by Thomas Otway
Thomson the poet ranked the parts of Monimia and Belvidera with those of Hamlet and Othello, and many of the greatest actresses owed to these rôles the leading triumphs in their careers. As Belvidera, Mrs. Barry was succeeded in turn by Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Seymour, Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Siddons, and Miss O’Neill; while Garrick and J. P. Kemble played both Pierre and Jaffier with notable success. Mills, Quin, and Mossop were also popular exponents of Pierre’s part, and Macready filled it for many years. As Monimia, Mrs. Oldfield, Mrs. Porter, and Mrs. Cibber all excelled. Miss O’Neill was the last eminent actress to essay the part. Garrick often played Chamont, Monimia’s brother. ‘The Orphan’ and ‘Venice Preserved’ both remained stock pieces until the present century. Twenty revivals of ‘Venice Preserved’ are noticed by Genest, the latest at Drury Lane on 6 April 1829, with Young as Pierre and Miss Phillips as Belvidera. Sixteen performances of ‘The Orphan’ are described by Genest between 1707 and 1815, on 2 Dec. of which year it was played at Covent Garden, with Charles Kemble as Chamont and Miss O’Neill as Monimia. Many modifications were introduced into the text of both pieces. J. P. Kemble printed an acting version of ‘Venice Preserved,’ from which the scenes with Antonio were omitted; this was thrice published, in 1795, 1811, and 1814 respectively. A performance of ‘Venice Preserved,’ by the boys of Otway’s old school (Winchester), took place in 1755, when a prologue was written by Robert Lowth , afterwards Bishop of London.
The earliest collected edition of Otway’s plays appeared in 1713, in two volumes; an edition in three volumes is dated 1757; a fuller edition, with some account of Otway’s life and writings, was issued in 1768 (3 vols.); a fourth edition was dated 1812 (2 vols.) The best is that edited by W. T. Thornton in 1813 (3 vols.) ‘Don Carlos,’ ‘The Orphan,’ ‘The Soldier’s Fortune,’ and ‘Venice Preserved’ were reprinted in the ‘Mermaid Series’ (1891), edited by Roden Noel. Otway’s chief plays figure in all the collections of the English drama, and his poems may be found in ‘Works of the most celebrated Minor Poets,’ 1750, vol. iii., and in the collections of Dr. Johnson (1779), of Dr. Anderson (1793, vol. vi.), T. Park (1806, vol. i.), and Alexander Chalmers (1810, vol. viii.)
[Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, ed. Cunningham, i. 211 sq.; Langbaine’s English Dramatick Poets, 1691, (with Oldys’s manuscript notes in Brit. Mus. copy, c. 28 g. 1, and Haslewood’s notes in Brit. Mus. copy of 1699 edit. c. 45, d. 16); Wood’s Athenæ Oxon. iv. 168; Mr. Gosse’s Seventeenth-Century Studies; Davies’s Dramatic Miscellanies, iii. 176–253; Genest’s Hist. Account of the Stage, passim; Alexandre Beljame’s Le Public des Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au Dix-huitième Siècle, 1660–1744, Paris, 1881; Ward’s Hist. of English Drama; Joseph Cradock’s Works, iv. 381 (poem on Otway); information kindly supplied by the Very Rev. the Dean of Winchester, formerly rector of Woolbeding, and by Mr. C. W. Holgate of The Palace, Salisbury.]
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Series Contents
Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
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Joseph Conrad
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Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Robert Louis Stevenson
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The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
Virginia Woolf
Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray
Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas (English)
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
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Series Three
Ambrose Bierce
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Charles Lever
Émile Zola
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George Gissing
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Mary Shelley
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Series Four
Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
Miguel de Cervantes
M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey
Series Five
Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris
Series Six
Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
&nbs
p; Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson
Series Seven
Adam Smith
Benjamin Disraeli
Confucius
David Hume
E. M. Delafield
E. Phillips Oppenheim
Edmund Burke
Ernest Hemingway
Frances Trollope
Galileo Galilei
Guy Boothby
Hans Christian Andersen
Ian Fleming
Immanuel Kant
Karl Marx
Kenneth Grahame
Lytton Strachey
Mary Wollstonecraft
Michel de Montaigne
René Descartes
Richard Marsh
Sax Rohmer
Sir Richard Burton
Talbot Mundy
Thomas Babington Macaulay
W. W. Jacobs
Series Eight
Anna Katharine Green
Arthur Schopenhauer
The Brothers Grimm
C. S. Lewis
Charles and Mary Lamb
Elizabeth von Arnim
Ernest Bramah
Francis Bacon
Gilbert and Sullivan
Grant Allen
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Hugh Walpole
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
John Locke
John Muir
Joseph Addison
Lafcadio Hearn
Lord Dunsany
Marie Corelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Ouida
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Sigmund Freud
Theodore Dreiser
Walter Pater
W. Somerset Maugham
Series Nine
Aldous Huxley
August Strindberg
Booth Tarkington
C. S. Forester
Erasmus
Eugene Sue
Fergus Hume
George Moore
Gertrude Stein
Giovanni Boccaccio
Izaak Walton
J. M. Synge
Johanna Spyri
John Galt
Maurice Leblanc
Max Brand
Molière
Norse Sagas
R. D. Blackmore
R. S. Surtees
Sir Thomas More
Stephen Leacock
The Harvard Classics
Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Paine
William James
Series Ten
A. E. W. Mason
Abraham Lincoln
Baruch Spinoza
Carolyn Wells
Charles Brockden Brown
Earl Derr Biggers
Evelyn Waugh
F. Marion Crawford
Fred M. White
Frederick Douglass
Gaston Leroux
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
George Berkeley
Howard Pyle
John Kendrick Bangs
John Steinbeck
John Stuart Mill
J. S. Fletcher
Martin Luther
Sherwood Anderson
Thomas Dekker
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Jefferson
Willa Cather
William Faulkner
William Le Queux
Series Eleven
A. Merritt
Blaise Pascal
Charles W. Chesnutt
Dashiell Hammett
Dinah Craik
Elizabeth Inchbald
François Rabelais
George Griffith
George du Maurier
Hamlin Garland
Hugh Lofting
Joel Chandler Harris
John Calvin
M. P. Shiel
Matthew Lewis
Nevil Shute
Olaf Stapledon
P. G. Wodehouse
Philip Massinger
Raymond Chandler
Romain Rolland
Sabine Baring-Gould
Sarah Orne Jewett
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Browne
William Wycherley
Ancient Classics
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Delphi Poets Series
Adam Mickiewicz
A. E. Housman
Alexander Pope
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Algernon Charles Swinburne
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Beowulf
Charlotte Smith
Christina Rossetti
Confederation Poets
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Delphi Poetry Anthology
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