The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThomas Otway

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThomas OtwayThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Thomas OtwayAuthor: Thomas OtwayEditor: Roden NoelRelease date: August 17, 2014 [eBook #46605]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Richard Tonsing, David Starner and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisbook was produced from scanned images of public domainmaterial from the Google Print project.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS OTWAY ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Thomas OtwayAuthor: Thomas OtwayEditor: Roden NoelRelease date: August 17, 2014 [eBook #46605]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Richard Tonsing, David Starner and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisbook was produced from scanned images of public domainmaterial from the Google Print project.)

Title: Thomas Otway

Author: Thomas OtwayEditor: Roden Noel

Author: Thomas Otway

Editor: Roden Noel

Release date: August 17, 2014 [eBook #46605]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Richard Tonsing, David Starner and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisbook was produced from scanned images of public domainmaterial from the Google Print project.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS OTWAY ***

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE MERMAID SERIES.

Edited by Havelock Ellis.

The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists.

Thomas Otway.

In Half-Crown Monthly Volumes uniform with the present Work.

THE MERMAID SERIES.

The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists.

The following Volumes are in preparation:—

BEN JONSON (3 vols.). Edited byBrinsley NicholsonandH. C. Herford.PATIENT GRISSILAND OTHER PLAYS. Edited byErnestRhys, etc.THE PARSON'S WEDDINGAND OTHER PLAYS. Edited byW. C. WardandA. W. Verity.DRYDEN (2 vols.). Edited byR. Garnett.CHAPMAN (2 vols.). Edited byBrinsley NicholsonandW. G. Stone.SHADWELL. Edited byGeorge Saintsbury.ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM, and other Plays attributed toShakespeare. Edited byArthur Symons.VANBRUGH. Edited byW. C. Ward.FARQUHAR. Edited byA. C. Ewald.THE SPANISH TRAGEDYAND OTHER PLAYS. Edited byW. H. Dircks, etc.LEE. Edited byEdmund GosseandA. W. Verity.ETHEREGEANDLACY. Edited byArthur SymonsandW. C. Ward.

BEN JONSON (3 vols.). Edited byBrinsley NicholsonandH. C. Herford.

PATIENT GRISSILAND OTHER PLAYS. Edited byErnestRhys, etc.

THE PARSON'S WEDDINGAND OTHER PLAYS. Edited byW. C. WardandA. W. Verity.

DRYDEN (2 vols.). Edited byR. Garnett.

CHAPMAN (2 vols.). Edited byBrinsley NicholsonandW. G. Stone.

SHADWELL. Edited byGeorge Saintsbury.

ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM, and other Plays attributed toShakespeare. Edited byArthur Symons.

VANBRUGH. Edited byW. C. Ward.

FARQUHAR. Edited byA. C. Ewald.

THE SPANISH TRAGEDYAND OTHER PLAYS. Edited byW. H. Dircks, etc.

LEE. Edited byEdmund GosseandA. W. Verity.

ETHEREGEANDLACY. Edited byArthur SymonsandW. C. Ward.

THOMAS OTWAY.From a Picture by Riley.

THOMAS OTWAY.

From a Picture by Riley.

The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists.THOMAS OTWAYWITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES,BYThe Hon. Roden Noel."I lie and dream of your full Mermaid wine."—Beaumont.UNEXPURGATED EDITION.LONDON:VIZETELLY & CO., 16, HENRIETTA STREET,COVENT GARDEN.1888.

THOMAS OTWAY

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES,

The Hon. Roden Noel.

"I lie and dream of your full Mermaid wine."—Beaumont.

UNEXPURGATED EDITION.

LONDON:

VIZETELLY & CO., 16, HENRIETTA STREET,

COVENT GARDEN.

1888.

"What things have we seenDone at the Mermaid! heard words that have beenSo nimble, and so full of subtle flame,As if that every one from whence they cameHad meant to put his whole wit in a jest,And had resolved to live a fool the restOf his dull life."

Master Francis Beaumont to Ben Jonson.

"Souls of Poets dead and gone,What Elysium have ye known,Happy field or mossy cavern,Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?"

Keats.

Itis now a commonplace of criticism that the epoch of Charles II. was an epoch of decline and degradation for the British drama. The complacent self-felicitations of Dryden in his early days on the superior refinement of his own age, and the consequent superiority of his own plays to those of Elizabeth and James, dispose us to insist upon the contrary view with somewhat emphatic asperity. Yet later, Dryden did ample justice to "the giant race before the flood"—the pre-rebellion poets, by himself so named—expressly repudiating French influence moreover. Indeed, the great wave of dramatic energy had culminated, and was subsiding. The age so extolled by Dryden was, in many respects, unfavourable to dramatic poetry. The Puritan, with his grave, earnest tone, righteous indignation against evil living, and crude, sour, uncultivated other-worldliness, had dehumanizedthe people, frowning upon art, beauty, and secular knowledge, till they withered and dwindled, as under a blight; so that religious reverence became identified with blind intolerance, virtue and high principle with clownish ignorance and pharisaic cant.

Then, after the Restoration—(partly through that tendency to reaction from extremes which characterizes human nature, partly through the direction given to our stage by a dissolute and light king, who had lived an exile at a court where he and his courtiers, besides acquiring foreign tastes, might well learn disuse, and forget the habit of patriotism)—not only a wide-spread sexual license, but a very general social and political corruption prevailed in England. The troublous period of the civil wars, moreover, besides leaving little leisure for the graces of life and courtship of the Muses, had engendered a certain ferocity and violence of tone in political and social relations; the war thunders and commotions still growled and grumbled, heaved and seethed in the sullen subsiding swell of bitter and furious faction—religious fanaticism on the one hand, incredulity and moral indifference on the other. Our very patriotism was tainted with venality. And though some splendid naval victories adorned the reign, though a few names, for ever illustrious in our annals, shine like stars from among dark and turbulent clouds, it was a time when our buffoon king bartered the libertiesof his country for gold of a foreign prince, invoking alien aid against his own subjects; when the Dutch admiral sailed by silent and dismantled forts up our chief river and burned our ships; when Clarendon, the historian, the Tory statesman of high reputation, grovelling at the Council board before the divine right of Stuarts, proclaimed eagerly his longing to embrace dishonour, and sacrifice his own daughter at the shrine of that terrible idol; when the shrewd and subtle Liberal statesman, Shaftesbury, emulating Machiavelli, deserved the scathing invective inflicted by Dryden upon Achitophel. Shall we compare such a middle age of declining manhood, though not shorn indeed of all glory, with that of Elizabeth in the generous splendour and faulty exuberance of adventurous youth? The purple glow of health and morning had well-nigh faded from this dim world.

Still we must not exaggerate the loss. Power and passion were yet with us. The spell and memory of great traditions, historical and literary, were yet upon us. I do think that our most recent writers have been unjust to the Restoration drama. The brightest glories of that period indeed are unquestionably of Puritan growth, the fruit of Humanism and Renascence grafted upon the sturdy stock of pious Puritan principle, Milton'sParadise, andComus, arrayed in magnificent language, sumptuous like cloth of gold; austereSamson, our only great native recreation (no mereclever imitation) of an old-world tragedy, because the work of a genius, devout as Æschylus, alive, moreover, with the personal experience of an illustrious personality; and Bunyan's wonderful vision, clad in a lovely homespun of purest English, solace of devout souls for all time, delight of young and old, wise and simple, rich and poor—healing aromatic balsam these from the still Puritan garden. Yet without this pale too, in the confused common world, in the sphere of rich and gracious secular poetry, there are two names at least that we cannot afford to forget—the names of Dryden and Otway. Two great human tragedies,DonSebastian, andAll for Love, besides one fine, though inferior tragi-comedy,The Spanish Friar, and the rhymed heroic plays, abounding in true poetry and skilful characterisation, has Dryden written; while Otway, who lived so miserably and died so young, produced three dramas of high calibre, one of which,Venice Preserved, is surpassed in the modern world only by Shakespeare. If those were the days of Lauderdale and Jefferies, they were capable also of nourishing the religious life of Leighton, Fox and Penn; the philosophy of Cudworth and Henry More, of Hobbes, Locke, Boyle and Newton; the narrative of Defoe; the satire of Butler; the history, and memoirs of Clarendon, Burnet, Fuller and Evelyn; finally, the excellent poetry of Andrew Marvell—leaving aside that thinner, weaker, more popular vein of Waller and Cowley; while even though Herrickwas gone, Rochester and Sedley could write a song. After all, the flood of national life still flowed strong, albeit turbid and troubled, still bursting through old worn barriers, irresistibly seeking, and with whatever delays securing health and freedom for all. Even the pulse of high Tories must have glowed when they remembered the European position of England under the Commonwealth; while Dryden was born a Puritan, though he died a Catholic, and had written an ode to Cromwell.

It is alleged, however, that the French drama had at this time (Scott says through the French taste of Charles II.) a baneful influence upon our own. But I cannot assent to this position. I believe rather that its influence was salutary, seeing that our drama never lost its own pronounced national character. On Dryden's earlier manner indeed, the fashionable French (or old Latin) declamation, casuistical debates about passion, and academic coldness may have been somewhat injurious. But this is a note rather of Dryden's idiosyncrasy than that of a school, like his neatly-turned, sense-isolating couplets—mannerisms shaken off by Dryden himself in his later plays.[1]Who can beless French than Lee? Otway also is perfectly free from these faults; nor, except in his earliest play,Alcibiades, is there any of Dryden's rant and bombast. His fable, indeed, is classical in its simplicity and skilful development; his concentration on some one motive of action, involving the utmost intensity of feeling, is unsurpassed; his movement fierce and rapid; and that without sacrificing underplot, or the grotesque element characteristic of the romantic drama, as written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nor can I grant that such concentration and unity of interest, derived from classical examples, was otherwise than a reform much needed in our romantic tragedy—seeing it entailed no languor or frigidity borrowed from Seneca, or the courtly decorum of a French academy. On the extravagant Gothicfougueand fury of our native stage, characterised by its bad artistic form, and tumid, fantastic diction, classical influence of the right kind was purely salutary—granting, of course, the presence of original genius, lacking, for instance, in Addison'sCato—although I fully admit with Schlegel that in the most perfect Shakespearean examples of romantic drama the virtues of ancientand modern poetry are combined. Mr. J. A. Symonds is unquestionably justified in his strictures on Marlowe's learned predecessors, Norton, Hughes, Sackville and Daniel as "pseudo-classical" inGorboduc, and elsewhere. But then they followed the bad example of Seneca and his Italian imitators. Dryden and Otway returned to more legitimate classical methods.

Otway reminds us of the best Greek tragedies by the intense furnace-breath of his passion, and its headlong rush into the abyss of Fate, though his poetry may be more volcanic and perturbed. Modern romantic love is the Englishman's theme, while in the religious atmosphere, and stately ideal repose of Greek tragedy his work is entirely wanting. But is not irreligion a distinctive note of romantic Christian drama, even as religion is that of the Greek? True it is that Christianity has opened to us the Infinite, and made us dissatisfied with the visible world; true also that the ideal of individual character has been heightened and purified in the advance of civilisation under Christian auspices, and that this feeling after the Infinite, this dissatisfaction with life, this heightened ideal of manhood, together with a deeper and wider comprehension of humanity, may be found in the drama of Shakespeare. Yet what ofreligionis there inHamlet, inLear, inOthello? "The rest is silence"—that is the final word. What reconciliation, or attempt at vindication, of the ways ofGod to man? Perhaps the most religious of old English plays is theFaustusof Marlowe, who is reported to have been an atheist! For we can hardly count the mediæval Miracles and Moralities. But in Racine and Calderon, on the other hand, you find again the religious atmosphere. However, Dekker, Heywood and Jonson are moralised in the best (and that no merely copy-book) sense, and Shakespeare sometimes, as inMacbeth. The Greeks took a familiar, majestic, semi-mythological history, in which Divine interference had ever been recognised, and the French tragedian took kindred themes. But in Otway's drama, while he adopted the classical unity of motive and harmony of artistic treatment, for moral order there is a dissonant clash, a confused shriek, a wail of pain. In Shakespeare, there are many noble axioms about living, many wise and religious meditations; but none here. Shakespeare is a broad beneficent river, life-giving, though lost in a boundless, bottomless deep; Otway is a turbid winter torrent, with the sob and moan of anguished, stifled human love in it, whirling us to a catastrophe without hope. Strange thatthisshould be the outcome of Christian, and that of Pagan poetry! The truth is that the modern dramatic poets had largely shaken off their Christianity, just as Euripides had shaken off his Paganism.

At the same time, the best modern drama does make us feel the moral influence, for good or evil, of experience upon character, and the inevitableissues in experience of character reacting upon circumstance. Otway (in his more limited sphere) does this, I think, as well as Shakespeare. Both leave us with a warmer affection for goodness. Carlos and the queen are noble and generous in their unmerited suffering, and Philip suffers for his fault.

Otway is classical in that he discovers a few principal groups of vividly portrayed figures, while the rest are very dim and subordinate. But he is romantic in that his personages are domestic, only dignified by their emotion. Dryden's flow is broader and statelier, but not so irresistibly compelling. In Otway and Lee, again, the lyrical fountain is very dry; sadly to seek is it in Otway, for in him there is no relief, no pause from the war and clamour of passion. He has abundant tenderness indeed, far more than Dryden; but then that tenderness is always shown stretched on the rack of disappointment, or suffering. In such high-strung tragedy of classical form, we much need the chorus of Greek poetry, or the sweet lyrical ripple of Elizabethan song. Racine's exquisite instinct for noble style fills effectually the intervals between extreme crises. The comic scenes in Otway, therefore, though unfortunately gross and repulsive, are absolutely needed for relaxation of the tense strain. For he makes the impression of being almost all supreme crisis and desperate situation, like terrific peaks where the earth-cloud hangsin gloom, only soothed by the low warble of water among mosses, or casual song of little bird, only broken by flashes of livid lightning—and all the rest barren steep; whereas in Shakespeare the awful snow-summits are girdled and invested with leafy forest, undulating lawn, lovely lake.

In Otway development of character, moreover, is little found; indeed, if "the unities" be observed as much as possible, that is not easy to compass; yet for knowledge of character in its labyrinthine recesses, and unexpected, though intelligible developments under the moulding pressure of circumstance, or commerce with other natures, as for nervous and appropriate poetic diction, Dryden'sDon Sebastianis one of our most remarkable tragedies. The scene between Dorax and Sebastian is unsurpassed in Shakespeare. It presents a credible, though marvellous transformation of a proud, injured, embittered man to love and loyalty. Every word tells, every word is right. Here in one wonderful epitome we have conversion in the line of vital growth. It is no mere incredible and arbitrary dislocation of character, as of some puppet manipulated by a conjurer, which so often arouses our surprise in the pre-rebellion drama—for instance, in Massinger'sDuke of Milan, and (dare I add?) in theRichard III.of Shakespeare.All for Love, again, is a splendid picture of the absorbing and enervating power of one great sensual passion;while the interview between Ventidius and Antony rivals that between Dorax and Sebastian.

Lee is an inferior Otway, but a man of true dramatic genius, with flashes of real poetry. HisRival Queensis one of our excellent tragedies. Southerne has produced at least one genuinely affecting act in his well-constructed drama,TheFatal Marriage, akin to Otway, though distinctly inferior. Crowne too was a poet, as is evident fromThyestes, in spite of repulsiveness and rant.Thyestesseems to me finer than theŒdipusof Dryden and Lee, which indeed appears to have been written to show how much worse a play than that of Sophocles could be written on the same tremendous theme. But theFair PenitentandMourning Bride, tragedies by Rowe and Congreve, are surely merely creditable academic exercises, destitute of fire and inspiration. In a lighter vein, Otway could only write some bustling, occasionally funny, dirty, rollicking farces. To call themcomedieswould be to insult the shades of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Congreve, and Sheridan.

On the whole, then, while there is less inexhaustible prodigality, and force of unfettered genius in the Restoration than in the Elizabethan drama, we have still left dramatic energy of high enduring quality, which became, however, nearly extinct in the reigns immediately succeeding. Under Charles, what was good in the romantic movement was still retained; the shifting,many-coloured sheen of vigorous life is yet there, the sun-and-shadow chequer of grave and gay; but classic exemplars have moderated, and moulded the work to finer, more regular form. There is less of exceptional extravagance in the story, less of inconceivable and sudden metamorphosis or distortion in the characters, the unpleasant and bewildering effect in earlier plays being almost as when an acrobat proceeds to walk with long, lithe, serpentine body round his own head; less also of the over-elaborated, misplaced, unveracious ingenuity of so-called poetic diction. One may generously attribute all this to the extravagance of national and literary youth, but the drama of Spain and Italy ought possibly to bear some of the responsibility. At any rate, these are grave defects.

I will illustrate what I mean. It is surely with a shudder of incredulous aversion that we find an apparently kind and cordial king, in Fletcher'sMaid's Tragedy, insisting upon a pure-hearted, generous, young courtier, Amintor, who adored him with superstitious reverence, breaking off his engagement to Aspatia, a noble maiden, and marrying the king's mistress, Evadne, in order the better to conceal, and carry on with more security his own guilty intrigue with her, and father his own bastards upon this loyal friend. Our incredulous aversion is, if possible, intensified when Amintor assents to his own dishonour, because it is the king who has compassed it. Notall the poetry put into the mouth of "lost Aspatia," nor all the knowledge of human nature displayed by the poet in the seeming inconsistency of this evil woman's mongrel repentance at the bidding of her brother, and conversion from cruel looseness to equally cruel respectability, and base desire to vindicate her own damaged reputation even by the treacherous murder of her royal lover, can condone for this initial, radical vice of unnatural motive. No lovely tropes and phrases, nor harmonies of verbal measure may condone this. It is with equally incredulous aversion that we find Massinger'sDuke of Milanbidding his creature Francisco kill the Duchess, who is devoted to him, and to whom he is devoted, should she happen to survive him—which, as Hazlitt says, seems a start of frenzy rather than a dictate of passion—then veering idiotically from love to murderous hatred upon the mere assertion of this same creature, Francisco, that his long proved and virtuous wife has solicited him, Francisco, dishonourably, he in fact having solicited her unsuccessfully. With some difficulty we accept the mercurial and hotheaded gullibility of Othello, played upon by so cunning a devil as Iago; but we revolt from so poor and pinchbeck a copy as this.

The early drama, in its poetic beauty of individual passages, and frequent verisimilitude in the working out of given motives, now and again reminds me of the character attributed to madmen, that they are persons who reasonlogically, but on absurd or mistaken premises. And surely Hazlitt, not Lamb, is right about that celebrated scene in Ford'sBroken Heart, where Calantha dances on, apparently indifferent, while messengers come successively to tell her of misfortune upon misfortune, death upon death; then, when the revel is over, dies suddenly from pent-up emotion. "This appears to me to be tragedy in masquerade, the true false gallop of sentiment; anything more artificial or mechanical I cannot conceive." That a woman should thus silence the voice of humanity, not from necessity, or for some great purpose, but out of regard to mere outward decorum of behaviour, for the mere effect andéclatof the thing, is not fortitude but affectation. It often seems as if the Elizabethan and Caroline poets wrote their plays for the sake of working up to some striking and effective situation, and as if it were of little consequence to them how difficult or impossible the way that led thither might be, so long as they could hew their path there. Even the splendid scenes in Cyril Tourneur'sRevenger's Tragedy, where the brothers assume a disguise in order to tempt their sister to unchastity, and procure their mother's consent to it, then threaten to kill their mother for consenting, appear to be open to the same objection.[2]

But I wish to emphasize the fact that the drama of Otway, whatever its shortcomings, is, in this respect of sobriety and truth to nature, superior on the whole to that of his illustrious forerunners. And surely a good deal of cant is now uttered about the academic insipidity and coldness of Corneille and Racine, who influenced our later drama, and who powerfully moved the men of their own day. What can be nobler thanAthalie,Britannicus, orThe Cid? Academic coldness is hardly the phrase that rises to one's lips when one is watching Sarah Bernhardt inPhèdre; while no comedy is superior to Molière's. If these men moved in golden fetters, they were strong enough to wear them as ornaments, rather than sink under them as impediments. Under the kid glove you feel the iron thews.

None of this incredulous aversion of which I spoke do we feel in reading Otway'sVenicePreserved. Dryden averred that he could not move the feelings as could Otway, who, while inferior in reflection, poetic expression, and versification, was a greater master of pathos and passion. On the latter acts ofVenice Preservedwe are hurried breathlessly, as by the impetus of a mighty wave, shaken to the very depths—yet not, I think, unendurably, as by the hideous and gratuitous cruelty of Ferdinand exercised upon a little-offending sister in Webster'sDuchess ofMalfi, where horror upon horror is accumulated upon her head, to thrill and harrow us; and sopowerful is the poet that only those can experience the pleasure which art should extract from pain, who enjoy the sight of an execution, or sniff gladly in a torture-chamber the fumes of spilt blood. We begin to breathe freely only when the monster, having filled up the measure of his unnatural malice, utters the fine line that first shows a faint relenting toward humanity:

Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young.

The Elizabethans were superior to their successors in isolated passages, and for the most part incomparably so in their lyrics. Therefore, they are well represented in the "Dramatic specimens" of Charles Lamb. Otway could not be so represented; his excellence lies in the noble organic harmony and sanity of his whole creation, as in its emotional intensity, from which little can be detached that shall be admirable out of its own vital relation. I do not say that Dryden and Otway never attempt to enlist interest illegitimately in their tragedies by relying upon strained situations, and abnormal traits of character; but I believe they do so less than their predecessors. And I hardly think Mr. Symonds' excuse for the Elizabethans a valid one, when he urges that the men and women of that time were really as inconsistent as the playwrights represent them. I do not know that we have any historical instance of just that queer kind of inconsistency which we find in their pages, thoughI admit that not only history, but our own experience also, furnishes very strange examples of self-contradiction. Yet one can only say that the examples of it in the older drama are not, for the most part, rendered credible and probable to us. And, so far, therefore, this is not a drama which can be always and universally interesting, except in the supreme examples. In the same way Otway's and Wycherley's indecencies would hardly (one supposes) interest a Victorian audience. The intellectual, or ethical, atmosphere must not be too unfamiliar and alien.

We are not incredulous when Jaffier, the weak, affectionate, impulsive hero ofVenice Preserved, maddened by the persecution of his adored bride, Belvidera, on the part of her implacable father, who is also a senator, suddenly, and without counting the cost, from motives of revenge and hope of better fortune, consents to take part in a conspiracy against the State, persuaded by his dearest friend, Pierre, a man of sterner and more homogeneous fibre. Nor are we incredulous when, realising with his tender heart what hideous consequences are likely to ensue in the disturbance of domestic peace, and the slaughter of so many innocent people, he allows himself, however reluctantly, to be over-persuaded by Belvidera, who comprehends that the murder of her father, with all the other senators, is intended; or when, thus over-persuaded, he renounces his purpose, and betrays his fellow-conspirators,including even his well-beloved friend, to the Doge and Senate. We are not incredulous when we see Jaffier, on his way to the Senate, walking as in a dream under spell of his adored Belvidera's more powerful will, and hear him say in some of the most beautiful lines the poet wrote:

Come, lead me forward now, like a tame lamb,To sacrifice: thus in his fatal garlandsDecked fine, and pleased the wanton skips and plays,Trots by the enticing flattering priestess' side,And much transported with his little pride,Forgets his dear companions of the plain;Till by her bound he's on the altar lain;Yet then he hardly bleats, such pleasure's in the pain.

The catastrophe we feel inevitably to follow from the given elements in their fusion and entanglement, the cruel injustice of the father, the weak and foolish impulsiveness of the hero, together with his ardent affection both to bride and friend, and the co-existent corruption in the State, which made that sinister intrigue against the Republic possible.

I cannot agree with Dr. Garnett that the interest of Otway's plays arises from the situation only, not from the characters. It appears to me that the humanity of the characters is strongly realised, and that we are made to sympathise with them profoundly. As to Addison's remark that the characters are mostly wicked, I hardly know what to say. The heroines are ideally good, and the others are neither better norworse than average men and women. If Shakespeare has given us types—though these are also individuals—of ambition, jealousy, revengeful avarice, unpractical genius, showing us the natural issues and eventuations of these, Otway has given us one type, equally individual, of weak, but absorbing, and passionate affection, showing us the natural issues of this. As Johnson says, he "consulted nature in his own breast."

Having then revealed the intended treason, after extorting an oath from the Senate to spare the lives of his coadjutors, Jaffier is confronted with Pierre and the rest. Then follows a tremendous scene, in which Jaffier almost abjectly implores Pierre for pardon, and the latter spurns him as one proved unworthy the friendship of an honest man, finally striking and hurling Jaffier from him. The words he uses to his former friend are worse even than the blow; their venom can never cease to rankle. The blunt, open and magnanimous, though reckless and desperate character of Pierre is finely contrasted with that of Jaffier, luxuriously feminine in its sensibility. Jaffier urges that he has at least saved Pierre's life, to which his old friend makes the terrible reply:

I scorn it more because preserved by thee.

When Belvidera was delivered by Jaffier, in pledge of his own good faith, into the hands of the conspirators, he gave them a dagger, charging them to despatch her, should he prove traitor,The Senate, false to their oath, condemned the rebels to death with torture; indeed the latter had refused to accept their lives with bondage at the hands of the Republic. Belvidera tells Jaffier this, and then he feels tempted to slay with that dagger her who has incited him to compass the ruin of his beloved friend. This is another tremendous scene. Prevented by the returning and overwhelming tide of love from executing his purpose, Jaffier bids her go to her father, and from him as senator beg the life of Pierre. She does so, and the old man, relenting at the sight of his yet beloved child kneeling in agony before him, grants her prayer. This part also is very beautiful. But his attempt to save Pierre comes too late. In their final most moving interview Jaffier tells Belvidera that he will not survive his friend. He commends his beloved to Heaven, calling down every blessing upon her. But when she understands that they are to part for ever she exclaims:

Oh! call backYour cruel blessing; stay with me and curse me!* * * Leave thy dagger with me.Bequeath me something—Not one kiss at parting? * * *Another, sure another,For that poor little one you've taken care of;I'll give it him truly.

Then her mind gives way, and in the fearful soliloquy that follows, Otway reminds us of the power shown by Shakespeare in dealing with minds unhinged. Jaffier being allowed to takeleave of Pierre on the scaffold, Pierre forgives him, but requests, as a last favour, that his friend will save him from the dishonour of public torture by killing him at the last moment. Jaffier promises, and does so, stabbing himself immediately after. In the last scene, Belvidera enters distracted:

Come, come, come, come, nay come to bed,Pr'ythee my love! The winds! Hark how they whistle,And the rain beats; oh! how the weather shrinks me!You're angry now; who cares? * * *[Jaffier'sghost rises.Are you returned? See, father, here he's come again!Am I to blame to love him? Oh, the dear one![Ghost sinks.Why do you fly me? Are you angry still then?Father, where art thou? Father, why do you do thus?Stand off. Don't hide him from me. He's here somewhere.

The apparitions of Jaffier and Pierre rise again bleeding. When they sink, she vows passionately that she will dig for them till she find them; and, imagining that they are drawing her downward, she dies.

Though nearly all authorities have objected vehemently to the gross quasi-comic scenes with which Otway has lightened the intense gloom of his tragedy, I am not sure that the illustrious French critic, Taine, is not right in his approval of them. However ghastly, they give some relief. Though coarse and disgusting, they do stand out distinctly in the memory. The conspirators met at the house of one Aquilina, a Greek courtesan, who had private motives for favouring their cause. The old senator, Antonio (intended for acaricature of the debauched Shaftesbury), had robbed Pierre of this mistress, which was one of his main incentives to plotting against the State. Taine's comment on the picture is striking: "Comme l'homme est prompt à s'avilir, quand, échappé de son rôle, il revient à lui-même!" He thinks that Otway alone in that epoch reproduced the tragedy of Shakespeare: "Il ne lui manque que de naître cent ans plus tôt." Perhaps; only his form might then have suffered.

And now as to Otway's diction. There is nothing convulsive about it; in him, to borrow a simile from Lowell, "every word does not seem to be underlined, like those of a school girl's letter." In the eyes of those to whom expression is good in proportion as it foregoes its function of expressing, in favour of a bedizenment, as of some window so prettily daubed that it lets in no light, the diction of Dryden, Otway, Goldsmith, Byron may appear poor. Otway speaks the language of nature and passion. Still, I admit that Otway's diction often does want distinction, and his metre rhythmical quality. He has not always the right word ready. But his language has certainly the merit of doing more justice to his subject than that of his euphuistic predecessors. Take, for instance, an example from that portion of the fine play, entitledThe Two Noble Kinsmen, on good grounds attributed to Shakespeare. A queen, the body of whose slain lord remains unburied byorder of a cruel king, implores redress from one able to grant it in these terms:

Oh, my petition wasSet down in ice, which by hot grief uncandiedMelts into drops * * * he that will fishFor my least minnow, let him lead his lineTo catch one at my heart.

Another queen, making a similar request, assures Theseus that they are—

Rinsing our holy begging in our eyesTo make petition clear.

Can these ladies, whose sorrow must have been much mitigated by their successful invention of such "precious" hyperboles, stand in need of much commiseration from us? Otway's expression at its best is simple, germane to the situation, vigorous, pregnant with the speaker's emotion, and therefore well calculated to impregnate us with it.

In the swift impetuous parts of a play such a diction is certainly best. Only Heywood, so far as I know, among the older dramatists, is equally pure. But I admit that where the action pauses, where it demands reflective soliloquy, Otway and Lee are inferior to their great predecessors. InVenice Preserved, andThe Orphan, the pace is so tremendous, however, that we have hardly leisure to perceive their poverty in that respect. But there are occasions, inDon Carlosespecially, where we do feel this inferiority, although the play is one of Otway's finest. Thus, at the beginning of thefifth act, when the king soliloquises on his misery in having lost the love of his bride, there was scope and verge for poetry of reflection, which Beaumont and Fletcher would have given, as well as Shakespeare. Dryden also would have given it, though perhaps of a somewhat coarser grain. This passage in Otway is poor, unworthy the occasion. His versification, moreover, though very good sometimes, is inferior on the whole to that of Dryden. Yet there are some passages of true reflective poetry in Otway, though certainly few and far between. In Southerne they are almost entirely wanting.

InDon Carloswe note the same want of political and historic sense which we had also to note inVenice Preserved, especially when we compare both plays with the narratives of Saint-Réal, from which they are taken, and which have high merit; or when we compare Otway's with Schiller'sDon Carlos, and even with Alfieri's tragedy,Filippo, though the extraordinary concentration of the latter admits of little historic detail. Still Alfieri's Philip is as life-like and graphic a study of individuality as that of Saint-Réal, or Schiller; whereas the Philip of Otway makes no pretence to being other than a mere conventional stage-tyrant, violent, and ever in extremes; yet is he a man capable of much tenderness also; for he actually loves the Queen and his son, feelings of which the real Philip was incapable. Philip's jealousy in real life, as in the other two plays,only arises from a fierce sensual greed of personal possession, and from wounded pride. In Otway the king repents, although too late, and becomes reconciled to his wife and son, when he discovers that his jealousy has made him a blind tool in the hands of the enemies of Carlos and the Queen, and that they have not sinned in act. But the real Philip could not have repented. He did not believe them guilty in act. Otway's range is limited, his types are few. He could not draw a cold deliberate villain. As for his politics, they are simply those of an ordinary country clergyman's son. But he died very young, with little experience. The Philip of Schiller and Alfieri is a cold, cruel, ambitious bigot, only capable of simulating natural affection. But in each of the three tragedies the Queen and Don Carlos are powerfully presented. The German play has all the Elizabethan lack of unity. Schiller's own intense and catholic sympathy with human progress and popular aspirations dominates throughout; and while unity of motive—for instance, in the important place given to Posa, friend of Carlos, a magnificent humane ideal—is somewhat lacking, there is more human verisimilitude in his play than in that of Otway, because men and women are usually swayed by complex and manifold impulses. The political part taken by the Queen and Prince in favour of the Flemish rebels had indeed a great deal to do with the King's anger against them. The splendid interviewof Posa with the tyrant, and also the Grand Inquisitor's are quite beyond Otway. Philip had wickedly married Elisabeth, who was originally betrothed to his son Carlos, and the conflict of conjugal duty with love is admirably rendered in all the tragedies, although the passion and pathos are perhaps warmest in Otway. This is the sole motive in the English and Italian plays. In Schiller there is a whole era, "the very form and pressure" of a time.

We get as little philosophy or theology, as political and historic sympathy from Otway. In this respect he is inferior not only to Shakespeare, but to Dryden, who is able to afford more food for the intellect, if less for the heart. The terse and nervous expression of ripe and mellow life-wisdom in Dryden'sSpanish Friar, for instance, is very remarkable. The greater poets indeed are usually men of great general intellectual power. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Goethe, Dante, Milton, Byron, Coleridge, Browning, occur at once to memory. Otway is perhaps exceptional in this respect. Possibly the free-thinking sentiments so fiercely hurled in the teeth of the priest by Pierre on the scaffold afford a clue to Otway's own attitude toward religion. InTheOrphanwe find the same ardour of friendship and attachment between the sexes, the same raging despair and revolted denial, when those fierceaffections are disappointed—no faith. Castalio's last words are—

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