Remember poor Otway BOOKS
'MARI( SPURLING
'What on earth you are serious about I haven't got the remotest idea. About everything. I fancy. You have such an absolutely trivial nature.' Thus Algernon Moncrieff, and though he was not speaking of or to the English theatre, he well might have been. For it is precisely this dangerously disingenuous trivi- ality which, having dominated our stage for centuries, ruled it in his day as it has • done since. Hence the mindless docility with which we accept the current wave of would-be serious playwrights; hence the vapidity of the senti- mental comedy which preceded them; hence, too, the savagely effective campaign -of sup- pression and distortion which put a stop, some 250 years ago, to the last great period in our drama. And hence the defence of restoration comedy so gracefully put about by Lamb, and so thankfully received by apologists ever since, that it dwelt in a fanciful dream world, not to be confused with real-or earnest life.
So powerful a fiction evidently answers .to some deep-seated need, among the playgoing public, for the kind of fulsome and dishonest reassurance it has been the business of the English playwright to provide for the past 200 years and more; it has only recently shown signs of wearing thin; it is even tacitly accepted by Thomas Otway's latest editor, in the preface to the otherwise admirable and handsome 1932 edition, now happily reprinted (The Works. of Thomas Otway : Plays, Poems and Love Letters edited by J. C. Ghosh, OUP, two volumes 110s). And yet, if the fiction can with difficulty be sustained for, say, Congreve or Vanbrugh, in Otway's case it is patently absurd. Like SD many of his great contemporaries, Otway lived precariously and died young, pos- sibly of starvation, certainly in poverty and want—Want! worldly want! that hungry meager Fiend' who stalks the pages of his greatest plays. 'Well, thou will't certainly die, in a Ditch for this,' says Courtine in The Soldiers Fortune, on - receipt of a gift from a friend unexpectedly in funds: 'I grant you a Gentle- man may swear and lye for his Friend, pimp for his Friend, -hang for his Friend, and so forth; but to part with ready money is the devil.'
A sound view and one familiar enough • in English comedy. But the case for Otway is not simply that he was an uncommonly funny man; nor that he deals with a 'swinging London'—curious to find him using this favourite adjective, even down to 'a dose of swinging Opium,' with precisely the connola- tation that it has today—in many ways disCon- certingly like our own; rather that his shabby and disgruntled heroes inhabit a 'world 'so riddled, with vulgarity, self-deception, pom- posity and cant. In other words, so disagree- ably like 'real' life. Which explains, no doubi, why, of all the restoration comic playwrights, Otway has been the most neglected.
Partly, of course, this is because his comedy has been overshadowed by his tragedies—he turned out half a dozen, and one at least which, until this century, rivalled Shakespeare in popu- larity. But Otway's peculiar honesty—a harSh, offensive frankness tempered, in the- two greit plays of his maturity, with a rare einotional
generosity—was from the start hopelessly at odds with the tragic conventions of the day. It shines through his last, justly celebrated tragedies—fitfully in The Orphan, and with a bleak morose fanaticism in Venice Pre- serv'd. But it reached its most startling and most satisfying expression, not on -the con- ventionally bloody terms of heroic tragedy; not even in the sombre passions of Venice Pre- serv'd; rather in the much more difficult and riskier, because so much more humdrum, resolutions of his comedies.
Not that the one would have been possible without the other. The point is obvious if one sets the bombastic and cynical frivolity of his early tragedies—much the usual mixture of stabbings, suicides, self-sacrifice and battles off, briskly interwoven with rape, betrayal and multiple murder—beside the haunting bitter- ness which pervades his portrait of contem-
porary life in The Soldier's Fortune and its sequel, The Atheist. Such singular comedies .would scarcely have been written, unless out of a powerful dissatisfaction with the heroic drama. Indeed, the heroes of Alcibiades and Don Carlos remind one of nothing so much as that blameless citizen—'this Heroick Person' as he is unkindly called—who so .officiously attempts to protect his sister's virtue in The Atheist. 'My brother Theoderet,' says that -lady coldly, -`puffs, swells, grinds his Teeth and stamps as if he would brain himself against the next wall.' It is an accurate description of Otway's early 'heroes, and probably a pretty fair impression of the way these parts •were played. Otway's own dim view of his success in this line is plain enough, from his preface to the much admired Don Carlos: 'my Hero, to do-him right, was none of that squeamish . Gentleman I made him, but would as little
• have bloggEd at.the.obliging the passion of a young and beautiful Lady, as I should my self, had I the same opportunities which 1 have given him.'
The trouble is. of course, that Otway's out- look was consistent, too much so for clam- fort—hence the palpable insincerity of so much in his tragedies and, by the same token, the relentless honesty of the two parts of The Soldier's Fortune. Compare, for instance, the absurdly pompous oaths—'By Heaven, I love/ My Polydore more than all worldly Joys!'— regularly exchanged between his tragic heroes with Courtine's oblique, ungracious and in- finitely more plausible declaration of affec- tion: 'Well, thou will't die in a Ditch for this . . .' One would be forced to conclude, if he had not spelt it out himself, that Otway's tragic heroes—like his comic heroes, but with- out their dangerous self-knowledge—are at best a shifty crew.
The gap between illusion and reality, noble sentiment and ignoble action, was Otway's fascination and a gap which—with the pos- sible exception of Pierre in Venice Preserv'ej —could be bridged only in comedy. Even in the two great tragic 'heroines, Monimia and Belvidera—grave and passionate portraits of wronged innocence—there is a hint of disin- genuousness, something which rings false, in their early and too-effusive protestations. Com- pare, again, the identical predicament in The Soldier's Fortune. Sylvia, like Monimia, is con- fronted with a lover in her bedroom in the middle of the night; but .here there can be no question of submission followed by a noble death. For Sylvia—wronged but not innocent in contemporary London—the situation is sordid, not tragic, and demands a rather trickier solution. For one thing, Courtine is already roaring drunk. For another—and un- like Monimia—Sylvia is neither surprised nor shocked at his intended rape. If true love is the highest good in the tragedies, marriage is the ultimate evil, inordinately dreaded by the comic heroes;-and with-reason, considering the ugly- consequences -which await any character rash enough to try it from desire or greed.
Sylvia is clear enough on the perils that beset her, just as she is well aware that her lover is not only greasy, .unkempt, penniless and alhe make, but quite ,unjustifiably pleased with himself. And,it is the grace and the adroit good humour with which .she accepts all these things—for they are, if not the grounds, at any rate the terms on which she loves him—which relieve the harshness of their scenes together; and which, as they move precariously towards their one moment of unconditional surrender, give their love-making a deep, sudden sweet- ness. This brief flowering of romanticism from stony, unromantic ground is not peculiar to Otway—it is one •of the hallmarks of restora- tion comedy—but the sense of underlying pain and treachery is found nowhere else.
If Sylvia is, in some sense, the counterpart of Otway's great tragic heroines, then her cousin's lover, Beaugard, is, so to speak, an adult version of the impeccable, improbable and=-save only Pierre—sadly immature tragic heroes. He shares none of their illusions; cast off without a penny by his father, he is (like his author) newly disbanded from Monmouth's army -when we -meet . him—shabby, disaffected and unscrupulous. And yet his sour knowledge of the world overlays a rare sweet temper. Take, for instance, his relationship with hit father—one of those disreputable and shame- less ancient wrecks on whom Otway is invari- ably good. Alternately wheedled and bullied by his parent, to make a decent marriage and not shame the family like his bachelor uncle, our hero remains admirably firm. And note the patience, the courtesy and wit—and the exquisite poetic justice—of Beaugard's retort: `[My uncle], dying, bequeaths me Two thousand pounds a year: You, Sir, the younger Brother, and my honoured Father, have been married and are not able, for ought I can perceive, to leave me a bent Ninepence.' There is something of this humour in all his dealings : his father—who is not above plotting to run him through the guts and abscond with the inheritance—is amply provided for; Courtine's peevish malice is most insouciantly parried; and his cynicism, in various expert courtships, conceals a transparent gentlenesS and gaiety.
For, though Beaugard has no mercy on hypocrisy or cant, he shares with his author an uncensorious tolerance for folly, vanity and weakness. Also an uncompromising honesty where his own emotions are concerned. He is one of Otway's most astonishing creations, and it is largely through him that we catch the play's characteristic mood, at once bitter and entirely free from rancour. For The Soldier's Fortune is that rare thing, an absolutely faithful reflection of ordinary life—a reflection in an unwavering, harsh, comic light which yet skims the depths and the delicate nuances of tragedy. This is some- thing which neither Shakespeare nor Congreve attempted; and though it has been achieved since by a handful of playwrights, it would take a bold man to claim that it has been done again in English. Which is why, now more than ever and for reasons of urgent practical self-interest, it behoves us, in his own words, to `Remember poor Otway.'
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