In tragedy the division between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is less marked than that which distinguishes in general the literatures of the Restoration and the Augustan eras. Yet by 1700 most of the leading dramatists of the preceding generation had ceased to write for the stage; and the death of Dryden marked the end of the old, as the beginning of the reign of Anne, with its important changes in politics, society, and literature, marked the beginning of a new development in tragedy. The attack of Jeremy Collier (1698) was also an important landmark in the history of the drama, assisting in a notable change from the preceding licentiousness and toward a moralized and sentimentalized comedy. A similar change in tragedy was its most apparent departure from Restoration models. Chastened language and a stricter moral censorship of both subjects and sentiments reflected that refinement of which the age of Addison and Pope was wont to boast.
The theatrical conditions governing the reign of Queen Anne were not very different from those of the Restoration. There was a general complaint, as there has been ever since, that operas and spectacles were crowding the serious drama out of favor, but there was still abundant opportunity to see many of the best plays of the Elizabethan and Restoration periods. Of tragedies, we find in a single season, 1703-04, "Hamlet," "Othello," "Julius Cæsar," and alterations of "Macbeth," "Lear," "Richard III," "Timon," and "Titus Andronicus," Shirley's "Traitor," and Beaumont and Fletcher's "Maid's Tragedy," "Valentinian," and "A King and No King," "The Loyal Subject," and other of their tragicomedies. "Henry VIII," "Rollo," "Bonduca," and "Philaster" were performed within the next few years. Of Restoration tragedies, Banks's "Unhappy Favorite" and Lee's "Rival Queens" were perhaps the most popular, and other plays of Banks, Lee, Otway, Dryden, Congreve, and Southerne were acted yearly. A number of the heroic plays also still kept the stage, including Howard's "Indian Queen," Dryden's "Conquest of Granada," "Indian Emperor," and "Aureng Zebe." Throughout the century both the London and the provincial theatres presented each year a large number of old plays, including many of these already mentioned. The Elizabethan tragedies, except Shakespeare's, and the heroic plays gradually disappeared from the regular repertoire, but Shakespeare's tragedies steadily gained in popularity, and "The Unhappy Favorite" (rewritten as "The Earl of Essex"), "The Orphan," "Venice Preserved," "Oronooko," "The Fatal Marriage" (altered as "Isabella"), "All for Love," and "The Mourning Bride" maintained their places into the nineteenth century. Tragedy thus had its permanent representatives in this group of stock plays, to which newcomers gained admission only by marked success on the stage.
To these stock plays no writer of the eighteenth century made more notable additions than Nicholas Rowe, the first editor of Shakespeare, whose work began the century, borrowed much from his predecessors, and yet introduced most of the changes which distinguish the eighteenth century type of tragedy from that of the Restoration or Elizabethan period. His first play was followed by four other tragedies by 1707, and, after an interval of seven years, by "Jane Shore" (1714) and "Lady Jane Grey" (1715). Of the first five, three are of little interest except as representing common variations of the prevailing type. They all relate love stories of rivalry and intrigue among heroic personages, and all observe the French proprieties in structure. "The Ambitious Stepmother," like so many predecessors and successors, places the scene in an oriental court; "Ulysses" more daringly invades Homeric territory; and "The Royal Convert" turns to early English history, a field which literary patriotism was appropriating for tragedy.
In "Tamerlane" (1702), love and intrigue play subordinate parts to the political and moral interest which the author endeavored to centre upon his protagonist. Tamerlane, who, we are told, was patterned on William III, is an extremely pious pagan, who overtops conquest with mercy and adorns every occasion with a moralizing discourse. Had he ever encountered his Marlowean namesake, he would have shed the pitying tear. In general, the structure is on the French plan, but the large number of characters and the considerable amount of action recall Elizabethan models. The verse, too, with its feminine endings, occasionally reminds one of Fletcher, and the figures of speech are feebly patterned on Shakespeare, while the ravings of Bajazet are worthy of Nat Lee. The play, long acted every November fifth, seems to have owed its great success to its high moral tone and its patriotic eloquence. It set the key for many similarly patriotic tunes.
"The Fair Penitent" (1703) links itself with the two later "She-tragedies," to borrow a term from one of their epilogues. Its prologue proclaims an innovation from the usual tragic themes of monarchs' cares and lost royalty, because—
"We ne'er can pity what we ne'er can share
*....*....*....*
Therefore an humbler Theme our Author chose,
A melancholy Tale of Private Woes."
This was the play of which Dr. Johnson said that "scarcely any work of any poet is at once so interesting by the fable and so delightful by the language." The domestic theme, the female protagonist, and the insistent appeal to pity were all already familiar in the plays of Otway and Southerne. Rowe gave these a larger popularity; and from his Lothario and Calista Richardson received suggestions for Lovelace and Clarissa.
"The Fair Penitent" is also interesting as an adaptation of an Elizabethan play. Rowe borrowed the plot and some hints in the characterization from "The Fatal Dowry" of Massinger and Field, but he refashioned the scenes and rewrote the verse in accord with current modes. While "The Fatal Dowry" is by no means one of the best of Elizabethan tragedies, a comparison of it with Rowe's version of the story emphasizes the losses which tragedy was suffering as it moved farther and farther from its old traditions.[28] "The Fair Penitent" reduces the host of dramatis personae to eight, the fair penitent, her husband, his rival, his sister, and three friends or confidants, and confines the action to one place and something over twenty-four hours. Much of the action of the early play is omitted or reduced to narrative, including all the opening scenes of the funeral of the husband's father and the origin of his friendship with the father of the heroine. The various attempts of the faithful friend to mend matters are also restricted, and Massinger's usual trial scene omitted. The result of these structural changes is a loss of verisimilitude. The old play had something of the illusion of a true history; in "The Fair Penitent" the action, though narrowed, is still far too much for the time supposed, and improbabilities are solved by well-worn theatrical devices. The guilt is discovered by means of a lost letter and an over-heard conversation, and throughout literary and moral proprieties lead to a reduction of action and an increase of talk. This is well illustrated in the scenes in which the husband confronts the guilty wife. In "The Fair Penitent," the wife and Lothario are having a final meeting, or declamation contest, on the day after the wedding. She upbraids him and incidentally relates the story of her seduction; the husband overhears. In "The Fatal Dowry," the husband comes unexpectedly to the house of Aymer where the lovers have an assignation. Aymer is attempting to divert him with music, when a laugh is heard within,—more music, and the lady's laugh again. The husband rushes from the stage and returns driving in the lovers. Further, the restricted action of Rowe's play causes a conventionalizing of the characters. The wife and her lover are shallow persons in Massinger's play, but they have some plausibility. In Rowe, he becomes the avenging rival; she, an impossible declaimer, now the evil woman of the heroic plays, now the lachrymose moralizer. The moralizing, emphatic in all of Rowe's plays, also adds to the general artificiality. Calista dies after most voluble repentance, and her husband matches her "groan for groan and tear for tear."