SOURCE: Berman, Ronald. “Nature in Venice Preserv'd.” ELH 36, no. 3 (September 1969): 523-39.

In the following essay, Berman explores Venice Preserv'd as a study of human nature and the influences of society, declaring that the play is “a rigorous and intelligent representation of the failure of freedom to acknowledge the limits of creation.”

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.¹ 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.”³ Dryden and Johnson seem...