"
_Master Francis Beaumont to Ben Jonson.
_Master Francis Beaumont to Ben Jonson.
Thomas Otway
_ Hah!
_Pierre. _ Speak! is't fitting?
_Jaf. _ Fitting!
_Pierre. _ I'd have thee undertake
Something that's noble, to preserve my memory
From the disgrace that's ready to attaint it.
_Capt. _ The day grows late, sir.
_Pierre. _ I'll make haste. Oh, Jaffier!
Though thou'st betrayed me, do me some way justice.
_Jaf. _ What's to be done?
_Pierre. _ This and no more. _[Whispers Jaffier. _
_Jaf. _ Hah! is't then so?
_Pierre. _ Most certainly.
_Jaf. _ I'll do't.
_Pierre. _ Remember.
_Capt. _ Sir--
_Pierre. _ Come, now I'm ready.
_[Captain Crossing to him]_
You should be a gentleman of honour;
Keep off the rabble, that I may have room
To entertain my fate, and die with decency.
You'll think on't? _[To Jaffier. _
_Jaf. _ 'Twont grow stale before to-morrow.
_[Pierre and Jaffier ascend the Scaffold--Executioner
binds Pierre. _
_Pierre. _ Now, Jaffier! now I'm going! Now--
_Jaf. _ Have at thee,
Thou honest heart, then! --here-- _[Stabs him. _
And this is well, too. _[Stabs himself. _
_Pierre. _ Now, now--thou hast indeed been faithful!
This was done nobly! --We've deceived the senate.
_Jaf. _ Bravely!
_Pierre. _ Ha! ha! ha! --oh! oh!
_[Falls down on the Scaffold and dies_
_Jaf. _ Now, ye cursed rulers,
Thus of the blood ye've shed, I make libation,
And sprinkle it mingling. May it rest upon you.
And all your race! Oh, poor Belvidera!
Sir, I've a wife; bear this in safety to her,
A token that, with my dying breath, I blessed her.
And the dear little infant left behind me.
I'm sick--I'm quiet. _[Dies. --The Scene shuts upon them. _
_Scene V. --An apartment in Priuli s House. _
_Enter Priuli, R. ; Belvidera, distracted; and two of her
Women. _
_Priuli. _ (L. C. ) Strengthen her heart with patience,
pitying Heav'n!
_Bel. _ (C. ) Come, 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!
I say you shall not go, indeed you shall not:
Whip your ill-nature; get you gone, then; Oh!
Are you returned? See, father, here he's come again!
Am I to blame to love him? Oh, thou dear one!
Why do you fly me? Are you angry still, then?
_Jaf. _ier, where art thou? Father, why do you do thus?
Stand off! don't hide him from me! He's there somewhere.
Stand off, I say! What, gone? Remember, tyrant
I may revenge myself for this trick, one day.
_Enter Captain of the Guard, L. , and whispers Priuli. _
_Priuli. _ News! what news?
_Capt. _ (L. ) Most sad, sir!
Jaffier, upon the scaffold, to prevent
A shameful death, stabbed Pierre, and next himself;
Both fell together.
_Bel. _ (R. ) Ha! look there!
My husband bloody, and his friend, too! Murder!
Who has done this? Speak to me, thou sad vision;
On these poor trembling knees, I beg it. Vanished:--
Here they went down. (R. C. )--Oh, I'll dig, dig the den up!
Hoa, Jaffier, Jaffier!
Peep up, and give me but a look. I have him!
I have got him, father! Oh!
My love! my dear! my blessing! help me! help me!
They have hold of me, and drag me to the bottom!
Nay--now they pull so hard--farewell-- _[Dies. _
_Priuli. _ [Bending over her ] Oh! lead me to some place
"that's fit for mourning;
"Where the free air, light, and the cheerful sun,
"May never enter; hang it round with black,
"Set up one taper that may last a day,
"As long as I've to live; and there all leave me:
"Sparing no tears when you this tale relate,
"But bid all cruel fathers dread my fate. " _[Exeunt omnes. _
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THOMAS OTWAY.
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_THOMAS OTWAY. _
_From a Picture by Riley. _
_THE BEST PLAYS OF THE OLD DRAMATISTS. _
THOMAS OTWAY
_WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES_,
BY
THE HON. RODEN NOEL.
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"What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.
"
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"Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? "
_Keats. _
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CONTENTS.
PAGE
THOMAS OTWAY vii
DON CARLOS, Prince of Spain 1
THE ORPHAN 85
THE SOLDIER'S FORTUNE 173
VENICE PRESERVED 287
APPENDIX 387
[Illustration]
_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 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 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 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.
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; 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 _OEdipus_ 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, 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 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.
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 reason logically, but on absurd or mistaken premises.
And surely Hazlitt, not Lamb, is right about that celebrated scene
in Ford's _Broken 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 and _éclat_ of 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's _Revenger'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
than _Athalie_, _Britannicus_, or _The Cid_? Academic coldness is
hardly the phrase that rises to one's lips when one is watching Sarah
Bernhardt in _Phèdre_; 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's _Venice Preserved_. 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 of _Venice Preserved_ we 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's _Duchess of Malfi_, where horror upon horror is accumulated
upon her head, to thrill and harrow us; and so powerful 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, though I 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 of _Venice 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 garlands
Decked 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 nor worse
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 back
Your 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 take leave 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'S _ghost 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 a caricature 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,
entitled _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, on good grounds attributed to
Shakespeare. A queen, the body of whose slain lord remains unburied by
order of a cruel king, implores redress from one able to grant it in
these terms:
Oh, my petition was
Set down in ice, which by hot grief uncandied
Melts into drops * * * he that will fish
For my least minnow, let him lead his line
To catch one at my heart.
_Pierre. _ Speak! is't fitting?
_Jaf. _ Fitting!
_Pierre. _ I'd have thee undertake
Something that's noble, to preserve my memory
From the disgrace that's ready to attaint it.
_Capt. _ The day grows late, sir.
_Pierre. _ I'll make haste. Oh, Jaffier!
Though thou'st betrayed me, do me some way justice.
_Jaf. _ What's to be done?
_Pierre. _ This and no more. _[Whispers Jaffier. _
_Jaf. _ Hah! is't then so?
_Pierre. _ Most certainly.
_Jaf. _ I'll do't.
_Pierre. _ Remember.
_Capt. _ Sir--
_Pierre. _ Come, now I'm ready.
_[Captain Crossing to him]_
You should be a gentleman of honour;
Keep off the rabble, that I may have room
To entertain my fate, and die with decency.
You'll think on't? _[To Jaffier. _
_Jaf. _ 'Twont grow stale before to-morrow.
_[Pierre and Jaffier ascend the Scaffold--Executioner
binds Pierre. _
_Pierre. _ Now, Jaffier! now I'm going! Now--
_Jaf. _ Have at thee,
Thou honest heart, then! --here-- _[Stabs him. _
And this is well, too. _[Stabs himself. _
_Pierre. _ Now, now--thou hast indeed been faithful!
This was done nobly! --We've deceived the senate.
_Jaf. _ Bravely!
_Pierre. _ Ha! ha! ha! --oh! oh!
_[Falls down on the Scaffold and dies_
_Jaf. _ Now, ye cursed rulers,
Thus of the blood ye've shed, I make libation,
And sprinkle it mingling. May it rest upon you.
And all your race! Oh, poor Belvidera!
Sir, I've a wife; bear this in safety to her,
A token that, with my dying breath, I blessed her.
And the dear little infant left behind me.
I'm sick--I'm quiet. _[Dies. --The Scene shuts upon them. _
_Scene V. --An apartment in Priuli s House. _
_Enter Priuli, R. ; Belvidera, distracted; and two of her
Women. _
_Priuli. _ (L. C. ) Strengthen her heart with patience,
pitying Heav'n!
_Bel. _ (C. ) Come, 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!
I say you shall not go, indeed you shall not:
Whip your ill-nature; get you gone, then; Oh!
Are you returned? See, father, here he's come again!
Am I to blame to love him? Oh, thou dear one!
Why do you fly me? Are you angry still, then?
_Jaf. _ier, where art thou? Father, why do you do thus?
Stand off! don't hide him from me! He's there somewhere.
Stand off, I say! What, gone? Remember, tyrant
I may revenge myself for this trick, one day.
_Enter Captain of the Guard, L. , and whispers Priuli. _
_Priuli. _ News! what news?
_Capt. _ (L. ) Most sad, sir!
Jaffier, upon the scaffold, to prevent
A shameful death, stabbed Pierre, and next himself;
Both fell together.
_Bel. _ (R. ) Ha! look there!
My husband bloody, and his friend, too! Murder!
Who has done this? Speak to me, thou sad vision;
On these poor trembling knees, I beg it. Vanished:--
Here they went down. (R. C. )--Oh, I'll dig, dig the den up!
Hoa, Jaffier, Jaffier!
Peep up, and give me but a look. I have him!
I have got him, father! Oh!
My love! my dear! my blessing! help me! help me!
They have hold of me, and drag me to the bottom!
Nay--now they pull so hard--farewell-- _[Dies. _
_Priuli. _ [Bending over her ] Oh! lead me to some place
"that's fit for mourning;
"Where the free air, light, and the cheerful sun,
"May never enter; hang it round with black,
"Set up one taper that may last a day,
"As long as I've to live; and there all leave me:
"Sparing no tears when you this tale relate,
"But bid all cruel fathers dread my fate. " _[Exeunt omnes. _
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THOMAS OTWAY.
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_THOMAS OTWAY. _
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_THE BEST PLAYS OF THE OLD DRAMATISTS. _
THOMAS OTWAY
_WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES_,
BY
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CONTENTS.
PAGE
THOMAS OTWAY vii
DON CARLOS, Prince of Spain 1
THE ORPHAN 85
THE SOLDIER'S FORTUNE 173
VENICE PRESERVED 287
APPENDIX 387
[Illustration]
_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 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 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 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.
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; 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 _OEdipus_ 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, 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 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.
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 reason logically, but on absurd or mistaken premises.
And surely Hazlitt, not Lamb, is right about that celebrated scene
in Ford's _Broken 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 and _éclat_ of 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's _Revenger'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
than _Athalie_, _Britannicus_, or _The Cid_? Academic coldness is
hardly the phrase that rises to one's lips when one is watching Sarah
Bernhardt in _Phèdre_; 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's _Venice Preserved_. 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 of _Venice Preserved_ we 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's _Duchess of Malfi_, where horror upon horror is accumulated
upon her head, to thrill and harrow us; and so powerful 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, though I 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 of _Venice 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 garlands
Decked 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 nor worse
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 back
Your 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 take leave 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'S _ghost 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 a caricature 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,
entitled _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, on good grounds attributed to
Shakespeare. A queen, the body of whose slain lord remains unburied by
order of a cruel king, implores redress from one able to grant it in
these terms:
Oh, my petition was
Set down in ice, which by hot grief uncandied
Melts into drops * * * he that will fish
For my least minnow, let him lead his line
To catch one at my heart.
