Complete Works of Thomas Otway

by Thomas Otway

  It seems likely that he was in hope of being busy and conspicuous: for he went to London, and commenced player: but found himself unable to gain any reputation on the stage1.

  This kind of inability he shared with Shakspeare and Jonson, as he shared likewise some of their excellences. It seems reasonable to expect that a great dramatick poet should without difficulty become a great actor; that he who can feel, could express: that he who can excite passion, should exhibit with great readiness its external modes: but since experience has fully proved that of those powers, whatever be their affinity, one may be possessed in a great degree by him who has very little of the other; it must be allowed that they depend upon different faculties, or on different use of the same faculty; that the actor must have a pliancy of mien, a flexibility of countenance, and a variety of tones, which the poet may be easily supposed to want; or that the attention of the poet and the player have been differently employed: the one has been considering thought, and the other action; one has watched the heart, and the other contemplated the face.

  Though he could not gain much notice as a player, he felt in himself such powers as might qualify for a dramatick author; and, in 1675, his twenty-fifth year, produced Alcibiades, a tragedy; whether from the Alcibiade of Palapran, I have not means to enquire. Langbain, the great detector of plagiarism, is silent.

  In 1677 he published Titus and Berenice, translated from Rapin, with the Cheats of Scapin, from Molière; and in 1678 Friendship in Fashion, a comedy, which, whatever might be its first reception, was, upon its revival at Drury-lane in 1749, hissed off the stage for immorality and obscenity.

  Want of morals, or of decency, did not in those days exclude any man from the company of the wealthy and the gay, if he brought with him any powers of entertainment: and Otway is said to have been at this time a favourite companion of the dissolute wits. But as he who desires no virtue in his companion has no virtue in himself, those whom Otway frequented had no purpose of doing more for him than to pay his reckoning. They desired only to drink and laugh; their fondness was without benevolence, and their familiarity without friendship. Men of wit, says one of Otway’s biographers, received at that time no favour from the Great but to share their riots; from which they were dismissed again to their own narrow circumstances. Thus they languished in poverty without the support of imminence.

  Some exception, however, must be made. The Earl of Plymouth, one of King Charles’s natural sons, procured for him a cornet’s commission in some troops then sent into Flanders. But Otway did not prosper in his military character; for he soon left his commission behind him, whatever was the reason, and came back to London in extreme indigence; which Rochester mentions with merciless insolence in the Session of the Poets:

  Tom Otway came next, Tom Shadwell’s dear zany,

  And swears for heroicks he writes best of any;

  Don Carlos his pockets so amply had fill’d,

  That his mange was quite cured, and his lice were all kill’d.

  But Apollo had seen his face on the stage, ⁠

  And prudently did not think fit to engage

  The scum of a play-house, for the prop of an age.

  Don Carlos, from which he is represented as having received so much benefit, was played in 1675. It appears, by the lampoon, to have had great success, and is said to have been played thirty nights together. This however it is reasonable to doubt, as so long a continuance of one play upon the stage is a very wide deviation from the practice of that time; when the ardour for theatrical entertainments was not yet diffused through the whole people, and the audience, consisting nearly of the same persons, could be drawn together only by variety.

  The Orphan was exhibited in 1680. This is one of the few plays that keep possession of the stage, and has pleased for almost a century, through all the vicissitudes of dramatick fashion. Of this play nothing new can easily be said. It is a domestick tragedy drawn from middle life. Its whole power is upon the affections; for it is not written with much comprehension of thought, or elegance of expression. But if the heart is interested, many other beauties may be wanting, yet not be missed. The same year produced the History and Fall of Caius Marius; much of which is borrowed from the Romeo and Juliet of Shakspeare.

  In 16832 was published the first, and next year3 the second, parts of The Soldier’s Fortune, two comedies now forgotten: and in 16854 his last and greatest dramatick work, Venice Preserved, a tragedy, which still continues to be one of the favourites of the publick, notwithstanding the want of morality in the original design, and the despicable scenes of vile comedy with which he has diversified his tragick action. By comparing this with his Orphan, it will appear that his images were by time become stronger, and his language more energetick. The striking passages are in every mouth; and the publick seems to judge rightly of the faults and excellences of this play, that it is the work of a man not attentive to decency, nor zealous for virtue; but of one who conceived forcibly, and drew originally, by consulting nature in his own breast.

  Together with those plays he wrote the poems which are in the present collection, and translated from the French the History of the Triumvirate.

  All this was performed before he was thirty-four years old; for he died April 14, 1685, in a manner which I am unwilling to mention. Having been compelled by his necessities to contract debts, and hunted, as is supposed, by the terriers of the law, he retired to a publick house on Tower hill, where he is said to have died of want; or, as it is related by one of his biographers, by swallowing, after a long fast, a piece of bread which charity had supplied. He went out, as is reported, almost naked in the rage of hunger, and, finding a gentle man in a neighbouring coffee-house, asked him for a shilling. The gentleman gave him a guinea; and Otway going away bought a roll, and was choaked with the first mouthful. All this, I hope, is not true; and there is this ground of better hope, that Pope, who lived near enough to be well informed, relates in Spence’s Memorials, that he died of a fever caught by violent pursuit of a thief that had robbed one of his friends. But that indigence, and its concomitants, sorrow and despondency, pressed hard upon him, has never been denied, whatever immediate cause might bring him to the grave.

  Of the poems which the present collection admits, the longest is the Poet’s Complaint of his Muse, part of which I do not understand; and in that which is less obscure I find little to commend. The language is often gross, and the numbers are harsh. Otway had not much cultivated versification, nor much replenished his mind with general knowledge. His principal power was in moving the passions, to which Dryden5 in his latter years left an illustrious testimony. He appears by some of his verses to have been a zealous royalist, and had what was in those times the common reward of loyalty; he lived and died neglected.

  ENDNOTES.

  1 In Roscius Anglicanus, by Downes the prompter, p. 34, we learn, that it was the character of the King in Mrs. Behn’s Forced Marriage, or the Jealous Bridegroom, which Mr. Otway attempted to perform and failed in. This event appears to have happened in the year 1672. ⁠R

  2 1681.

  3 1684.

  4 1682.

  5 In his preface to Fresnoy’s Art of Painting.⁠Dr. J.

  Thomas Otway by Roden Noel

  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, uncu
ltivated other-worldliness, had dehumanized 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 ado
pted 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 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 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.