Nature in Venice Preserv'd

Abstract

It is probably surprising to discover how many of our best literary minds have taken positions on Venice Preserv'd. Dryden, Addison, Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, Lord Byron, Goethe-in a way the criticism of this play has become a strand of our intellectual history.' Two judgments in particular seem to me valuable, Dryden's eloquent phrase but nature is there, 2 and Dr. Johnson's summary it is the work of a man not attentive to decency, nor zealous for virtue; but of one who conceived forcibly, and drew originally, by consulting nature in his own breast. ' Dryden and Johnson seem to share the implicit understanding that Otway's idea of Nature was dialectically and psychologically sound. Their proximity to the play, and the critical quality of their minds ought to warn us to take seriously their sympathy for Otway. There is another critic of some importance. One of themost penetrating remarks on literary influence that I know is that of Balzac's Vautrin, who reminds us of his ancestry: My passion is the same as that of Pierre and Jaffier [sic], and I know Venice Preserved by heart. 4 It is not often that a literary character gives us such an explicit conception about himself, and the revelation of such a figure is doubly worth consideration. Vautrin is able to see the resemblance because of his ideology. Like Pierre, he requires of a world-view two things: that it account for social injustice in passionately dialectical terms and that it satisfy his vast and egocentric cathexis. Like Pierre, he is a reasoner and something indeed of a theorist. He is especially alive to those implications of Venice Preserv'd which have to do with