Thomas Southerne was a popular and influential playwright, a contemporary during his most productive years of John Dryden, William Congreve, Colley Cibber, and Sir John Vanbrugh. His two best tragedies, The Fatal Marriage (1694) and Oroonoko (1695), appealed to the imagination of his time and continued the tradition of "pathetic" tragedy, exemplified in the 1670s and early 1680s by Thomas Otway, John Banks, and Nathaniel Lee. This type of play, in which the sympathies of the audience are strongly moved by the sufferings of a worthy hero or heroine, foreshadows later playwrights, such as Nicholas Rowe and George Lillo, who worked within the tradition. Southerne was considered especially talented at developing female characters, such as Isabella of The Fatal Marriage and Imoinda of Oroonoko, who in distressed circumstances suffer mightily and, in the hands of a talented actress such as Elizabeth Barry, moved audiences to tears. Most recently, Southerne's comedies...