SOURCE: Brown, Laura. “Affective Tragedy.” In English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: An Essay in Generic History, pp. 69-101. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981.

In the following excerpt, Brown explains why The Orphan and Venice Preserv'd are some of the purest and most cynical examples of affective tragedy.

Thomas Otway's mature affective drama, represented by The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserved (1682), but clearly prefigured in the early near-heroic Don Carlos (1676) and Titus and Berenice (1676), reveals the depoliticization characteristic of the purest versions of the form. The simple domesticity of Otway's tragic plots entails not merely the choice of love over empire, which we have seen to be common to Dryden and Lee, but the elimination of empire altogether. Along with honor and empire, Otway necessarily eliminates status, even as a nominal label attached to a primarily pitiable character or as a nostalgic reflection of past heroism. Otway's protagonists are neither...