Thomas Otway

Thomas Otway (3 March 1652 – 14 April 1685) was an English dramatist of the Restoration period, best known for Venice Preserv'd, or A Plot Discover'd (1682).

Otway was born at Trotton near Midhurst, the parish of which his father, Humphrey Otway, was at that time curate. Humphrey later became rector of Woolbeding, a neighbouring parish, where Thomas Otway was brought up and expected to commit to priesthood. He was educated at Winchester College, and in 1669 entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a commoner, but left the university without a degree in the autumn of 1672. At Oxford he made the acquaintance of Anthony Cary, 5th Viscount Falkland, through whom, he says in the dedication to Caius Marius, he first learned to love books. In London he made acquaintance with Aphra Behn, who in 1672 cast him as the old king in her play, Forc'd Marriage, or The Jealous Bridegroom, at the Dorset Garden Theatre. However, due to severe stage fright, he gave an abysmal performance and never returned to the stage, instead opting to write what was being performed. The same year as the performance, his father died, triggering Otway to officially abandon any thoughts of priesthood and move to London to become a playwright, where he discovered his muse.

The muse he had fallen in love with was Elizabeth Barry, who played many of the leading parts in his plays. Six letters to her survive, the last of them referring to a broken appointment in the Mall. She seems to have flirted with Otway, but had no intention of permanently offending Rochester, her lover. In 1678, driven to desperation, Otway obtained a commission through Charles, Earl of Plymouth, a natural son of Charles II, in a regiment serving in the Netherlands. The English troops were disbanded in 1679, but were left to find their way home as best they could. They were paid with depreciated paper, and Otway arrived in London late in the year, ragged and dirty, a circumstance utilized by Elkanah Settle in his Sessions of the Poets.

Upon his return, he apparently ceased to struggle against his poverty and misfortunes. At one point in attempts to make money, he tutored the son of famed Restoration actress Nell Gwyn. The generally accepted story regarding the manner of his death was first given in Theophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets. He is said to have emerged from his retreat at the Bull on Tower Hill to beg for bread. A passer-by, learning who he was, gave him a guinea, with which Otway hastened to a baker's shop. He ate too hastily, and choked on the first mouthful. Whether this account of his death is true or not, it is certain that he died in the utmost poverty, and was buried on 16 April 1685 in the churchyard of St. Clement Danes.

In 1675 Thomas Betterton produced Otway's first play, Alcibiades at the Dorset Garden Theatre, where all but one of his plays would eventually be produced. It is a tragedy, written in heroic verse, saved from absolute failure only by the actors. Elizabeth Barry took the part of Draxilla, and her lover, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, recommended Otway to the Duke of York (later King James II). He made a great improvement in Don Carlos, Prince of Spain (licensed 15 June 1676). The material for this rhymed tragedy came from the novel of the same name, written in 1672 by the Abbé de Saint-Real, the source from which Friedrich Schiller also drew his tragedy of Don Carlos. In it the two characters familiar throughout his plays make their appearance. Don Carlos is the impetuous, unstable youth, who seems to be drawn from Otway himself, while the queen's part is the gentle pathetic character repeated in his more celebrated heroines, Monimia and Belvidera. It got more money, says John Downes (Roscius Anglicanus, 1708) of this play, than any preceding modern tragedy.

In 1677 Betterton produced two adaptations from the French by Otway, Titus and Berenice (from Racine's Bérénice), and The Cheats of Scapin (from Molière's Scapin the Schemer). These were printed together, with a dedication to Rochester. In 1678 he produced an original comedy, Friendship in Fashion, which was very successful.

In February 1680, the first of Otway's two tragic masterpieces, The Orphan, or The Unhappy Marriage, was produced at the Dorset Garden, with Mrs. Barry playing the part of Monimia. Written in blank verse, modeled upon Shakespeare, its success was due to Otway's mastery of tragic pathos found in the characters of Castalio and Monimia. The History and Fall of Caius Marius, produced in 1679 and first printed in 1680, is a curious grafting of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on the story of Marius as related in Plutarch's Lives. Caius Marius was incredibly popular during its time, outperforming Romeo and Juliet for at least seventy years following its initial release.

In 1680, Otway also published The Poets Complaint of his Muse, or A Satyr against Libells, in which he retaliated against his literary enemies and critics. An indifferent comedy, The Soldier's Fortune (1681), was followed in February 1682 by Venice Preserv'd, or A Plot Discover'd. The story is founded on the Histoire de la conjuration des Espagnols contre la Venise en 1618, also by the Abbé de Saint-Réal, but Otway modified the story considerably. The character of Belvidera is his own, and the leading part in the conspiracy, taken by Bedamor, the Spanish ambassador, is given in the play to the historically insignificant Pierre and Jaffeir. The piece has a political stance, with the narrative influenced by the fictitious conspiracy of the Popish Plot, which heightened anti-Catholic sentiments in England in favor of political advancement. His frustrations with such political scandals are evident in a caricature of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, a founder of the Whig party in the character of Antonio and in the play's "Prologue", in the following lines: