Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee are generally thought of as writers of tragedy. There is, however, another, more revealing, way of considering them: as writers not so much of tragedy as of history. While many contemporary playwrights employed historical plots at one time or another, Otway and Lee were unique in the scope and seriousness of their preoccupation with the past. Virtually all of their rhymed and blank verse tragedies were history plays. That is, not only were they set in the past: they had a known historical setting and had known historical characters. Why this preoccupation with history? To begin with, the past held authority and fascination for early modern writers and audiences, and mattered far more to them than it does to us. People went to the past, in ways that we do not, for guidance to the present. The minds of dramatists, audiences and readers moved easily across time, detecting parallels between past and present or noting examples of general historical laws which applied to all periods and thus applied to their own. Throughout the seventeenth century the conception of history remained didactic. Yet the split in society and ideology produced by the Civil War in the 1640s made it much harder for people to agree about what the lessons of history were. Whereas before the Civil War there was a degree of consensus, now there was polarization. The restoration of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text