SOURCE: Hume, Robert D. “Otway and the Comic Muse.” Studies in Philology 73, no. 1 (January 1976): 87-116.

In the following essay, Hume argues that Otway's comedies are every bit as good as his more acclaimed tragedies, concluding that critics who have faulted the comedies are less offended by their bawdy humor than their pessimistic vision of human nature.

We now think of Otway as a writer of tragedies. The domestic simplicity of The Orphan (1680) is often praised, while the flaming passions and harrowing pathos of Venice Preserv'd still have some power to move us. Articles on Otway's pathos, politics, religion, and tragic vision abound. Yet he did write some comedies, and about these there has been a conspiracy of silence. In his own age, Otway was considered a comic writer of some importance. Even the splenetic author of A Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702) singles him out, with Dryden, as...