Thomas Southerne

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SOURCE: Root, Robert L., Jr. “Conclusion.” In Thomas Southerne, pp. 118-28. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

[In the following excerpt, Root argues that Southerne is an important dramatist deserving of greater scholarly attention.]

References to Thomas Southerne in his lifetime are plentiful but usually brief. The picture that emerges from what amount to little more than footnotes to other men's lives is that of a well-fed, jovial companion and guest. Except for some back-biting by such a figure as William Broome, the references are always affectionate, cheerful, good-natured. He is teased about his deafness, asked after by corresponding friends, and applauded for his graciousness and generosity. In all this welter of reference, there is surprisingly little mention of his work, either positively or negatively. It is as if the man's personality and social grace had completely effaced the accomplishment of his literary career. And, indeed, the references to him in the close of his life as “the poet's Nestor” or ‘’great Otway's peer and greater Dryden's friend” seem to suggest that it was as much longevity as talent, as much nostalgia for the era in which he wrote as the plays he created, that elicits respect and regard.

We can judge from such evidence that Southerne was one of those men whose character is so evenhanded and unassuming that he seldom inspires either great enmity or great admiration. And, in fact, Southerne is attacked personally in the period only over the question of his political loyalties. Even then, the attacks are mild and factional and create no significant controversy.1

In the same way, the references to Southerne's work, while often laudatory, strangely lack the depth and breadth of attention given to that of his contemporaries and friends, such as Dryden, Otway, Congreve, and Vanbrugh. The opposition to the “blasphemy” and “obscenity” of the stage, while pummeling Congreve and Vanbrugh, two men much akin to Southerne in their work, seldom gives him more than a passing slap. And while his tragedies are sometimes mentioned in the same breath with those of Shakespeare, Otway, and Lee, critical attention, even by such a friend as John Dennis and a contemporary as Charles Gildon, is never focused on his work. Nonetheless the passing references have in some ways determined the nature of critical responses to his work right up to this century. Now, as Southerne edges his way into the select circle of Restoration authors for whom there is continuous critical attention, we need to reevaluate carefully his accomplishments and what they mean in terms of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater.

I. THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THOMAS SOUTHERNE

Surveying Southerne's career, Dodds charged that “politically and professionally he was an opportunist.”2 In his view, “by 1695 Southerne had written five plays, all stamped with the formula of lubricous wit. It was the fashion”;3 however, he continues, Collier's attack on the theater led to reform on the stage and in Southerne's writing, as shown by the exemplary Money the Mistress. He further argues that “a survey of his plays in chronological order would show his progressive attempt to adjust his methods to popular demand.”4 There are, however, a number of reservations we might have about this judgment.

First of all, the matter of Southerne's financial success in the theater seems to trouble certain critics—one biographer sneered that he “was not beneath the Drudgery of Sollicitation … which, perhaps, Dryden thought was much beneath the Dignity of a Poet.”5 But surely popular success carries no certain onus with it—witness Shakespeare and Dickens. Second, the theatrical and cultural context of Southerne's work needs to be considered before we dismiss his changes of genre and mode as commercial self-serving—again we have the range of Shakespeare's work before us; indeed, most of the chief seventeenth-century dramatists produced plays of considerable variety. The failure or inability to adapt to changing times or to avoid stale repetition has often signaled the end of literary careers. But the most important reason to distrust Dodds's assessment is simply that a survey of Southerne's plays in chronological order shows a certain unity of theme and design in his works and a fairly consistent and conscientious world view being expressed.

At the heart of his earliest play, The Loyal Brother, Southerne is interested in the analysis of character in reaction to a crisis chiefly envisioned as domestic. Although such as examination of conflicting motives has its roots in the origins of heroic drama generally, especially the love-and-honor plays of the reign of Charles I, Southerne's focus is closer to the pathetic tragedy of Dryden (in All For Love), Otway, Banks, and Lee. We see this in his attempts to render the complicated motives of most of his characters, but primarily in the analyses of themselves and their situations by Tachmas, Seliman, and Semanthe.

It becomes clearer in The Disappointment, where the attention of the play is freed from the encumbrance of the political allegory and the state plot, and where Southerne establishes a second hallmark for his plays, the panorama of motivation. Here the main crisis is similar to that of The Loyal Brother, the threat to a good woman's virtue; but Southerne has heightened it by domesticating it, focusing on a distressed wife and her obsessively jealous husband, and broadening the context to include a set of characters who provide a range of responses to questions of sexual intrigue. Southerne's lack of sympathy with the libertine world view is pretty clearly expressed here, and that attitude will remain consistent throughout his work. Finally, The Disappointment demonstrates Southerne's seriousness of intention by its verbal echoes of several of Shakespeare's plays, revealing not only his indebtedness but the degree to which he saw himself working in a tradition of high moral and artistic design.

In effect, Southerne, particularly in The Disappointment, is working independently of stage tradition even at the moment he seems so overwhelmed by a potpourri of influences and conventions. While he relies on conventions to express certain kinds of characters or situations, his response is usually unconventional—he sees tragic intensity in conventions usually reserved for comedy, particularly in the later comedies. The effect of his use of conventions is to subvert them and, thus, to subvert the social tradition or ethic which they represent.

If we place The Spartan Dame in its proper chronology we do not see a development expressly from The Disappointment except that here Southerne is able to free himself from his reliance upon earlier models; the play does, however, offer clear equivalences to Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus. There is also greater control of the tendency, derived from Restoration tragedy, to develop powerful moments at the expense of overall design. The play's greater unity tightens the relationship between public and private plots and the analysis of motive and the development of character is far less bombastic and overt than in his earlier plays. Yet, partly perhaps because the play was virtually commissioned rather than inspired by the playwright himself, the play is not nearly as dynamic and forceful as the earlier two.

With Sir Anthony Love Southerne tries the fourth kind of drama in four plays, comedy, and succeeds remarkably well. Yet in some ways this is experimental work of the order of the earliest plays, not completely coherent, sometimes labored and self-conscious, but generally successful as a potent and consistent work. We see here, in the adaptation of an Aphra Behn story, Southerne's ability to transform material to fit a unified structure and to see as well the levels of interrelationships revolving around a central theme or character—here Sir Anthony/Lucia—which is the kind of unity found in his best plays. Although in many ways it is a very successful play, it lacks the power its design portends—one feels that what was meant to be ironic and subversive too often seems either overstated or ambiguous—and ultimately dissipates its vision in overextended banter.

Particularly in The Disappointment and Sir Anthony Love Southerne has fashioned extremely interesting and provocative near-successes, and all the first four plays demonstrate clearly derivative but nonetheless distinctive talents. But Sir Anthony Love, perhaps because of its success, is tantamount to a final rite of passage before emergence into acknowledged artistry. The four plays which follow, each in its own way, display the unique properties of Southerne's talent in highly effective and memorable ways.

The Wives Excuse offers a singular vision of the free-gallantry ethic in contemporary society. Its focus is wholly domestic and contemporary, centered upon a distressed heroine, Mrs. Friendall, whose situation is recounted with compassion but without maudlin sentimentality. Its revelation of a continuum of male predators and female victims includes several striking portraits of complicated and uniquely motivated characters to whom the audience must often have conflicting responses. It raises the comic conventions to near-tragic intensity and tends to subvert them thoroughly. In addition to several telling dialogues and soliloquies, Southerne includes the innovations of attention chiefly to a married couple, an opening scene in which secondary, low characters delineate the primary characters, and the presence of an author-surrogate who discusses the departure from convention in the play itself. Overall it is a masterful work, poignant and powerful, superbly designed and executed.

The Maids Last Prayer is equally powerful but its impact is the reverse of The Wives Excuse. It too focuses on marriage, offering a range of responses; it too argues against self-serving and hypocrisy in sexual relationships; but its range of characters is darkly satiric, savaging the conventions of libertine comedy rather than subtly undercutting them. Its brutal force derives chiefly from a series of self-portraits in soliloquy by the central characters which pinpoint their locations on a chart of a social wilderness.

Artistically these two comedies are Southerne's triumphs: The Wives Excuse rivals the best of Congreve's plays, and The Maid's Last Prayer, the angriest of Wycherley's. Both stand apart from the double tradition of hard and humane comedy (in Hume's terms), and strike a middle position indicative of the best plays of the period to follow. They were succeeded by Southerne's greatest commercial triumphs, both of which carry on the principles of composition and structure developed in the comedies.

The Fatal Marriage, by its focus on a distressed heroine, its range of characterizations, and its parallel plotting, is linked to both The Disappointment and The Wives Excuse. As he had darkened the prospects for his heroine in Mrs. Friendall's plight, Southerne carried the beleaguered Isabella to ultimate destruction, protesting the ways of the world regarding marriage and women's freedom. The play is solid and unified, even with the balance of comic and tragic plots, and its analysis of character thorough and disturbing.

Oroonoko is similarly constructed, but its vision is even darker and more distressing, since it aligns an essentially heroic tragedy with intrigue comedy, the slavery of men with slavery of women. On one level, then, the play is part of a consistent vision—not merely the theatrical interest in the distress of a female but a philosophical and social concern over the exploitation of women. On another level, Oroonoko himself is another of Southerne's portraits of a man struggling to make sense out of his circumstances, as Tachmas does in a tentative way in The Loyal Brother or as Alphonso does in The Disappointment. Again we have the range of responses to conditions, here the issue of slavery. The unity of the play allows a powerful reaction to the condition and fate of its protagonists. In this play, as in its predecessors, Southerne has learned to push on into tragedy, using tragic conventions, to win an audience to a tacit acceptance of his thesis, rather than violate convention and lose his audience. There is still subversion in the underplot of Oroonoko but its very ability to sustain itself as a comic action is what caused its abandonment years later.

As we have seen, the two tragedies held the stage for a long time, some demonstration of Southerne's success in their construction, and the chief characters, Isabella and Oroonoko, became household words. In The Fate of Capua we see Southerne's most successful political play, on the theme of loyalty, which owes its artistic success, though commercially it failed, to the complete integration of political and private plots. The play is far more universal in design than The Loyal Brother or The Spartan Dame, far less limited to its political circumstances, and its impact less controversial because not clearly of current significance. Nonetheless it shows a falling off of power, a reworking of familiar themes—the distressed wife and unjust husband, the range of male reactions to a woman's condition—which here never reach the intensity of the earlier tragedies. It is as if Southerne had lost the spontaneous power of his earlier plays in seeking after the unity of tone and mood he achieved in his last tragedy. Still, it is a readable and well-wrought play, and its analysis of complex motives in the political characters is telling and significant.

It hardly seems fair to hold Southerne to account for Money the Mistress after twenty-six years of absence from dramatic writing. While it is an interesting play, it is too pat—a condition not simply of the time in which it was written, but of the tendency in Southerne to unity which here simply becomes too mechanical. The heat and force of the four chief plays are missing, and an exemplum told with a certain amount of smugness is offered in their place.

What then is the accomplishment of Thomas Southerne in these plays? When we strip away the apprentice work and the final plays, we are left with a core of drama rivaling, although not always equaling, the best of its period. Southerne changes the emphasis in comedy to the married couple, provides stunning psychological portraits of the social types of his time, writes two of the most compelling comedies of the era, helps develop the pathetic tragedy and advance the emphasis on domestic concerns, and establishes four tightly unified plays exploring, from a variety of perspectives, the central issue of Restoration comedy: the problems of marriage.

II. THE INFLUENCE OF THOMAS SOUTHERNE

Thomas Southerne's personal accomplishment was significant—the growing range of critical acclaim attests to that. It is more difficult to gauge his accomplishment in terms of its impact on the theater. Surely there was continual acknowledgment in his own time that his place ought to be high. Buckinghamshire pictured in “The Election of a Poet Laureat” (1719):

Apollo, now driven to a cursed quandry,
Was wishing for Swift, or the fain'd Lady Mary:
Nay, had honest Tom Southerne but been within call—.(6)

In “A New Session of the Poets, Occasion'd by the Death of Mr. John Dryden,” Kenrick wrote to Congreve, “You write correct, but Southerne writes as well,” and then wrote:

Next Southern to the Judge himself apply'd,
With haughty Oroonoko by his Side;
The Ladies pity, and the Author's Pride.
Southerne, who still shew'd Nature on the Stage,
Not whines his Tender, nor too rough his Rage.
Apollo told him he deserv'd the Bays,
Had he been contented to write three Plays.—
But since he knew not when he Glory won,
'Twas just, that Capua's Fate should be his own.(7)

These views of Southerne take his talent as a matter of course and the judgment of Kenrick is close to that held throughout the tenure of the two tragedies upon the stage. Hazlitt wrote in 1814 that he had “wept outright” during Sarah Siddons's performances as Isabella, and “this we take to have been a higher employment of the critical faculties than doubling down the book in dog-ears to make out a regular list of critical common-places.” Elsewhere he wrote of the eighteenth century that no play in it could “be read with any degree of interest or even patience, by a modern reader of poetry, if we except the productions of Southern, Lillo, and Moore, the authors of The Gamester, Oroonoko, and Fatal Curiosity, and who instead of mounting on classic stilts and making rhetorical flourishes, went out of the established road to seek for truth and nature and effect in the commonest life and lowest situations.”8

The feeling for Southerne's place among his contemporaries, as “great Otway's peer,” was largely founded on his ability to wring the passions, as Otway had done, and to use language that seemed right for the situation and the theatrical audience. Such a view was held throughout the eighteenth century; Colman wrote that “it must however be lamented that the Modern Tragick Stile, free, indeed, from the mad Flights of Dryden, and his Contemporaries, yet departs equally from Nature. … Southerne was the last of our Dramatick Writers, who was, in any Degree, possesst of that magnificent Plainness, which is the genuine Dress of Nature.”9 Francis Gentleman wrote that “Southerne, as a tragic writer, made very powerful attacks upon the tender passions, and is remarkably free in his versification.”10 In A Comparison between the Two Stages, during an interchange concerning Oroonoko, Southerne's language is praised:

R(AMBLE).
I have a particular regard for Mr. Southern's Stile and agreeable Manner; there's a Spirit of Conversation in every thing he writes.
S(ULLEN).
I think very few exceed him in the Dialogue; his Gallantry is natural, and after the real manner of the Town; his acquaintance with the best Company entered him into the secrets of their Intrigues, and no Man knew better the Way and Disposition of Mankind. But yet I must say, his Diction is commonly the best part of him, especially in Comedy; but in Tragedy he has once in this, and in one other, Drawn the Passions very well.(11)

We should recall that Dryden himself had written of Congreve:

In him all Beauties of this Age we see;
Etherege his Courtship, Southern's Purity;
The Satire, Wit, and Strength of Manly Witcherly.

As Kaufman points out, Dryden here “is recommending Southerne's language; its clarity, its exactness of word choice, its freedom from antiquated or new-coined words.”12 But Kaufman himself complains that the characters are not differentiated enough by their language because of this purity.

The emphasis on Southerne's language, however, seems to have been not its purity, but its reality and its grace. In part this is why Southerne's diction does not fare well with Kaufman or with Bonamy Dobree, who complained that the rhythm of Southerne's verse “is hardly to be distinguished from that of prose.”13 But this is the very reason who so much of his work is powerful, because it approximates the rhythms of real speech. Of course this reaches its greatest effectiveness in prose, particularly in the comic work. If one compares Wishwell in The Maid's Last Prayer with Lady Wishfort in Congreve's The Way of The World, one sees how important Southerne's dialogue is for the development of Congreve's. In tragedy it is not the mixture of thought with feeling—Dobree complains that Southerne is one of those who thinks “that poetry can be made out of the emotions alone” and thus “his verse is like an embroidered garment covering a flimsy frame.”14 But it is the emphasis on feeling, the experience of passion by suffering individuals rather than the flights of bombast so prevalent in heroic drama, which strains after poetic effect, or the philosophizing of tragic poets which produces the frigid verse of Addison's Cato, that sustains the popularity of Southerne's creations on the stage. No critic or commentator refers to the intellectual content of Southerne's plays, only their emotional power.

This emotional power has long been recognized as a significant factor in the shaping of eighteenth-century drama, not only in tragedy, but in comedy as well. Nettleton wrote that Southerne's “most successful achievement was in the tragedies, which, at the close of the seventeenth century, help to bridge the gap between the Restoration and the Augustan Age. With some of Otway's dramatic pathos, though without his genius, Southerne points the way, perhaps, toward the sentimental drama of the eighteenth century. The school which Richard Steele is usually held to have founded seemed foreshadowed, however unconsciously, in the almost feminine appeal of Otway and Southerne to the sentiment of pity.”15 Nicoll concurs. “The fact that Southerne was one of the few dramatists whose work extends over the border of the two centuries and the fact that he mingled in such an artistic way the various elements heroic, Shakespearean, and pathetic make him one of the most interesting figures of the tragedy of the time. He stands with Rowe as one of the chief influences on the development of the later theatre.”16 Such a view lies behind Dodd's insistence that “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 … and thus prepared the way for the final triumph in comedy of the Sentimental Muse.”17

There can be little doubt about the connection among Otway, Southerne, and Rowe. We have seen the closeness between The Orphan and The Fatal Marriage and the echoes of The Wives Excuse in The Fair Penitent; the distressed heroine is equally a feature of the plays of Otway, Banks, Southerne, and Rowe. Hazlitt's linking of Southerne, Moore, and Lillo is suggestive of this same point. Yet we should also note that very little specifically refers back to Southerne. The direct links to Southerne are usually weak efforts: George Powell's Fatal Discovery (1698) imitates the elements of domesticity and parallel tragic and comic plots to a rather tasteless degree;18 a much later imitation of The Fatal Marriage, Osburne Sidney Wandesford's Fatal Love, or, The Degenerate Brother (1730) adds a good deal more bloody melodrama to a rather close rendering of Southerne's play, including a moral addressed to overstern parents. William Walker's Victorious Love (1698) is a rehash of the heroic elements of Oroonoko. None of these is successful commercially or artistically; nor are the plays most often acknowledged as indebted to Southerne's aid, Norton's Pausanias, Dennis's Liberty Asserted, Fenton's Mariamne, Hughes's The Siege of Damascus, and Madden's Themistocles. Southerne's direct influence in tragedy does not necessarily produce plays like his own and his indirect influence does not produce good ones. Thus in tragedy, at least, the influence of Southerne is primarily general and diffuse, although the early and continuous identification of him with Otway must surely suggest a continuing spirit that he provided the age.

In comedy, however, we are on somewhat firmer ground. Southerne assisted in the preparation of The Old Bachelor, Congreve's initial success, and in Cibber's Love's Last Shift. Moreover, as Harold Love has pointed out, the embodiment of comic ideals in the work of Congreve by Dryden first passed through the unsuccessful work of Southerne, particularly as evidenced by Dryden's epistle to The Wives Excuse and the commendatory verses to The Double Dealer.19 Scouten suggests that “his work had little effect on the direction taken by the drama in the 1690's except for his noteworthy innovation of choosing a married couple to be the leading characters in a comedy, a striking deviation from the customary formula.”20 But it may be that just as the plight of Isabella and her domestic circumstances have an effect on the drama which follows, the adaptation by other playwrights of the married couple often subsumes into it some part of the unique vision Southerne used them to display, particularly in Crowne's The Married Beau, Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife, and even Congreve's The Double Dealer and The Way of The World. These are not plays which simply use the married couple; they are plays which, as none but Southerne's before and only Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem until Ibsen, investigate the social and psychological significance of marriage in the current age. Thus we can agree with Scouten's judgment that “his acute psychological perception and his coldly realistic analyses of social and marital relationships make him one of the most artistic dramatists of the seventeenth century,” but we should go on to see that his influence underlies the complex and profound insights of the best comedies of the decade. In another sense as well, his emphasis on the married couple, even when adapted by those who, like Cibber, do not share his view of marriage, leads to a proliferation of such emphases, until the Restoration conventions upon which they are founded are used up and discarded.

In sum, whether for his own accomplishments as an artist, a dramatist, a surveyor of the human condition, or for his position in a pivotal moment on the history of English drama, Thomas Southerne deserves our attention. No really complete understanding of Restoration drama, particularly in the 1690s, can be complete without reading his work, and it can only be hoped that he will soon receive his due.

Notes

  1. The fullest discussion is in Clifford Leech, “The Political Disloyalty of Thomas Southerne,” Modern Language Review 28(1933): 421-30.

  2. John Wendell Dodds, Thomas Southerne, Dramatist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933), p. 205.

  3. Ibid., p. 207.

  4. Ibid., p. 208.

  5. Baker, [David Erskine et al. Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse (1812; reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1966)] I, 681.

  6. John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, in Minor English Poets 1660-1780, compiled by David P. French (New York: B. Blom, 1967), II, 654.

  7. The Grove, or, A Collection of Original Poems, Translations, etc. (London: A. Baldwin, 1721), pp. 129, 140-41.

  8. Hazlitt, [Willaim. The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1933)] V, 199; VI, 359.

  9. “Critical Reflections on the Old English Writers,” in The Dramatick Works of Philip Massinger, ed. Thomas Coxeter (London: T. Davies, 1761), I, 20.

  10. The Dramatic Censor, or, Critical Companion (London: J. Bell, 1770), II, 470.

  11. A Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702), p. 19.

  12. Kaufman, Anthony. “This Hard Condition of a Woman's Fate: Southerne's The Wives' Excuse,Modern Language Quarterly 34 (1973), p. 37.

  13. Bonamy Dobree, Restoration Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), p. 63.

  14. Ibid., p. 64.

  15. George Henry Nettleton, English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1642-1780) (1932; reprinted New York: Cooper Square Pub., 1968), p. 119.

  16. Nicoll, [Allardyce. A History of English Drama 1600-1900. 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959,] p. 155.

  17. Dodds, p. 217.

  18. The play sets a cuckolding intrigue against a plot involving double incest which is as “innocent” as Isabella's adultery.

  19. Love, Harold. “Dryden, Durfey, and the Standard of Comedy.” SEL 13 (1973): 422-36.

  20. Scouten, A. H. “Plays and Playwrights.” The Revels History of Drama in English. Vol. 5: 1660-1750. By John Loftis, Richard Southern, Marion Jones, and A. H. Scouten. (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 214.

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