Thomas Otway is one of the most brilliant--and one of the most disturbed-of Restoration playwrights. His two most popular tragedies, The Orphan and Venice Preserved, held the boards for a century and a half and were second in popularity only to those of William Shakespeare. They spawned other tragedies focusing especially on women protagonists--plays by John Banks, Thomas Southerne, and Nicholas Rowe--and they influenced the development of bourgeois drama both in France and Germany. But the versions that remained popular acting vehicles for the great actors and actresses of the eighteenth century were expurgated. From the beginning Otway's plays were disturbing, and his comedies, perhaps his greatest achievement, have never been popular after some initial success by the first two. They reveal that Otway's real bent is as a satirist who attacks the corruption and finally the absurdity of human existence.

The known facts of Otway's life are...