Vanbrugh's quality, his absence of sentiment, his large and lively handling of old comic types, may be guessed at from this brief analysis of his first play. He was thought to have surpassed it in "The Provoked Wife" (1697) and "The Confederacy" (1705). He also adapted pieces by Molière, and a French writer nearly forgotten, Boursault.
George Farquhar.
George Farquhar, born 1678, at Londonderry, was the son of a clergyman, and was a University wit of Trinity College, Dublin. He early became an actor, and early left the stage; it is said because he had done accidentally what Mr. Lenville proposed to do of set purpose to Nicholas Nickleby, severely wounded a fellow-player in a stage duel. He then obtained a commission in the army, and wrote plays, "A Trip to the Jubilee," "Sir Harry Wildair," "The Way to Win Him," "The Recruiting Officer," "The Beaux' Stratagem" (1707), and others; the characters, such as Scrub, Sergeant Kite, Archer, Lady Bountiful, Captain Plume, and others, were great favourites with Sir Walter Scott, and by him are often quoted. Farquhar died young, at about the age of 30. George Farquhar with his gaiety, his gallantry, his happy military swagger, his heroes who are not lost to honour, his plots, so comprehensible, and sources of so many merry adventures, wins more sympathy and affection,—dying in the arms of Victory as he did, during the triumph of his last and best play,—than any of the other comic writers of the Restoration.
Otway.
Otway, like most dramatists of his day, cannot be fairly judged by his printed works. They want the splendid costumes and decor, the setting of the stage, and the pathos and brilliance of the beautiful actresses, for Otway was most successful in such tender and distraught heroines as Belvidera and Monimia. Born in 1652, Thomas Otway, the son of the rector of Woolbeding, in Sussex, entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1669, but soon left it, on the death of his father, for London. Here he hung about the Duke of York's Theatre, where he failed as an actor. In 1675 he produced a play, "Alcibiades," though, as he says in a preface to his "Don Carlos," "I might as well have called it 'Nebuchadnezzar,'" for Alcibiades acted in a way not consistent with his character. The caprice of the witty, miserable Earl of Rochester won the good will, if nothing more substantial, of the Duke of York for the poet, who dedicates to him the heroic play of "Don Carlos" (1676). In this, according to Otway, Dryden declared that "I know not a line I would not be author of," so the play must have been, and in fact was, a success. It is written in rhyming couplets, and even triplets; the rhymes are often surprisingly bad. The history of the death of Don Carlos, who was mad, is obscure, and Otway treats it with extreme poetic licence. Philip of Spain is here a tender, though avenging, father and husband, who repents and rants monstrously, though rant is not the common fault of Otway. There is tenderness and pathos enough to account for the popularity of the play; moreover Otway was known to be hopelessly in love with Mrs. Barry, the beautiful actress; Rochester who presently satirised Otway, being his rival. After a luckless campaign with Monmouth in Flanders, Otway, following Dryden's example, abandoned rhyme for blank verse in "The Orphan" (1680), based on a stock situation in a novel of the seventeenth century. The intrigue, though the crucial situation is not acceptable now on the stage, is ingeniously contrived to bring out the characters of the rival brothers, and Monimia, a very pathetic character, must have drawn many tears. There is the usual number of deaths in the last act. The blank verse has no great distinction, and abounds in redundant feet. Otway, in fact, did not take by literary perfections, but "The Orphan" has no lines so far below the tragic level as the words of the Queen in "Don Carlos".
How hard it is his passion to confine,
I'm sure 'tis so if I may judge by mine!
The phrase of Monimia when she learns the depth of her misery, "Oh, when shall I be mad indeed!" is of other metal.
In 1682, Otway produced his "Venice Preserved," certainly his best play, which long held the stage, and was acted now and then up to the middle of the nineteenth century. The conspirators in the play may be said to rant, but moderation of language does not mark the eloquence of violent revolutionaries with the most bitter personal wrongs to avenge. Belvidera may be "stagey," but she has genuine tenderness and pathos; there is dramatic development of character in Jaffier; "the moving incident" is abundant; the absence of poetry was not marked or missed. The scenes with Antonio, a caricature of the Shaftesbury of Titus Oates's plot, with his "I'll prove there's a plot with a vengeance, a bloody, horrid, execrable, damnable, and audacious plot," must have delighted audiences who had just escaped from Oates's reign of lies and terror. The bloody ghosts who appear in the conclusion are an unhappy reversion to the devices of Chapman. Otway wrote other things, the comedy of "The Soldier's Fortune," for example, which, even then, was "so filthy, no modest woman ought to be seen at it," as, Otway tells us, a woman of "a nice morality" declared. Certainly Otway had no real comic genius. Before he wrote "Venice Preserved" Otway was destitute, till relieved by the Duchess of Portsmouth, to whom the play is dedicated. On the death of Charles II the Duchess ceased, it appears, to succour the poet, who died in deep distress, in April, 1685; as to the manner of his death, stories vary. Probably he was not a careful liver; profits from plays were slight; and patrons were niggardly. Otway is undeniably more coherent, more capable in construction than the majority of the tragedians from Chapman to Ford; but he did not inherit that remarkable, if occasional, gift of greatness in style which was their common portion.
Nat Lee.
The reader of the plays in which Nat Lee (1653-1692) employs blank verse, finds it much more satisfactory in its cadences and in movement than the blank verse of Otway. There is something of the old ring in