The Experimental Theatre of Lee and Otway

Abstract

When Nathaniel Lee and Thomas Otway commenced writing for the stage in 1674, they had to choose among the four rival models outlined in John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667): Dryden’s new heroic drama, the neoclassical dramaturgy of Corneille and Racine, the irregular but vigorous and natural drama of Elizabethan and Jacobean poets such as Shakespeare and Fletcher, or the Attic simplicity of Sophocles’s tragedies. Lee and Otway experimented with each of these modes in turn during their period of ‘Experimental Theatre’. This chapter analyses their trials in Otway’s heroic drama Don Carlos; Otway’s Racinian tragedy Titus and Berenice; Otway’s Caius Marius (a blend of Plutarch’s life and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), Lee’s Mithridates, a self-conscious attempt to refashion Shakespeare and Fletcher for a new age; and Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus, a play conscious of previous engagements with the subject by Sophocles, Seneca, Fletcher, and Corneille. In their mature plays, Lee and Otway strove for an elegant neoclassical design that blended the masculine vigour of Shakespearean language with the melting scenes of courtship found in Fletcher, that presented audiences with baroque contrasts of mood and setting, that relied on more violent stage action than could be admitted to the French stage, and that sought to create a revolution of the passions. This chapter examines Otway’s The Orphan and Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus as examples of their mature dramatic craft.