A Plot Discover'd; or, The Uses of Venice Preserv'd within Clarissa

Abstract

Because Samuel Richardson's Clarissa is filled with allusions to the theatre as well as with actual quotations from plays, the relation between the novel and the drama has been variously explored. Among recent studies, William B. Warner's controversial book cites Clarissa's absorption of dramaturgical patterns as evidence that the novel is 'indeterminate': 'The copresence of comedy and tragedy in Clarissa is early evidence that this text is not a unified organic body dominated by a single mythic design. Instead, this text is much more like a geological formation, with layers of sharply differentiated strata that tell us of the successive acts of interpretation, each with its own peculiar set of haphazard intensities, that give this text its ambiguous shape.' Warner believes that 'the conjunction of tragedy and comedy in Clarissa is violent and inharmonious' and that the novel itself lacks a stable structure to which all readers react alike. By contrast, Mark Kinkead-Weekes and others regard Clarissa as 'dramatic narrative' and as coherent tragedy. Despite such interest, no one has fully considered why the author included an actual night at the theatre in the work and why he chose Venice Preserv'd, or, A Plot Discover'd for this purpose. Otway's play is clearly not a 'key' to the novel as a whole; the performance that Lovelace and Clarissa attend is easily overlooked among the many and varied incidents within this complex work. Nevertheless, a closer consideration of the theatrical presentation reveals a telling analogy between the disturbing process of reading Richardson's narrative and the psychological warfare that constitutes the very 'action' of its plot.