Like Otway's "Orphan," this is virtually a domestic tragedy, for there are no interests of state or court, and our sympathy is centred solely on the innocent distress of the heroine. Like Otway, again, Southerne gains his greatest effects by an appeal to pity. The sentimentality that we attribute to the days of Richardson's "Clarissa" earlier triumphed on the stage in the heroines of Lee, Otway, and Southerne.
Not less successful on the stage than the plays of Banks and Southerne was the single tragedy of Congreve. First acted in 1697, "The Mourning Bride" continued without alteration through the next century, and furnished Mrs. Siddons with one of her greatest parts. Congreve's remarkable dramatic ingenuity was skillfully exercised in combining all the elements that the average audience delighted in, and yet presenting these draped sufficiently to avoid offending the judicious. Classical form and technic permit a sensational and gruesome fifth act; dignified and facile verse gives way at times to outrageous rant; the usual plot of the rival ladies and rival lovers is ingeniously complicated to supply suspense, surprise, and a happy ending.
It is the day after the death of King Anselmo, prisoner of Manuel, King of Granada, whose daughter Almeira has been secretly married to Alphonso, son of Anselmo, and then separated from him by shipwreck. She confesses this marriage to her confidant, mourns Anselmo, and declares that she will never yield to her father and marry Garcia, son of the premier Gonzales. King Manuel returns from battle, having slain the Moorish king, and brings the queen Zara and other prisoners, among them a valiant warrior, Osmyn—Alphonso in disguise. At the tomb of Anselmo, Osmyn-Alphonso and Almeira meet and dissolve in grief.
The king is in love with Zara and Zara with Osmyn. She offers to procure Osmyn's escape and to fly with him; but later on, discovering him with Almeira, she betrays them to the king. The king and Zara are now torn by love and jealousy. She obtains permission to have Osmyn strangled by one of her mutes, and the suspicious Gonzales assumes the costume of the mute in order to make sure of the execution. Meanwhile the king, learning of Zara's passion for Osmyn, determines to have him killed and then assume his clothing in order to confront Zara. Osmyn makes his escape; Gonzales kills the king, taking him for Osmyn; Zara, taking the body to be Osmyn's, drinks poison; Almeira is about to make the same mistake, when the soldiers enter with Osmyn at their head.
Perhaps no other single play is so representative of the various features of Restoration tragedy. It is not a tragedy, at all if one insists that tragedy should be logical and psychological; but it was praised by Voltaire and Dr. Johnson and approved by the London public for over a century.
Although the years from 1660 to 1700 offer little in tragedy that has proved of permanent value, they mark the continuance of the genre in a full tide of popularity. Probably in no forty years since then have so many original tragedies appeared in the London theatres; certainly in no forty years since have so many Elizabethan tragedies been revived. Tragedies and tragicomedies together are in numbers almost equal to the comedies which we think of as especially distinguishing the Restoration stage. There was hardly a writer for the theatre who did not try his hand at tragedy. In spite of the rivalry of opera and comedy, it continued from Davenant to Southerne to delight the age. Its literary as well as its theatrical importance was maintained. Noble authors as well as the greatest wits, the Earl of Orrery, Granville, Dryden, and Congreve, courted the tragic muse. Tragedy written for the popular stage had, indeed, a literary eminence hardly recognized before, even in the generation preceding the Civil War. In comparison with their Elizabethan predecessors the tragedies of this time are, in fact, literary rather than popular. They draw their themes from French or English plays; they display little innovation and still less study of life; they adopt rules and regulations; they are conventional and artificial. They respond to literary traditions; they hardly express the sentiments or ideas of their age. Some exceptions there are; but even plays like those of Banks, which gained theatrical success without literary distinction, resembled their more worthy brethren in their adherence to convention rather than nature.
In the main Restoration tragedy must be regarded as a continuation and development of Elizabethan. The influence of Beaumont and Fletcher continued in the heroic plays and their after-effects. The wane of the heroic plays brought a return to the Elizabethans, and, notably in Lee, to some of the most characteristic features of the later revenge plays. The increasing influence of Shakespeare was felt not only in the worthy emulation of "All for Love" and in the various adaptations, but also in the debates of the critics and through the whole warp and woof of tragedy. But what were preëminent in many of Shakespeare's contemporaries as in Shakespeare himself, poetry, passion, and characterization, were beyond the reach of any of the playwrights except Dryden, Lee, and Otway at their best. The worst excesses, the most undesirable conventions of the Elizabethans, excited imitation as much as their excellences. The Elizabethan bloom had gone to seed in unfavorable soil. It is not strange that after the horrors, bloodshed, and supernaturalism of Lee and Otway, and after the gross buffoonery that spoils tragedies otherwise so noble as "Don Sebastian," "Venice Preserved," and "The Fatal Marriage," there should have followed in the opening years of the next century a marked reaction to the decencies of French tragedy. In the Restoration period, however, the French influence, though manifest in the great vogue of the heroic plays and in a wide adoption of French ideas of structure and propriety, won only a partial triumph in checking and modifying the Elizabethan tradition. Its effect in supplying fresh incentives for worthy endeavor was slight, indeed, hardly discernible unless in the influence of Racine upon Otway. Tragedy, then, as handed down to the eighteenth century, was not a fixed and definite form, though measurably more so than a century before. It was still a conglomerate of various forms and tendencies, mingling relics of the medieval stage with reminiscences of Shakespeare and the manners of the court of Louis XIV. The sentimental tragedies of Southerne and Otway, telling stories of distressed womanhood and exciting pity without any accessories of grandeur, were perhaps the most independent achievements of Restoration tragedy; the preservation of Shakespearean influence was its most important. But, in comparison with a century before, the changes in tragedy that were most noticeable and permanent were the restriction of themes, the narrowing of structure, and the conventionality and artificiality that extended to character and language as well as to themes and plots.
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ward continues to supply the best history of the drama. Henceforth the standard authority for the history of the stage is Genest's Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols., Bath, 1832. This is an invaluable collection of facts in regard to plays and actors, superseding preceding books on the subject and supplying material for subsequent ones. Other histories of the theatre are: Chetwood's General History of the Stage (1749); The Dramatic Mirror (1808); D. E. Baker's Biographica Dramatica (1764, continued by Isaac Reed and Stephen Jones, 3d ed. 1812); Dibdin's Complete History of the English Stage (1800). Lowe's Bibliographical Account of English Dramatic Literature (1888) will guide in their use. More recent histories of the theatre are: P. Fitzgerald's New History of the Stage (1882); Lowe's new edition of Doran's Their Majesties' Servants (1888); and H. B. Baker's The London Stage, 1576-1903 (1904).
Works of the Restoration period on the drama or theatre include a number of Dryden's essays, notably, The Essay of Dramatic Poesy, The Defence of the Essay, The Defence of the Epilogue, Of Heroic Plays, and The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy; Wright's Historia Histrionica (1699, reprinted in Dodsley and in Cibber's Life); Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum (1675); Langbaine's Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691); Rymer's Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693); Dennis's The Impartial Critic (1693); and Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). Downes's Roscius Anglicanus (1708, facsimile reprint, 1886) also contains interesting information on the period. Corneille, Boileau, Saint Evremond, the Abbé D'Aubignac, and Rapin are the French critics of most influence on the drama of this period, especially Rapin, whose Reflexions sur la poëtique was translated by Rymer (1674). J. E. Spingarn's Seventeenth Century Critical Essays (now in press) will contain all the critical work of the period of importance, with a valuable discussion of its relation to French criticism.