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| "Remember poor Otway" |
Thomas
Otway
| "A steady Faith and Loyalty to my Prince was all... my Father left me," |
Born on 3 March 1652, son of a Sussex rector with good, even spectacular North Country connections, Thomas Otway received his education at Winchester and Oxford, where some curious destiny brought the Duke's Players from London to perform during the only full summer or his brief residence. In February 1671 his father died, and by the autumn Thomas was gone to London:
To Britain's great Metropolis I stray'd
Where Fortune's generall Game is play'd... My forward Spirit prompted me to find
A Converse equall to my Mind
But by raw judgement easily miss-led...
I mist the brave and wise, and in their stead
On every sort of Vanity I fed...
Gamesters, Half-wits, and Spendthrifts (such as think
Mischievous midnight Frollicks bred by Drink
Are Gallantry and Wit,
Because to their lewd Understandings fit)
Were those wherewith two years at least I spent,
To all their fulsome Follies most incorrigibly bent.
| "I am a Wretch of honest Race: My Parents not obscure, nor high in Titles were; They left me Heir to no Disgrace. My Father was (a thing now rare) Loyall and brave, my Mother chast and fair, Their pledge of Marriage-vows was onely I: Alone I liv'd their much-lov'd fondled Boy." |
His first job in the theatre was as an actor in a play by Mrs Aphra Behn, The Jealous Bridegroom. He was a notable failure. John Downes wrote:
"Mr Otway the Poet having an Inclination to turn Actor, Mrs Behn gave him the King in the play for a Probation Part, but he being not us'd to the Stage, the full House put him to such a Sweat and Tremendous Agony, being dash't, spoilt him for an Actor."
| "I found myself Father of a Dramatique birth which I call'd Alcibiades" |
Otway
now turned to writing plays. Remembered only as "the first play that Mr Otway wrote",
his Alcibiades first united the two lasting passions of his life: in
the auditorium, the Duke of York, extending a royal hand for kissing, promised to
favour the poet's next play; on stage, the 17-year-old Elizabeth Barry played Draxilla.
Otway fell in love with her. She, however, was already mistress to the Earl of Rochester,
who was later Otway's wayward patron. Though not handsome ("her Mouth op'ning most
on the Right side, which she strove to draw t'other Way"), to her titled lovers,
to Otway, and to audiences in roles he created for her, she was spellbinding, but
he could never make headway with her: "She could get Bastards with other men, tho'
she would hardly condescend to grant Otway a kiss, who was as aimiable in person
as the best of them".
| "I have languished through seven long tedious years of desire." |
With
Don Carlos (1676), dedicated to the Duke of York, Otway began to make
himself a name. 'Admirably acted, it got more Money than any preceding Modern Tragedy."
Two adaptations from the French — Racine's Bérénice and Moliere's
Les Fourberies de Scapin — followed. Then silence, broken in 1678 by
his first comedy, Friendship in Fashion, given as Mrs Barry nursed Rochester's first
child.
| "The more I strove, the more I fail'd I chaf'd, I bit my Pen, curst my Soull, and rail'd... I tore my Paper, stabb'd my Pen And swore I'd never write again." |
Before the year's end Otway was fighting in Flanders, on a commission possibly
obtained through the Earl of Plymouth, one of the natural sons of Charles II and
of Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, to whom he dedicated
Venice Preserv'd. An early
peace brought him back to England by January 1679, richer by one uncashable debenture
for £27/17/6, a subject of mirth for the wits.
London was then in the throes of the Popish Plot (see "The Bloodiest Hoax in History"
in this programme). The Duke's Company, who staged Otway's plays, were in at the
birth. Matthew Medburn, who regularly appeared with them, had taken up with a down-at-heel
cleric, introducing him to his Catholic friends at a drinking club. The cleric was
Titus Oates, and as the price of his friendship, Matthew was now in Newgate prison.
| "She forc'd Tears from the Eyes of her Auditory" |
In 1680 Rochester died, and Otway provided Mrs Barry with the first of her great tragic roles, Monimia in The Orphan, and with the part of Lady Dunce in his most successful comedy, The Soldier's Fortune.
Early in 1682 Venice Preserv'd was produced for the first time, with Mrs Barry as Belvidera. It was a huge success, partly due to its bearings on the Popish Plot, and its portrait of the Earl of Shaftesbury as the old Senator, Antonio.
Otway's last play, The Atheist, a sequel to The Soldier's Fortune, appeared in 1683, and its author now began to sink into death by slow starvation. Still a "Jovial Companion, and a great Lover of the Bottle, particularly of Punch", it was said he was "more beholden to Captain Symonds the Vintner, in whose debt he died four hundred pounds, than to all his Patrons of Quality." He was composing a congratulatory poem on the inauguration of King James II when he died. In this classic account, given in Dr Johnson's Lives of the Poets, while hiding from his creditors in a pub, he was:
"driven at last to the most grievous necessity, ventured out of his lurking place, almost naked and shivering, and went into a coffee-house on Tower Hill, where he saw a gentleman, of whom he solicited the loan of a shilling. The gentleman was quite shocked to see the author of Venice Preserv'd begging bread, and compassionately put into his hand a guinea. Mr Otway, having thanked his benefactor, retired and changed the guinea to purchase a roll; as his stomach was full of wind from excess of fasting, the first mouthful choked him and instantaneously put a period to his days."
| "Think and be generous" |
He was thirty-three.
The last line of his life was written in the parish register of St Clement Danes:
1685. Thomas Otway, a man, buried 16 April.
[See also the Thomas Otway biography from the Soldier's Fortune programme.]