SOURCE: Leissner, Debra. “Divided Nation, Divided Self: The Language of Capitalism and Madness in Otway's Venice Preserv'd.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 2 (fall 1999): 19-31.

In the following essay, Leissner argues that in Venice Preserv'd Otway was not making a political statement but rather was writing a drama in reaction to the changing social and economic climate of late seventeenth-century England.

Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd; or, A Plot Discovered (1682) is an enigma, if judged by the interpretations of scholars who have tried to associate Otway's drama with plots and political parties in England from 1678 through 1682. The often contradictory conclusions that scholars have reached when they try to determine who represents whom in the drama suggest that the nature of the play's characters resists strictly allegorical interpretations. But for all that, the characters answer in personal terms to the politics of Otway's day. I shall argue that in Venice...