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Contemporary Satire in Otway's Venice Preserved
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2021
Extract
From the accession of Charles II, English drama manifested a continuous strain of political satire, most of it in favor of the Court party. The Roundheads, the citizens, the Presbyterians, the opposers of the Crown, above all the foremost Liberal of the day, Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the Earl of Shaftesbury, were fair game to be attacked in a prologue, an epilogue, and even at times in a full-length character portrayal or an entire play.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1928
References
1 Shaftesbury is variously described by friends and foes as “the great liberal” and as “the wickedest man of a wicked age.” More reasonable is the estimate of G. M. Trevelyan: “A sceptic who believed in civil liberty and religious Toleration for all Protestants.... Sometimes the servant, sometimes the enemy of Cromwell and of Charles II., he was always the servant of civil freedom and the enemy of a persecuting State Church” (England under the Stuarts, 9th ed., 1920, p. 364).
2 The influence of the Court on Restoration Drama is especially well treated by Allardyce Nicoll, in Chapter I of A History of Restoration Drama, Cambridge, 1923.
3 W. D. Christie, A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, London and New York, 1871, II, 259.
4 Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 382.
5 John Pollock, The Popish Plot: A Study in the History of the Reign of Charles II, Lond., 1903, p. 260: “In the panic of the Popish Plot and the wild agitation of the Exclusion bill that struggle, exasperated by the Dover treaty and the Catholic intrigues, came to a head. Its consequence was the Rye House Plot, the perfection of Whig failure. In that struggle too the conflicting principles found their absolute exponents in the two wittiest and two of the most able statesmen in English history, each gifted with a supreme political genius, each exclusive of the other, each fighting for personal ascendency no less than for an idea, for principle no less than for power, Charles II and the Earl of Shaftesbury.”
6 Pollock, op. cit., pp. 256-57. Richard Lodge, The History of England from the Restoration to the Death of William III. (1660-1702), Lond. and N. Y., 1912, Chapter X.
7 Christie, op. cit., II, 87-88. Lodge, op. cit., p. 123.
8 Christie, op. cit., II, 136.
9 Ibid., II, 352. Burnet's History of My Own Time, ed. Osmund Airy, Oxford, 1900, Part I, II, 248, note 1.
10 Christie, op. cit., II, 419-426.
11 Ibid. II, 427.
12 Absalom and Achitophel, Part I. Montague Summers, the latest editor of Otway, apparently adopting the precept that “the Devil was the first Whig,” ignores all contemporary evidence in Shaftesbury's favor and denies him all excellence except in the degree of his crimes (The Complete Works of Thomas Otway, Lond., 1926, III, 277-8): “that lewd and hateful wretch, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, who may not untruly be said to have been one of the founders of the Whig faction. Patron and friend of the vile Titus Oates, true to no principles.... steeped himself in every species of disloyalty, treachery, and crime branded with the brand of Judas and of Cain, he found it convenient to fly to Holland in November, 1682, and there in the following January this execrable monster breathed his last, leaving ‘A Name to all succeeding Ages curst’.”
13 Nicoll, op. cit., p. 311; records from the Lord Chamberlain's department of the Public Record Office.
14 J. Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, etc., Bath, 1832, I, 294.
15 Lodge, op. cit., 462. The Hon. Roden Noel, Thomas Otway, London, 1888, pp. 288-89. Ibid., p. xlvii: “But Otway, to use his own words, only got ‘the pension of a prince's praise’; and a gracious permission to lampoon the greatest statesman of the age, which he did accordingly.”
16 In the five plays by Otway (1675-78) which precede the agitation over the Popish Plot, political allusions are doubtful and infrequent The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1679) exalts the Duke of York in the Prologue; but the supposed satire on Shaftesbury is questionable. The accusations against Marius as proud, base-born, a leader of the mob, and a free dispenser of bribes may perhaps be oblique hits at Shaftesbury; but the play is not closely topical in its allusions, and most of it is remote from contemporary affairs. The Orphan (1680) exalts the Duke of York in the Prologue, contains two passages expressing intense loyalty to kings, and jibes at the Dissenters in the Epilogue.
But it is in Otway's three last plays that contemporary allusions become most frequent and bitter. The Soldier's Fortune (1680) contains ten passages attacking Shaftesbury's party, false swearing, and the Plot. Venice Preserved (1682) intensifies and extends the attack on Shaftesbury. The Atheist (1683) contains ten passages, some of several pages, ridiculing the Dissenters, rebellion, false swearing, and the Plot, the Epilogue exulting in the discomfiture of those who
“were never sparing
To save the land, and damn yourselves, by swearing.”
17 The oath sworn by the senators when they promise immunity to Jaffeir and life to his associates.
18 Pollock, op. cit., pp. 312, 313, 328, 334, 345, 346: Burnet, op. cit., Part I, II, 198
19 Pollock, op. cit., p. 265.
20 See note 16 above.
21 Venice Preserved, Prologue, ll. 3-5:
When we have feared three years we know not what.
Till witnesses begin to die o' th' rot,
What made our poet meddle with a plot?
22 The text of Venice Preserved cited throughout is that of D. H. Stevens, Types of English Drama 1660-1780, Boston, 1923.
23 Prologue, ll. 11-12.
24 I, i, 296 ff.
25 II, ii,72 ff.
26 III. ii, 132 ff.
27 IV, ii, 59 ff.
28 IV, ii, 229 ff.
29 V, i, 219 ff.
30 Burnet, op. cit., Part I, II, 292: “hearing that England was at that time disposed to hearken to good swearers, they thought themselves well qualified for the employment.”
31 Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, Lond., 1785, III, 228-29.
32 Genest, op. cit., I, 353. Since this article was written, the surmise of Genest has been quoted with approval by Summers (op. cit., I, lxxviii).
33 Representative English Dramas from Dryden to Sheridan, N. Y., 1914, p. 438.
34 Pollock, op. cit., p. 368; Christie, op. cit., II, 382.
35 Pollock, op. cit., p. 369.
36 Ibid., pp. 369-70.
37 Prologue, ll 23-28.
38 “You are Enghlishman: when teason's hatchinh One might have thought you'd not have been behindhand.” (II, iii, 20-21.)
39 Burnet, op. cit., Part I, II, 213, Note 2.
40 Genest, op. cit., I, 353.
41 III, ii, 342.
42 III, ii, 433-38.
43 Bishop Burnet believed the charge against him: “He was, as to religion, a deist at best.” (Op. cit., Part I, I, 172.)
44 IV, ii, 165.
45 V, iii, 54-55.
46 The often-maligned praise which Taine has given these scenes is due in part to his entirely different conception of Antonio. To him, Antonio is not the doting pervert, but a statesman playing truant—“the busy man eager to leave his robes and his ceremonies .... a clown who had missed his vocation, whom chance has given an embroidered silk gown. He feels more natural, more at his ease, playing Punch than aping a statesman” (History of English Literature, New York, 1875, Book III, 25-6). This is curiously like some of the contemporary estimates of Shaftesbury, who was noted for wit and for practical joking. Pepys, for instance, says of him (May 15, 1663) that he was “a man of great business and yet of pleasure and drolling too.” Nicoll, op. cit., p. 154, calls the scenes, “marring features,” “not because they are badly written, but because they do not harmonise well with the general theme of the play.”
47 The Medal, l. 23.
48 Ibid., l. 37.
49 III, i.
50 Dict. Nat. Biog., XII, 111.
51 Christie, op. cit.. I. 134.
52 Lodge, op. cit., p. 175.
53 Burnet, op. cit., Part I, I, 172-73.
54 V, i, 122-57.
55 Burnet, op. cit., Part I, I, 172.
56 Pollock, op. cit., p. xviii. For a somewhat different statement see Burnet. op. cit., Part I, II, 262, Note 3.
57 Christie, op. cit., II, 348-49
58 Hudibras, III, Canto 2, ll. 379-420.
59 Christie, op. cit., II, 253.
60 Ibid., II 48.
61 Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 423.
62 Christie, op. cit., II, 349.
63 IV, ii, 32.
64 IV, ii, 55.
65 V. i 146.
66 Pollock, op. cit., p. 171.
67 W. J. Courthope represents Otway as incapable of presenting the historical conspiracy (A History of English Poetry, Lond., 1903, IV, 430): “no conspirators off the stage ever acted from such motives, or proceeded in such a manner, as Otway imagines except for the pathetic scenes between Jaffeir and Belvidera, on the one side, and Pierre and Jaffeir, on the other, the entire action of Venice Preserved is as improbable as a nightmare; the stage situations caused by the conflicts between love and conscience, love and friendship, public and private duties, are admirable; but of the nature of man in society, as it is represented to us in Julius Caesar, all trace has disappeared.”
68 John S.P. Tatlock and Robert G. Martin, Representative English Plays, N.Y., 1916. p. 459.
69 III, i, 25, 28, 65, 110; V, i, 124, 128, 153, 211.
70 The Orphan and Venice Preserved, ed. Charles F. McClumpha, Boston and Lond., 1908, p. xxxiv.
71 Op. cit., I, 353.