Otway [7] has followed Nature in the Language
of his Tragedy, and therefore shines in the Passionate
Parts, more than any of our English Poets.
As there is something Familiar and Domestick in the
Fable of his Tragedy, more than in those of any other
Poet, he has little Pomp, but great Force in his Expressions.
For which Reason, though he has admirably succeeded
in the tender and melting Part of his Tragedies, he
sometimes falls into too great a Familiarity of Phrase
in those Parts, which, by Aristotle’s
Rule, ought to have been raised and supported by the
Dignity of Expression.
It has been observed by others, that this Poet has
founded his Tragedy of Venice Preserved on
so wrong a Plot, that the greatest Characters in it
are those of Rebels and Traitors. Had the Hero
of his Play discovered the same good Qualities in
the Defence of his Country, that he showed for its
Ruin and Subversion, the Audience could not enough
pity and admire him: But as he is now represented,
we can only say of him what the Roman Historian
says of Catiline, that his Fall would have
been Glorious (si pro Patria sic concidisset)
had he so fallen in the Service of his Country.
C.
[Footnote 1: From Seneca on Providence:
“‘De Providentia’, sive
Quare Bonis Viris Mala Accidant cum sit Providentia’
Sec. 2, ’Ecce spectaculum dignum, ad quod
respiciat intentus operi suo Deus: ecce par
Deo dignum, vir fortis cum mala fortuna compositus,
utique si et provocavit.”
So also Minutius Felix, ‘Adversus Gentes:’
“Quam pulchrum spectaculum Deo,
cum Christianus cum dolore
congueditur? cum adversus minas, et supplicia,
et tormenta componitur?
cum libertatem suam adversus reges ac
Principes erigit.”
Epictetus also bids the endangered man remember that
he has been sent by God as an athlete into the arena.]
[Footnote 2: shall]
[Footnote 3: ‘Poetics’, Part I. Sec.
7. Also in the ‘Rhetoric’, bk III.
ch. i.]
[Footnote 4: These chiefs of the French tragic
drama died, Corneille in 1684, and his brother Thomas
in 1708; Racine in 1699.]
[Footnote 5: It is the last sentence in Part
III. of the ’Poetics’.]
[Footnote 6: Nathaniel Lee died in 1692 of injury
received during a drunken frolic. Disappointed
of a fellowship at Cambridge, he turned actor; failed
upon the stage, but prospered as a writer for it.
His career as a dramatist began with ‘Nero’,
in 1675, and he wrote in all eleven plays. His
most successful play was the ‘Rival Queens’,
or the Death of Alexander the Great, produced in 1677.
Next to it in success, and superior in merit, was
his ‘Theodosius’, or the Force of Love,
produced in 1680. He took part with Dryden in
writing the very successful adaptation of ‘OEdipus’,
produced in 1679, as an English Tragedy based upon
Sophocles and Seneca. During two years of his
life Lee was a lunatic in Bedlam.]
