Thomas Southerne, restoration playwright

Thomas Southerne, for nearly two centuries largely ignored by critics and scholars, was in the last decade of the seventeenth century one of the foremost playwrights of the London stage. . He was sponsored in the middle '80's by Dryden and subsequently helped both Congreve and Cibber to establish themselves as dramatists. In his own time he was tremendously successful with a variety of dramatic modes-comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy-and appears to have been the first English playwright able to support himself exclusively by writing plays.

Except for a study by John Wendell Dodds which appeared in l933, Southerne has received little attention in this century, although the last few years have produced a handful of articles concerned with certain of his works. . The purpose of this present research has been to reassess Southerne's corpus, particularly the eight plays written before l700, in an effort to determine both the nature of his talents and whether his enormous contemporary popularity was justified. The conclusions are that he was indeed an excellent and at times gifted dramatist and that it is his current neglect, which probably results in large part from the lack of a modern edition, which is unjustified.

His great strengths lay in characterization and motivation, the ability to see relationships between seemingly disparate types, to exploit these ties in dramatically effective ways, and to evoke natural responses to situations. He became particularly adept at handling the split-plot tragicomedy, scoring his two greatest successes with The Fatal Marriage, or The Innocent Adultery (1694) and Oroonoko (1695), both of which linked serious stories drawn from works by Mrs. Behn with sex-comedy subplots.

In his own time Southerne was known as a favorite of the ladies, and his abilities are particularly evident in the long line of remarkable female characters he created. These range from the libertine Lucia, disguised as Sir Antony Love, to the betrayed wives Mrs. Friendall and Celona, to the splendidly corrupt society courtesan Lady Trickitt. These women are for the most part strong and assertive. They are caught, as Southerne makes clear in each instance, in cultural traps not of their own making and are yet able by their own efforts to impose some sort of control over themselves and their destinies. Isabella, the protagonist of The Fatal Marriage, is another type. She has long been considered an early sentimental heroine, pathetic in her destruction by forces beyond her control. Yet careful reading of the whole play, the comic as well as the serious plot, reveals that she is in fact a truly tragic figure who brings on herself most of the disasters which befall her. She is a brilliant creation by an artist whose respect for and understanding of the situation of women allowed him to present female characters not just as victims but as humans responsible for their own failures as well as successes.