Born, at Trotton, Sussex, 3 March 1652. Educated at Winchester College, till 1669. Matriculated, Christ Church, Oxford, 27 May 1669; left in 1672, without degree. To London; devoted himself to writing plays. Produced, at Dorset Gardens Theatre, “Alcibiades,” 1675; “Don Carlos,” 1676; “Titus and Berenice,” 1677; “The Cheats of Scapin,” 1677; “Friendship in Fashion,” 1678. Enlisted, to serve in army in Holland, 1678. Ensign in Duke of Monmouth’s regiment, Feb. 1678; Lieutenant, Nov. 1678. Returned to England, 1679. Produced, at Dorset Gardens Theatre, “The Orphan,” Feb. 1680; “History and Fall of Caius Marius,” 1680; “The Souldier’s Fortune,” 1681; “Venice Preserved,” Feb. 1682; “The Atheist,” 1684. Died, in London, April 1685. Buried in St. Clement Danes Churchyard. Works: “Alcibiades,” 1675; “Don Carlos,” 1676; “Titus and Berenice … With a farce called The Cheats of Scapin” (adapted from Racine and Molière), 1677; “Friendship in Fashion,” 1678; “The Orphan,” 1680; “History and Fall of Caius Marius,” 1680; “The Poet’s Complaint of his Muse,” 1680; “The Souldier’s Fortune,” 1681; “Venice Preserv’d,” 1682; “The Atheist,” 1684. Posthumous: “Windsor Castle,” 1685; “The History of the Triumvirates” (trans. from the French), 1686. Collected Works: in 2 vols., 1713; in 3 vols., ed. by W. T. Thornton, 1813.

Personal

  An Author who was well known to most Persons of this Age, who are famous for Wit and Breeding.

  In this play [“The Jealous Bridegroom”] Mr. Otway, the poet, having an inclination to turn actor, Mrs Behn gave him the King in the play for a probation part; but he, being not used to the stage, the full house put him to such a sweat and tremendous agony, that being dash’t spoilt him for an actor.

  Otway had an intimate friend (one Blackstone), who was shot; the murderer fled toward Dover; and Otway pursued him. In his return, he drank water when violently heated, and so got a fever which was the death of him.

	But wherefore need I wander wide
	To old Ilissus’ distant side,
	Deserted stream, and mute?
	Wild Arun, too, has heard thy strains,
	And echo, ’midst my native plains,
	Been soothed by pity’s lute.
	There first the wren thy myrtles shed
	On gentlest Otway’s infant head,
	To him thy cell was shown;
	And while be sung the female heart,
	With youth’s soft notes unspoiled by art,
	Thy turtles mixed their own.

  His person was of the middle size, about, 5 ft. 7 in. in height, inclinable to fatness. He had a thoughtful speaking eye.

  He died April 14, 1685, in a manner which I am unwilling to mention. Having been compelled by his necessities to contract debts, and hunted, as is supposed, by the tarriers of the law, he retired to a publick-house on Tower-hill, where he is said to have died of want; or, as it is related by one of his biographers, by swallowing, after a long fast, a piece of bread which charity had supplied. He went out, as is reported, almost naked in the rage of hunger, and, finding a gentleman in a neighbouring coffee-house, asked him for a shilling. The gentleman gave him a guinea; and Otway going away bought a roll, and was choaked with the first mouthful. All this, I hope, is not true; and there is this ground of better hope, that Pope, who lived near enough to be well informed, relates in Spence’s Memorials, that he died of a fever caught by violent pursuit of a thief that had robbed one of his friends. But that indigence, and its concomitants, sorrow and despondency, pressed hard upon him, has never been denied, whatever immediate cause might bring him to the grave.

  If Lee died tipsy outside a public house, Otway died half-starved within one, at the Bull on Tower Hill.

  Dryden and Otway were contemporaries, and lived, it is said, for some time opposite to each other in Fetter Lane. One morning the latter happened to call upon his brother bard about breakfast-time, but was told by his servant that his master was gone to breakfast with the Earl of Pembroke. “Very well,” said Otway, “tell your master that I will call to-morrow morning.” Accordingly he called about the same hour. “Well, is your master at home now?” “No, sir, he is just gone to breakfast with the Duke of Buckingham.” “The d— he is!” said Otway; and, actuated either by envy, pride, or disappointment, in a kind of involuntary manner he took up a piece of chalk which lay on a table … and wrote over the door,—

“Here lives Dryden, a poet and a wit.”

The next morning Dryden recognized the handwriting, and told the servant to go to Otway and desire his company to breakfast with him; in the mean time to Otway’s line of

“Here lives Dryden, a poet and a wit,”

he added,—

“This was written by Otway, opposit.”

When Otway arrived he saw that his line was linked with a rhyme, and, being a man of rather petulant disposition, he took it in dudgeon, and, turning upon his heel, told Dryden he was welcome to keep his wit and his breakfast to himself.

  Except that Otway’s life in London was generally disreputable, little is recorded of it. The low ale-house in which he perished miserably is the only spot mentioned as being in any way positively associated with him, and only the name of that is known now…. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Clement Danes, April 16, 1685. No stone marks the spot.

  Weak rather than vicious, ill-used and luckless, Otway’s unhappy end makes a pitiful story. There are few sadder pictures in literary history than that of the sensitive soul, famished and despairing, making known his misery in a public place, and for lack of bread startling the careless stranger with the words, “I am the poet Otway.” “Alas! poor Castalio!”

Don Carlos, 1676

	Tom Otway came next, Tom Shadwell’s dear zany,
	And swears for heroicks he writes best of any;
	Don Carlos his pockets so amply had fill’d,
	That his mange was quite cured, and his lice were all kill’d
	But Apollo had seen his face on the stage,
	And prudently did not think fit to engage
	The scum of a play-house, for the prop of an age.

  Although “Alcibiades” had been a partial failure, Betterton accepted another tragedy from the young author in the following year. “Don Carlos” is as great an advance on its predecessor as it could possibly be. It is difficult to believe that they were written by the same hand. The rhyming tragedies were on their last legs, but “Don Carlos” was a crutch that might have supported the falling fashion for years. The supple, strong verse, un-English in character but worthy of Corneille or at least of Rotrou, assists instead of hampering the dramatic action: the plot is well-considered, tragical, and moving; the characters, stagey though they be, are vigorously designed and sustained. I think we should be justified in calling “Don Carlos” the best English tragedy in rhyme; by one leap the young Oxonian sprang ahead of the veteran Dryden, who thereupon began to “weary of his long-loved mistress, rhyme.”

  Might have been a good play if it had not been written in rhyme. The action is highly dramatic, and the characters, though artless, are not ineffective; but the pathos in which the poet excelled is continually disturbed by the bombastic couplets, ever trembling on the brink of the ridiculous. The remorse of Philip after the murder of his wife and son is as grotesque an instance of the forcible feeble as could easily be found, and is a melancholy instance indeed of the declension of the English drama, when contrasted with the demeanour of Othello in similar circumstances. Otway, however, was yet to show that his faults were rather his age’s than his own.

The Orphan, 1680

  Notwithstanding its real beauties, could hardly have taken so prodigiously, as it hath done, on our stage, if there were not somewhere a defect of good taste as well as of good morals.

  This is one of the few plays that keep possession of the stage, and has pleased for almost a century, through all the vicissitudes of dramatick fashion. Of this play nothing new can easily be said. It is a domestick tragedy drawn from middle life. Its whole power is upon the affections; for it is not written with much comprehension of thought, or elegance of expression. But if the heart is interested, many other beauties may be wanting, yet not be missed.

  But the reputation of Otway for pathetic powers was, by the success of his “Orphan,” justly exalted above all the dramatists of his own and succeeding times. The characters, by being brought nearer to the condition of the audience, more deeply interest their passions than the fate and fortune of persons who are eminently placed above them.

  In the ‘Orphan’ there is little else but this voluptuous effeminacy of sentiment and mawkish distress, which strikes directly at the root of that mental fortitude and heroic cast of thought which alone makes tragedy endurable—that renders its sufferings pathetic, or its struggles sublime. Yet there are lines and passages in it of extreme tenderness and beauty; and few persons, I conceive (judging from my own experience) will read it at a certain time of life without shedding tears over it as fast as the “Arabian trees their medicinal gums.” Otway always touched the reader, for he had himself a heart. We may be sure that he blotted his page often with his tears, on which so many drops have since fallen from glistening eyes, “that sacred pity had engendered there.” He had susceptibility of feeling and warmth of genius; but he had not equal depth of thought or loftiness of imagination, and indulged his mere sensibility too much, yielding to the immediate impression or emotion excited in his own mind, and not placing himself enough in the minds and situations of others, or following the workings of nature sufficiently with keenness of eye and strength of will into its heights and depths, its strongholds as well as its weak-sides.

  The plot of the “Orphan” is as clumsy as it is indelicate.

  The story of the “Orphan” is domestic, and borrowed, as I believe, from some French novel, though I do not at present remember where I have read it: it was once popular on the stage, and gave scope for good acting, but is unpleasing to the delicacy of our own age.

  Has drawn more tears from female eyes than almost any other play. The nature of its central incident has kept it from the stage for the last eighty years, but from the time that Mistress Barry first played Monimia the character has been a favourite one with many of our best actresses, down to Miss O’Neill; while Betterton’s part, Castalio, has given opportunities for pathos to an equally long list of his successors. “The Orphan” was the best work that Otway had yet given to the stage…. It shows at its highest Otway’s power of moving compassion, the continued tension of its unhappiness—when once the earlier scenes are disposed of—being absolutely painful. In Monimia he has created a victim of love ill-fated, worthy for sadness to rank with Penthea in “The Broken Heart,” though she is altogether more lovable and life-like than that somewhat shadowy personage. Indeed, Otway might be called a belated Ford, with tempered horrors and mitigated gloom, yet with fully as intense a sympathy for ill-starred love and the sickness of a heart broken with griefs as he who drew the wretched Annabella; but while Ford in all probability found his sadness in the hearts of others, his own strong and silent nature enabling him to draw coolly with lines not blurred with passion, Otway had in his own breast all too faithful a realisation of the sorrows he portrayed.

Caius Marius, 1680

  How little Otway understood the true rules of composition may be inferred from this, that he has taken the half of the scenes of his “Caius Marius” verbally, or with disfiguring changes, from the “Romeo and Juliet” of Shakspeare. Nothing more incongruous can well be conceived than such an episode in Roman manners and in a historical drama. This impudent plagiarism is in no manner justified by his confessing it.

Venice Preserved, 1682

  I will not defend every thing in his “Venice Preserved;” but I must bear this testimony to his memory,—that the passions are truly touched in it, though perhaps there is somewhat to be desired both in the grounds of them and in the height and elegance of expression. But nature is there,—which is the greatest beauty.

  His last and greatest dramatick work, “Venice Preserved,” a tragedy, which still continues to be one of the favourites of the publick, notwithstanding the want of morality in the original design, and the despicable scenes of vile comedy with which he has diversified his tragick action. By comparing this with his “Orphan,” it will appear that his images were by time become stronger, and his language more energetick. The striking passages are in every mouth; and the publick seems to judge rightly of the faults and excellencies of this play, that it is the work of a man not attentive to decency, nor zealous for virtue; but of one who conceived forcibly, and drew originally, by consulting nature in his own breast.

  Instead of those monsters, he brought forward, early in the month of January 1748, Otway’s tragedy of “Venice Preserved.” He had studied the character of Jaffier in the preceding season, with intent to perform it, with the advantage of having Quin in the part of Pierre; but a fever, that lasted three or four weeks, obliged him to postpone that design. He now prevailed on Barry to undertake the part, and, with that great coadjutor, he presented Jaffier to the public. The critics have objected to this play, that the title of “Venice Preserved, or a Plot discovered,” is by no means proper, as, instead of keeping the audience in a state of suspence, it announces the catastrophe. This undoubtedly is an error in limine; and in the body of the work, we have a gross violation of all decorum, in the low buffoonery of Antonio with Aquilina. The scene, were it written with true comic humour, would be still exceptionable, as it is detached from the context of the fable, and is merely episodical. It is judiciously omitted in the representation, and the play as acted, is perhaps the best since the days of Shakespeare. Pierre is painted in the most striking colours; his zeal for liberty and abhorrence of oppression would be real virtues, had they not been converted, by the violent temper of the man, into the most furious passions…. Jaffier is a very different character, perhaps the fittest for the stage in the whole circle of the drama.

  He is a legitimate English classic, and as his “Venice Preserved” is yet among the most justly applauded of our dramatic performances, I should be censurable if I did not allow him a foremost place in the foremost rank of the DRAMATIC WORTHIES of his Country.

  “Venice Preserved” is more frequently represented than any tragedy after those of Shakspeare; the plot is highly dramatic in conception and conduct: even what seems, when we read it, a defect,—the shifting of our wishes, or perhaps rather of our ill wishes, between two parties, the senate and the conspirators, who are redeemed by no virtue,—does not, as is shown by experience, interfere with the spectator’s interest. Pierre, indeed, is one of those villains for whom it is easy to excite the sympathy of the half-principled and the inconsiderate. But the great attraction is in the character of Belvidera; and, when that part is represented by such as we remember to have seen, no tragedy is honored by such a tribute, not of tears alone, but of more agony than many would seek to endure. The versification of Otway, like that of most in this period, runs, almost to an excess, into the line of eleven syllables; sometimes also into the sdrucciolo form, or twelve syllables with a dactylic close. These give a considerable animation to tragic verse.

  Undoubtedly a work of genius, far superior to any dramatic composition of this period; it will remain for ever one of the classical tragedies of English literature.

  I remember one circumstance connected with my first performance of it which proved how painfully the unredeemed horror and wretchedness of the piece acted upon my nerves and imagination. In the last scene, where poor Belvidera’s brain gives way under her despair, and she fancies herself digging for her husband in the earth, and that she at last recovers and seizes him, I intended to utter a piercing scream; this I had not of course rehearsed, not being able to scream deliberately in cold blood, so that I hardly knew, myself, what manner of utterance I should find for my madness. But when the evening came, I uttered shriek after shriek without stopping, and rushing off the stage ran all round the back of the scenes, and was pursuing my way, perfectly unconscious of what I was doing, down the stairs that led out into the street, when I was captured and brought back to my dressing-room and my senses.

  The best tragedy of the Restoration…. The author of this play, in fact, seems a sort of prose Shakespeare, a Shakespeare with the romantic charm precipitated. The verse, indeed, is strong and good, but the spirit of the drama is domestic and mundane; there are no flights into the spiritual heavens. The imagination of the dramatist is lucid, rapid, and direct; there is the utmost clearness of statement and reflection; but although this masterpiece of genius is not obscured, it is certainly toned down by a universal tinge or haze of the commonplace.

  Otway’s most memorable work, though inferior in mere poetry and unstudied simplicity to “The Orphan,” surpasses it in tragic grandeur, in variety of action, and in intensity of interest. It has the further great advantage that the interest does not entirely arise from the situation, but that at least one of the characters is a skillful piece of painting from the life, and very probably from the author. In Jaffier we have a vivid portrait of the man who is entirely governed by the affections, and who sways from the ardent resolution to a weakness hardly distinguishable from treachery, as friendship and love alternately incline him. The little we know of Otway warrants the impression that he was such a man, and assuredly he could not have excited such warm interest in a character so feeble in his offence, so abject in his repentance, and in general so perilously verging on the despicable, without a keen sympathy with the subject of his portrait. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.

General

	There was a time when Otway charm’d the stage;
	Otway, the hope, the sorrow of our age;
	When the full pitt with pleas’d attention hung
	Wrap’d with each accent from Castalio’s tongue;
	With what a laughter was his Soldier read,
	How mourned they when his Jaffier struck and bled!

Otway fail’d to polish or refine.

  Otway has written but two tragedies, out of six, that are pathetic.—I believe he did it without much design; as Lillo has done in his Barnwell.—’Tis a talent of nature, rather than an effect of judgment, to write so movingly.

  The English language owes very little to Otway, though, next to Shakespeare, the greatest genius England ever produced in tragedy. His excellencies lay in painting directly from nature, in catching every emotion just as it rises from the soul, and in all the powers of the moving and pathetic. He appears to have had no learning, no critical knowledge, and to have lived in great distress. When he died (which he did in an obscure house near the Minories), he had about him the copy of a tragedy, which it seems he had sold for a trifle to Bentley the bookseller.

  No poet has touched the passions with a more masterly hand than Otway. He was acquainted with all the avenues to the human heart, and knew and felt all its emotions. He could rouse us into rage, and melt us into pity and tenderness. His language is that of nature, and consequently the simplest imaginable. He has equally avoided the rant of Lee, and the pomp of Dryden. Hence it was that his tragedies were received, not with loud applause, but with tears of approbation.

And every charm of Otway’s melting page.

… gentle Otway’s magic name.

  The cannons of Otway in his scenes of passionate affection rival at least, and sometimes excel, those of Shakespeare. More tears have been shed, probably, for the sorrows of Belvidera and Monimia than for those of Juliet and Desdemona.

  Otway was out off in the spring-tide of his genius, and his early death was, according to every appearance, a heavy loss to our drama. It has been alleged, indeed, in the present day, that Otway’s imagination showed no prognostics of great future achievements; but when I remember “Venice Preserved,” and “The Orphan,” as the works of a man of thirty, I can treat this opinion no otherwise than to dismiss it as an idle assertion.

  With the sweet and mellow diction of the former age, had none of its force, variety, or invention.

  Otway is the poet of sensual pathos; for, affecting as he sometimes is, he knows no way to the heart but through the senses. His very friendship, though enthusiastic, is violent, and has a smack of bullying. He was a man of generous temperament, spoilt by a profligate age. He seems to dress up a beauty in tears, only for the purpose of stimulating her wrongers.

  Through the pompous cloak of the new rhetoric, Thomas Otway now and then reached the passions of the other age. It is plain that the times he lived in marred him, that the oratorical style, the literary phrases, the classical declamation, the well-poised antitheses, buzzed about him, and drowned his note in their sustained and monotonous hum. Had he but been born a hundred years earlier! In his “Orphan” and “Venice Preserved” we encounter the sombre imaginations of Webster, Ford, and Shakspeare, their gloomy idea of life, their atrocities, murders, pictures of irresistible passions, which riot blindly like a herd of savage beasts, and make a chaos of the battlefield, with their yells and tumult, leaving behind them but devastation and heaps of dead. Like Shakspeare, his events are human transports and furies—a brother violating his brother’s wife, a husband perjuring himself for his wife; Polydore, Chamont, Jaffier, weak and violent souls, the sport of chance, the prey of temptation, with whom transport or crime, like poison poured into the veins, gradually ascends, envenoms the whole man, is spread on all whom he touches, and contorts and casts them down together in a convulsive delirium. Like Shakspeare, he has found poignant and living words, which lay bare the depths of humanity, the strange noise of a machine which is getting out of order, the tension of the will stretched to breaking-point, the simplicity of real sacrifice, the humility of exasperated and craving passion, which longs to the end and against all hope for its fuel and its gratification. Like Shakspeare, he has conceived genuine women,—Monimia, above all Belvidera, who, like Imogen, has given herself wholly, and is lost as in an abyss of adoration for him whom she has chosen, who can but love, obey, weep, suffer, and who dies like a flower plucked from the stalk, when her arms are torn from the neck around which she has locked them. Like Shakspeare again, he has found, at least once, the large bitter buffoonery, the crude sentiment of human baseness; and he has introduced into his most painful tragedy, an obscene caricature, an old senator, who unbends from his official gravity in order to play at his mistress’ house the clown or the valet.

  In addition to a keen insight into the dramatic excellence of themes, he possessed a real gift of tragic pathos; but he lacked the self-restraint which genius itself can rarely forego, and his efforts were as incomplete as his end was premature.

  The first writer of any prominence who chose any one for his subject outside of a royal family was Otway, whose “Orphan” (1680) and “Venice Preserved” (1682) long held the stage. The language of these plays is entirely different from that of Dryden’s, and, as we shall see, is of itself worthy of attention; but what I wish to mention, first of all, is the introduction of this new hero, and the abandonment of the king. This change was an indication of what was going to take place in the next century, and is but one of the instances which we shall find of the growth of democracy in literature. At this time, however, nothing of the sort was conjectured, and Otway, doubtless, wrote about private people from no desire to revolutionize letters. The poor man had but little chance to think of anything but the day before him, or, more probably, the night that was before him, and he manufactured gross comedies, and wrote two of the most memorable plays of the time.

  Thomson the poet ranked the parts of Monimia and Belvidera with those of Hamlet and Othello, and many of the greatest actresses owed to these rôles the leading triumphs in their careers. As Belvidera, Mrs. Barry was succeeded in turn by Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Seymour, Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Siddons, and Miss O’Neill; while Garrick and J. P. Kemble played both Pierre and Jaffier with notable success. Mills, Quin, and Mossop were also popular exponents of Pierre’s part, and Macready filled it for many years. As Monimia, Mrs. Oldfield, Mrs. Porter, and Mrs. Cibber all excelled. Miss O’Neill was the last eminent actress to essay the part. Garrick often played Chamont, Monimia’s brother. “The Orphan” and “Venice Preserved” both remained stock pieces until the present century. Twenty revivals of “Venice Preserved” are noticed by Genest, the latest at Drury Lane on 6 April 1829, with Young as Pierre and Miss Phillips as Belvidera. Sixteen performances of “The Orphan” are described by Genest between 1707 and 1815, on 2 Dec. of which year it was played at Covent Garden, with Charles Kemble as Chamont and Miss O’Neill as Monimia. Many modifications were introduced into the text of both pieces. J. P. Kemble printed an acting version of “Venice Preserved,” from which the scenes with Antonio were omitted; this was thrice published, in 1795, 1811, and 1814 respectively. A performance of “Venice Preserved,” by the boys of Otway’s school (Winchester), took place in 1755, when a prologue was written by Robert Lowth, afterwards Bishop of London.