Sebastian, King of Portugal (acted 1689): “the Genius of the English cannot bear too regular a Play … the English will not bear a thorow Tragedy; but are pleas'd, that it should be lightned with Under-Parts of Mirth.”6 Between Oroonoko in 1695 and The Fate of Capua in 1700, however, came Collier, and an increasingly strong aversion on the part of the critics to tragi-comedy. So Southerne's next two plays, The Fate of Capua (1700) and The Spartan Dame (1719), were written to fit not only the changed morality but also the taste for more regular tragedy of critics who were bending more and more to French neo-classicism. And then, in 1726, the final comedy, this time a complete capitulation to the school of sentiment. From first to last, Southerne was trying desperately to interpret the taste of the town and to reflect that taste as accurately as possible in his plays.
INFLUENCES OPERATING ON SOUTHERNE
Like any writer of importance, Southerne stands in a double relation to the history of his art. There were bearing in upon him easily recognizable forces from the drama of the past; on the other hand, the drama that followed him carried the imprint of his influence. Before we can attempt to place him historically, we must trace these threads of artistic continuity. Since Southerne's later reputation in the theatre depended upon two of his tragedies, it is natural that such a discussion should center for the most part on the two plays that gave him an important place in the history of English drama: The Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko.7
Southerne's earliest indebtedness was to the heroic drama. His first play, The Loyal Brother, is entirely within the heroic tradition, drawing its plot from a French romance, hinging its conflict on the opposing forces of love and honor, and filling the mouths of its characters with inflated speeches. The influence of Dryden appears particularly in the use of the short line and the substitution of blank verse for rhyming couplets. Sooner and more completely than might have been expected, though, Southerne rid himself of the heroic incubus. In none of his later plays does he apply the Drawcansir method. The old manner returns occasionally in a passage of elevated declamation or in scattered bursts of rhetorical bombast, but never again does it color character or situation with more than a touch of the familiar extravagance. Another and a softer temper brought him fame.
More deeply important to Southerne's art was the Elizabethan drama, the influence of which is writ large over the whole of his dramatic achievement. A note of Jacobean horror and frenzied emotion is not infrequently heard in the midst of the falling cadences of a more modern sentimentality.8 Madness brings its quota of terror. Gross comedy elbows itself to the side of tragedy in utter neglect of the unity of action. The abundance of incident and the rapidly changing scenes, with their concomitant use of the inner stage, are Elizabethan too. Even in his last tragedy, The Spartan Dame, which is avowedly “classical” in theme and treatment, the large number of characters, the bustle of action, and the use of spectacular scenes mark it as stemming from the main branch of English dramatic tradition. Southerne was never more than superficially under the rule of the new criticism; the passion and intensity of his best scenes owe nothing to French theory and everything to the vitality of a dramatic inheritance strictly British.
As might be expected, Shakespeare, of all the old dramatists, throws the largest shadow on Southerne's page. This is evident not only in the shaping of situation and the determining of character, but in frequent verbal echoes. Here Southerne shared in the general revival of interest that Shakespeare had enjoyed in the last twenty years of the seventeenth century. Before 1678 only Measure for Measure, Macbeth, and The Tempest had been altered to suit the Restoration palate; between 1678-82 ten more Shakespearian alterations reached the stage.9 Southerne made no claim, as did Rowe, to write in imitation of Shakespeare, but he is in no small sense the great dramatist's inheritor. Yet the continuation of the Elizabethan tradition, important as that might be, is not Southerne's most important contribution to Restoration drama. The search for that contribution brings us to the heart of our study.
SOUTHERNE'S PLACE IN RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY DRAMA
Southerne's place in dramatic history is linked with the emergence of sentimental drama, which has been so variously defined and whose origins have been tracked by almost every critic to a different source. A. W. Ward finds the root of sentimental drama in pity, and its first appearance in the subplot of Steele's Lying Lover (1704).10 Professor Bernbaum sees it distinguished chiefly by a certain confidence in the goodness of human nature, and takes as its starting-point Cibber's Love's Last Shift in 1696.11 With Professor Nicoll, the presentation of a moral problem first began to mark off sentimental drama from the rest, and he traces its beginnings as far back as 1680.12 Even behind this, he says, it was hinted in the comedies of Dryden, Mrs. Behn, and Crowne; later, in Ravenscroft and D'Urfey, and “by 1676 [with The Plain Dealer], the age was moving steadily in the direction of sentimentalism.”13 Further back than Dryden in Restoration drama it would be hard to go.
The early appearance of sentimental tendencies in comedy, as Professor Nicoll would be the first to admit, was decidedly ephemeral, limited to a few chance moralized phrases or the inclusion in a typical comedy of manners of a character whose sensibilities were in advance of his time. Southerne donated his portrait to such a gallery in the character of Mrs. Friendall in The Wives' Excuse—a wife consciously moral and virtuous, repelling with elevated utterances the siege against her chastity.14
But it appears to have gone unnoticed that as early as 1684 Southerne wrote a comedy in which the entire main plot expressed the moralized emotions later known to sentimental drama. In The Disappointment were anticipated the characters that Cibber and Steele were to make famous: the loyal wife whose virtue triumphs in the end; the man and maid whose love was untouched by any cynical contempt of marriage; the faithful friend; the spurned mistress who is at last married to her former lover; and the rake purged just in time for the fifth-act curtain. Pathos is stronger here than wit, human nature is found to be fundamentally good, and aroused sensibilities find issue in an emotion altogether moral. The history of sentimentalism in England cannot afford to ignore this early appearance of a play that adumbrates, perhaps more clearly than any original comedy prior to Love's Last Shift, the approach of the new drama.15
Comedy, however, was not Southerne's chief gift to the stream of sentiment. In the later history of the theatre comedy came to encroach more and more on the province of tragedy, until Sir Fretful Plagiary in Sheridan's Critic could cry out: “A Dext'rous plagiarist may do anything.—Why, sir, for aught I know, he might take out some of the best things in my tragedy, and put them into his own comedy.”16 In the course of time, theatre-goers attended a comedy in order that they might weep. In view of this it seems to me reasonable to emphasize a little more than has been done the contribution that sentimental tragedy has made to the development of the drama of sensibility.17 And here The Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko become of major significance.
Southerne's place in dramatic history depends largely upon these two plays and their influence in extending the borders of domesticated and sentimentalized tragedy. Domestic tragedy had entered English drama in Elizabethan times with The Yorkshire Tragedy, Arden of Feversham, and Heywood's English Traveller and Woman Killed With Kindness. But generally in Elizabethan drama, as later in Restoration, tragedy had been synonymous with the fall of kings or princes and had concerned itself with the affairs of state or court. The Fatal Marriage, however, is virtually a domestic tragedy. Its interest does not derive from the noble station of the protagonists; no crowns fall and no kingdoms totter. It is domestic drama on a rather high plane, to be sure; the atmosphere is not yet consciously bourgeois. But the emphasis is on the common humanity of the people concerned, and the distresses are those that might have come to any husband and wife. Isabella, Biron, and Villeroy are presented simply on the basis of the personal tragedy in which they were involved. It was still a long step to George Barnwell and the apotheosis of the London apprentice, but once the barrier of rank was removed the evolutionary process could be accelerated.
A surge of tearful pathos is at the center of Southerne's tragedy. His appeal is to the feminine emotion of pity, tragic terror standing meanwhile at a distance. One does not wonder that Southerne's staunchest supporters in the theatre were the women, for it was they who were glorified in all his tragedies. Semanthe, Isabella, Imoinda, Favonia, Celona—each was a main figure in a tragic action. Each was a plaintive sufferer under an unjust fate; each was pure and faithful to the undeservedly bitter end. In most instances, these heroines were incapable of battling with the overwhelming odds against them, and tragic conflict therefore dissolved into an orgy of pathos. It is not meretricious pathos, nor is it sentimental in the sense that the emotions are aroused only that they may be indulged; nevertheless it is a softening down of the elements necessary to tragedy if it is to evoke in its spectators anything more powerful than a passive contemplation of distress. The whole tone of these plays was one calculated to appeal to a later generation for whom the shedding of tears was the end of tragedy.
Southerne was no originator of the new tendency. Otway had preceded him in the construction of tearful situations replete with pathetic emotion. The domestic theme, the elevation of the heroine to the place of chief importance, and the appeal to compassion had been written into tragedy with The Orphan in 1680, and all that Southerne did was to strengthen an element already introduced. Inevitably, Southerne must come into comparison with his predecessor in the field of pathetic tragedy. His contemporaries had noted the likeness between the two; indeed, the greatest praise that Southerne received was to be called by Dryden another such poet as Otway. Criticism, however, has always been just in granting the supremacy to the earlier dramatist. Southerne could approximate Otway's tenderness, even at times his intensity, but the depth of passion and the inflection of great poetry that brings Otway into the borders of tragic genius were well beyond the other's lesser powers. At his best, Otway fuses intellect and emotion, while Southerne, striving for profundity, comes always short of it, and must be satisfied with the lesser reaches of pity. Yet within these limits he is second only to Otway.
The drop in poetic power from Otway to Southerne may be taken as the measure of the men. The verse of The Fatal Marriage lacks the flexibility of that in Venice Preserved. There is as much use of enjambement, but the pauses are less subtly varied and the regularity of Southerne's lines beat more monotonously on the ear. We are surprised to find that Otway uses at least four times as many feminine endings as Southerne. It would be obscuring the level adequacy of Southerne's verse, nevertheless, to ignore the aptness of its adjustment to the tragic themes which it expressed. Tragedy, subsequent to as well as prior to Southerne, meant too often bombastic diction and artificial sentiments. Southerne had the merits attendant on simplicity, and it is noteworthy that his purity of diction drew both contemporary and eighteenth-century approval. Motteux, in 1693, commended his “purity of Diction.”18 Gildon found in him a “Purity of Language, which few of our Poets observe,”19 and declared that “very few exceed him in the Dialogue … his Diction is commonly the best part of him …”20 Davies, asserting that “the passion of love is no where so tenderly or ardently expressed” as in Oroonoko,21 places him with Otway in excellence of language: “Without going into the usual method of censuring the style of our modern tragedies, I believe every man will agree with me, that the language of Otway and Southerne cannot be mended or improved:—through them nature speaks, and speaks with equal freedom and force.”22
One need make no extravagant claim for Southerne to say that he was a powerful force on the side of naturalness in the contemporary theatre and that next to Otway he was the Restoration dramatist most active in determining the course of eighteenth-century tragedy. Between the death of Otway and the appearance of Rowe23 he was the chief exponent of the moral, problem tragedy to which a sentimental age was to give the benediction of its tears. His influence, as we have seen in our discussion of The Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko, was evidenced in the shaping of certain specific eighteenth-century plays, but his chief contribution to later drama was rather in the tone of pathetic sentiment which he helped to popularize and of which he was a chief continuator.
Historically, then, Southerne stands as the strongest link between Restoration and eighteenth-century tragedy—more specifically, between Otway and Rowe. The tragedy of all three was concerned preeminently with piteous love; it was inclined to be domestic, feminine, and emotional; in it the Elizabethan influence was strong. Like Otway and Rowe, Southerne softened the tragic conflict to one of pity, and thus prepared the way not only for the later prose, bourgeois drama, but for the final triumph in comedy of the Sentimental Muse.
Notes
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p. 25. [R.G.H.]
-
See detailed discussion of this above, pp. 24-27; 29-30.
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Introduction to the Short View.
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Dedication.
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Dedication to The Fatal Marriage.
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To the “unities” of time and place, as well as of action, Southerne gave short shrift. In the Prologue to The Fatal Marriage he scorns those who affect them:
There are some others too who offer battle,
And with their time and place, maul Aristotle.
Ask what they mean, and, after some grimace,
They tell you, twelve's the time; and for the place,
The chocolate-house, at the looking-glass.
To please such judges, some have tir'd their brains,
And almost had their labour for their pains. -
Southerne's comedies owe little to the influence of any one dramatist. Their characters and situations may often, as we have seen, be paralleled in both earlier and later Restoration plays, but for the most part they belong to the artificial conception of comedy that was part of the times. Of those who wrote before him, Southerne reflects faintly in his witty dialogue the grace of Etherege. Nowhere does he approach the bitter cynicism of Wycherley. One feels that he is not so much critical of his characters as appreciative of their humorous idiosyncrasies.
-
See, for instance, the exaggerated scene of Sunamire's throwing herself, as she thinks, on the body of Tachmas (Loyal Brother, V, 3), and the torture of Pedro on the rack (Fat. Marr., V, 4). Southerne does not, however, make as undisciplined a use of horror as Lee, for example, in Caesar Borgia (1679).
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Cf. Thorndike's Tragedy, Boston, 1908. p. 264. G. C. Odell names eight alterations between 1678-82. See Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 2 vols., New York, 1920. I, ch. 2.
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History of English Dramatic Literature, London, 1899. III, 495.
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Drama of Sensibility, Boston, 1915. p. 76.
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A History of Restoration Drama, Cambridge, 1923. pp. 227 and 252.
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Ibid., p. 227.
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Another virtuous wife appears, almost anachronistically, in the comic sub-plot of The Fatal Marriage. Julia is true to the jealous Fernando despite the efforts of Carlos to make her otherwise. Here, however, the situations are given no sentimental coloring.
-
Mrs. Behn's alteration as The Town Fop, in 1676, of George Wilkin's Elizabethan play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, though hardly a comedy, is of a clear sentimental appeal. Cf. Bernbaum: Drama of Sensibility, p. 50.
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I, 1.
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Professor Nettleton has already touched on this: “Perhaps the real origin of sentimental comedy should be sought not simply in the moralized comedy of Cibber but in the somewhat sentimentalized tragedy of Otway and Southerne.” English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, New York, 1914. p. 155.
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Gentleman's Journal, January 1692/3, p. 28.
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Gildon's Langbaine's Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets (1699), p. 136.
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A Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702), p. 30.
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Dram. Miscellanies (1785), III, 449.
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Ibid., III, 237.
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Southerne was almost as superior to Rowe in poetic power and dramatic energy as he was inferior to Otway. Rowe was still softer and more lachrymose than Southerne and even less cogent than he. His verse is smoother and at the same time more relaxed. And pathos in The Fair Penitent (1703) and Jane Shore (1714) assumes a still larger proportion; the moralizing tendency, too, is there pushed to further extremes.
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