Otway, like Lee, began with rhymed plays, "Alcibiades" (1675) and "Don Carlos" (1676), the second winning an extraordinary and long-continued success on the stage. The next year appeared his "Titus and Berenice," a free and sympathetic translation of Racine's "Berenice" that was surpassed in the favor of the theatre by Crowne's treatment of the same subject. After several comedies he followed the fashion for Shakespearean adaptations in his "History and Fall of Caius Marius" (1680).[27] This monstrous play, about half of which, as Otway acknowledged in his prologue, is from "Romeo and Juliet," provides a large mixture of comedy, and presents Juliet (Lavinia) dressed as a page, the servant of her lover, after the style of Beaumont and Fletcher's Bellario. For sixty years this play superseded "Romeo and Juliet" upon the stage. Otway's two other tragedies, "The Orphan" (1680) and "Venice Preserved" (1682), are his masterpieces. They continued to be stage favorites for a century and a half, and procured for Otway the place next to Shakespeare in the admiration of the eighteenth century.
"Venice Preserved" may be classed with the many tragedies of the day that maintain the Elizabethan traditions. These are manifest in the general structure, the large number of actors, the changing scenes, the gross comedy, the abundance of incidents, the terrors, ghosts, and madness. Not only the frequent reminiscences of Shakespeare and Fletcher, but the whole conception and treatment testify to an inspiration from the earlier and better days of the drama.
The story, not long ago too well known to need retelling, relates how Jaffier, in poverty and desperation, is induced to join a conspiracy against the state, and is then persuaded by his wife, Belvidera, to save the state and her father by turning informer. He seeks to sacrifice himself for the friend whom he has betrayed, and in the end stabs both himself and his friend upon the scaffold. A curiously Elizabethan prolongation of the catastrophe follows in the apparition of the ghosts of the friends, and the madness and death of Belvidera.
The essentials of great tragedy, of Shakespearean tragedy, are here. The opposition of character, the struggle of the generous but pliable Jaffier under the conflicting influences of his wife and the steadfast 'Roman' Pierre, the joy and tenderness and ruin that come with his love for Belvidera, are all drawn with a truth of passion in conception and language that reaches the heart. "Nature is there," wrote Dryden, "which is the greatest beauty." Marred as a whole by buffoonery and excess, the play is still among the two or three best tragedies of the Restoration. If it were all equal to the tremendous fourth act, Otway would be sure of a place among the immortals.
Marked by the same power of swaying the emotions of tenderness and pity, "The Orphan" attains these effects by means of the situations rather than through the study of motives. The plot deals with the rivalry of two brothers in love with their father's ward. She is secretly married to one; the other substitutes himself by trick on the marriage night. The situation, which has parallels in preceding tragedy, is abhorrent enough to kill all interest in the persons concerned; but Otway's power to depict love and distress triumphs over one's repugnance. The play is remarkable in many ways. Its few characters, its observance of the unities, its confinement of the action, give it the simplicity and directness of French tragedy. Its theme and its poetry recall Elizabethan rather than Restoration examples. But it departs from the canons of either theatre in presenting neither historical persons, nobles, kings, nor illustrious actions. Based on a story, supposedly of fact, related in a contemporary pamphlet, it merely transfers the scene to Bohemia, without adding the usual accessories of tragedy. Though it keeps something of a court setting and does not venture into middle-class society, it is like the Elizabethan plays of crime in its presentation of contemporaneous fact, and like Heywood's "A Woman Killed with Kindness" in telling a story of domestic distress. It might by a little extension of the term be called a domestic tragedy, and it still further departs from the canons in relating the misery of an innocent sufferer who is the victim of a cruel mistake. Otway should, therefore, be remembered as a dramatist who, in a time when tragedy was largely artificial, imitative, and conventional, painted suffering and tenderness with truth to nature, and who violated the accepted rules of his art in order to reach the hearts of his audience. That he could not also escape the moral perversion of taste that marked his time has brought its punishment in the final neglect of his masterpieces; but it is a sign of genius to turn away from heroic plays, Racine, and Shakespeare, to write plays different from any written before, and to stir all men's hearts for over a century.
Of the many dramatists who wrote tragedies in the last decade of the seventeenth century and bridged the way from the age of Dryden to the age of Pope, only Banks, Southerne, and Congreve produced plays of continuing popularity and influence through the eighteenth century. Banks ended a prolific career with "Cyrus the Great, or the Tragedy of Love" in 1696, but his popularity was mainly due to his three English historical tragedies, "Virtue Betrayed, or Anne Bullen," "The Island Queens" (Elizabeth and Mary Stuart), and "The Unhappy Favorite" (the Earl of Essex). These plays are interesting as an illustration of the survival on the stage of a dramatic species in a debased form. Though in blank verse, their material is that of the heroic play; their formula, much love-making and a pretense of portentous events; their persons, rivals in love,—two men with the same woman or two women with the same man,—a wicked minister, a revengeful woman, and the queen at the centre of the stage. There is no comedy, no physical horrors, and even the portents are reduced to a peculiar decorum:—
"Last night no sooner was I laid to rest
But just three drops of blood fell from my nose."
The construction is on French models with few actors, continuity of scenes, and observance of the unities. Puerile in conception and more ridiculous in their bombast than Fielding's burlesque, they have enough rapidity of action, vivacity of claptrap, and extravagance of changing emotions to account for their stage success.
Thomas Southerne finished "Cleomenes" for Dryden, with whom he was closely associated, and his tragedies follow Dryden's later work in maintaining the Elizabethan traditions of blank verse, comedy, double plots, shifting scenes, horrors, and persons of varied ranks. His "Loyal Brother" (1682) is wholly commonplace, and "The Spartan Dame" (1719) and "The Fate of Capua" (1700) do not depart from usual themes and methods, though the latter is in some respects Southerne's best play; but his two most successful plays, "The Fatal Marriage" (1694) and "Oroonoko" (1696), both based on novels by Mrs. Behn, present decided innovations in theme. "Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave" contains much comedy, and has little merit besides the novelty of the story, presenting the virtues of a negro slave. "The Fatal Marriage, or the Innocent Adultery" introduces the Enoch Arden story, attached to an outrageous comic underplot derived in part from Fletcher's "Nightwalker."
In the main plot, Biron, oldest son of Baldwin, has been captured by pirates and is supposed to be dead, his letters being kept secret and answered by his villanous brother, Carlos, who urges his wife Isabella to marry. After Baldwin, instigated by Carlos, has thrust her out from his house, she accepts the devoted Villeroy. Biron returns; she goes mad in a scene of great imaginative power; Carlos and his assistants endeavor to kill Biron, who is rescued by the returning Villeroy. Biron, however, dies; and an accomplice of Carlos, tortured upon the rack (on the stage), confesses and exposes Carlos. Then "enter Isabella distracted, her little son running in before, being afraid of her." She stabs herself.