Thomas Otway

Title: Thomas Otway

Author: Thomas Otway

Editor: Roden Noel

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

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46605

Credits: Produced by Richard Tonsing, David Starner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.)

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 by Brinsley Nicholson and H. C. Herford.

PATIENT GRISSIL AND OTHER PLAYS. Edited by Ernest Rhys, etc.

THE PARSON'S WEDDING AND OTHER PLAYS. Edited by W. C. Ward and A. W. Verity.

DRYDEN (2 vols.). Edited by R. Garnett.

CHAPMAN (2 vols.). Edited by Brinsley Nicholson and W. G. Stone.

SHADWELL. Edited by George Saintsbury.

ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM, and other Plays attributed to Shakespeare. Edited by Arthur Symons.

VANBRUGH. Edited by W. C. Ward.

FARQUHAR. Edited by A. C. Ewald.

THE SPANISH TRAGEDY AND OTHER PLAYS. Edited by W. H. Dircks, etc.

LEE. Edited by Edmund Gosse and A. W. Verity.

ETHEREGE AND LACY. Edited by Arthur Symons and W. C. Ward.

[Pg i] [Pg ii]

THOMAS OTWAY.

From a Picture by Riley.

[Pg iii]

The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists.

THOMAS OTWAY

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES,

BY

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.

[Pg iv]

Master Francis Beaumont to Ben Jonson.

Keats.

[Pg v]

CONTENTS.

[Pg vi] [Pg vii]

THOMAS OTWAY.

It is 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 dehumanized[Pg viii] the 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 liberties[Pg ix] of 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's Paradise, and Comus, arrayed in magnificent language, sumptuous like cloth of gold; austere Samson, our only great native recreation (no mere[Pg x] clever 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, Don Sebastian, and All 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 Herrick[Pg xi] was 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 be [Pg xii]less 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 Gothic fougue and 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's Cato—although I fully admit with Schlegel that in the most perfect Shakespearean examples of romantic drama the virtues of ancient [Pg xiii]and 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" in Gorboduc, 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 of religion is there in Hamlet, in Lear, in Othello? "The rest is silence"—that is the final word. What reconciliation, or attempt at vindication, of the ways of[Pg xiv]

God to man? Perhaps the most religious of old English plays is the Faustus of 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 in Macbeth. 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 that this should 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 inevitable[Pg xv] issues 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 hangs[Pg xvi] in 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's Don Sebastian is 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's Duke of Milan, and (dare I add?) in the Richard III. of Shakespeare. All for Love, again, is a splendid picture of the absorbing and

enervating power of one great sensual passion;[Pg xvii] 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. His Rival Queens is one of our excellent tragedies. Southerne has produced at least one genuinely affecting act in his well-constructed drama, The Fatal Marriage, akin to Otway, though distinctly inferior. Crowne too was a poet, as is evident from Thyestes, in spite of repulsiveness and rant. Thyestes seems to me finer than the Œdipus of 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 the Fair Penitent and Mourning 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 them comedies would 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, [Pg xviii]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's Maid'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. Not[Pg xix] all 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's Duke of Milan bidding 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.