SOURCE: Rich, Julia A. “Heroic Tragedy in Southerne's Oroonoko (1695): An Approach to a Split-plot Tragicomedy.” Philological Quarterly 2 (spring 1983): 187-200.

In the following essay, Rich compares the major and minor plots in The Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko.

The Restoration split-plot tragicomedy, combining as it frequently does wildly disparate tones in its “upper” and “lower” plots, can present difficulties to the modern reader searching for coherence. Should these works, many of them enormously popular in their own age, be dismissed as artistically unsatisfactory efforts to entertain an undiscriminating audience? Or do at least some of them possess a unity accessible by analysis? Modern critics have begun to discover organizing principles in these “hip-hop” plays, especially those of Dryden, by looking for parallels and correspondences between the two plots in character, situation, action, theme, or any combination of these elements. Eric Rothstein, for example, uses all four in demonstrating the unity...