SOURCE: Hagstrum, Jean H. “Restoration Love and the Tears of Morbidity.” In Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart, pp. 72-99. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

In the following excerpt, Hagstrum discusses satire and pathos in Otway's comedies and tragedies.

Thomas Otway fully deserves the reputation he possessed for over a century following his death—that of a tender, loving writer whose serious works, more than those of any other Restoration dramatist, aroused the pity that Aristotle required and who remained for generations the examplar par excellence of the pathetic. Since that quality was admired greatly as, along with the sublime, the very nerve of poetry, Otway's reputation as a tragedian was inflated until he occupied a position “next to Shakespeare” as a natural portrayer of human affections. It has not been sufficiently realized that the tears Otway shed and produced are as much...