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 enlists twentieth-century psychoanalytical theory to offer fresh interpretations of Otway's reaction to political and social tension in 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 Preserv'd, Otway does not recreate historical events as such, but, rather...