And then to fall forgotten-Sleep or death Works always sure, and best can close my eyes.1 Oroonoko, on the other hand, is a romantic tragedy (also founded on a novel of Mrs. Behn's), in which is represented the magnanimous life and death of an Indian prince, who has somehow become a slave in Surinam to English planters, and is joined in that unhappy condition by his betrothed Imoinda, from whom he has long been parted. Their adventures are of the French school of romance, the improbability of them being emphasised by the realism of the underplot, which is intended to be comic, but is only disgusting. Though in its own day, and for long afterwards, this play was found very moving on the stage, it seems to me greatly inferior to The Fatal Marriage, and must have owed its success entirely to the charms of the actresses who took the part of Imoinda. The Spartan Dame is an example of yet another variety of the Caroline drama-namely, the political allegory like Crowne's Fall of Jerusalem and Dryden's Duke of Guise. The author gives the following account of its origin :— This tragedy was begun a year before the Revolution, and near four acts written without any view, but upon the subject, which I took from the Life of Agis in Plutarch. Many things interfering with those times, I laid by what I had written for seventeen years. I showed it then to the late Duke of Devonshire, who was in every regard a judge; he told me he saw no reason why it might not have been acted the year of the Revolution. I then finished it, and, as I thought, cut out the exceptionable parts, but could not get it acted, not being able to persuade myself to the cutting off of those limbs which I thought essential to the strength and life of it. But since I found it must pine in obscurity without it, I consented to the operation; and after the amputation of every line, very near the number of four hundred, it stands on its own legs still, and by the favour of the town, and indulgent assistance of friends, has come successfully forward upon the stage. When the play was printed, Southerne replaced the lines he had excised, marking them with inverted commas, 1 The Fatal Marriage, Act v. Sc. i. and from these it is plain that, if the Duke of Devonshire ever made the remark ascribed to him by the poet, he must have been much less of a Whig than is generally supposed. The play was obviously written from the Legitimist point of view, and was no doubt put on the stage in view of the Tory reaction in the first years of Queen Anne's reign. It proved amazingly successful, and Elijah Fenton who, as a Nonjuror, warmly sympathised with its sentiments addressed to Southerne a poetical epistle in which he said :— Our poets only practise on the pit With florid lines and trifling turns of wit. Beyond its political significance The Spartan Dame has no merit: the author has evidently wavered between two intentions, one to excite the male portion of his audience with party politics, and the other to interest the female spectators in the fate of one of the heroines, who is placed in the same situation as Lucretia, the victim of Sextus Tarquinius. The action is ill-constructed, and the characters indistinctly drawn; if the success of the play was due to anything but party spirit, it must have been the good acting of Mrs. Barry, in the part of Celona, or in that of Thelamia. William Congreve is mainly known by his prose comedies, which, of course, fall beyond the scope of this History, but, as the author of The Mourning Bride, he may be said to occupy a characteristic place in the progress of the poetical drama. He was the son of William Congreve of Bardsey Grange, near Leeds, and was baptized in Bardsey Church on the 10th of February 1669-70. His father being an officer in the army, and stationed in Ireland, he was educated at Kilkenny and Trinity College, Dublin, whence he was admitted to the Middle Temple on the 17th of March 1690-1. His first play, The Old Bachelor, acted at Drury Lane in 1692-3, was highly successful, and through the patronage of Halifax he obtained a place in the Pipe Office, and another in the Customs, worth about £600 a year. The Double Dealer and Love for Love, produced in 1695, were followed, in 1697, by The Mourning Bride. In 1698 Congreve was attacked by Collier for the "immorality and profaneness" of his Comedies; and though he affected to despise his assailant, yet the apology he put forward for himself and the ill-success (in spite of its wit) of The Way of the World (1700), show what a change had been wrought in the public taste. He made no further appearance upon the stage as a comic or tragic poet, but continued to lead an easy life in the midst of aristocratic and literary acquaintance. When the Whigs came into power in 1714, he was appointed Secretary for the Island of Jamaica, which made his sinecure emoluments worth about £1200 a year. He died on the 19th of January 1728-9, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Mourning Bride is a tragedy similar in class to Dryden's Don Sebastian, but not disfigured by the comic scenes which debase that play. Its general merits have perhaps been under-rated, in consequence of the exaggerated praise bestowed by Johnson on the celebrated lines describing a cathedral. Many of the incidents are, no doubt, violently improbable; but the action is not uninteresting, and the female characters are dramatically conceived; it is also extremely well written. One of the scenes-that in the cathedral between Almeria and Osmyn, or Alphonso, husband of the former, whom she believes to have been drowned-is genuinely pathetic; and the gusts of contrary emotions that sweep through the soul of Zara, who is in love with the captive Osmyn, are admirably portrayed. Zara's character is thus painted by the man she loves : This woman has a soul Of godlike mould, intrepid and commanding, And challenges, in spite of me, my best Will make all fatal,1 Declaimed by Mrs. Barry or Mrs. Bracegirdle, the outbursts of this passionate spirit must have been strongly affecting, as may be judged from the following extract : OSMYN. What would you from a wretch who came to mourn, ZARA. What joy do I require? If thou dost mourn I come to mourn with thee; to share thy griefs, ZARA. Thou hast a heart, though 'tis a savage one; For all I've done, and all I have endured; Thou and thy friend, till my compassion found thee; (2) The Mourning Bride was not free from the kind. of rants which Buckingham had satirised in The Rehearsal; 1 The Mourning Bride, Act iii. Sc. v. 2 Ibid. Act ii. Sc. ix. nor did these escape the penetrating malice of Collier, who by no means confined himself to rebuking "immorality and profaneness." He ridicules, and with justice, the passage beginning Ha! prostrate! bloody! headless! O! start eyes! And his jests as well as his serious protests told on public opinion. Mrs. Bowman speaking the Epilogue to Boadicea, Queen of Britain, a play produced in 1697, says: : Once only smutty jests could please the town, But now (heaven help our trade!) they'll not go down.1 The Court itself interfered on behalf of morality. By the Proclamation of Queen Anne of the 17th of January 1703-4, no one was allowed to go behind the scenes; no woman to wear a mask; no one to have a seat for which they had not paid the established price. All these were signs of the times, and obliged the dramatists to restrain their licence and alter the character of their plays. From the wild extravagances of the Caroline era, they turned to imitating the tamer and more decorous manner of the French tragedians. Racine was, of course, the object of their particular attention. In 1699 T. Boyer adapted the Iphigenie of the latter under the title, Achilles or Iphigenia in Aulis; and in 1707 Edmund ("Rag ") Smith's Phædra and Hippolytus, a play combined from Racine's Phèdre and Bajazet, was produced at the Haymarket. Following on the same lines Ambrose Philips, by a very slight transformation, altered Racine's Andromaque into his own Distrest Mother, which was acted at Drury Lane in 1712. The new style was warmly supported, out of friendship or party spirit, by the little Whig coterie surrounding Addison. Before the appearance of The Distrest Mother, for example, the following eulogistic advertisement, written by Steele, appeared in The Spectator:-2 1 Genest, History of the Stage, vol. ii. p. 118. 2 No. 290. |