THOMAS, one of the foremost names in the English drama, was the only child of the Rev. Humphrey Otway, rector of Wolbeding in Sussex, and was born at Trotton, in the same county, on the 3d of March 1651. Passing from Winchester school, where he received his early education, he entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a commoner, in 1669. Little is known respecting his university career. He was not remarkable, however, for diligence in study, and seems to have cultivated society more than letters. He was intended for the church; but the death of his father, who left him no other inheritance, he tells us, but that of "faith and loyalty," compelled him to leave college without taking his degree. In these circumstances, he set out for London to push his fortune, without any more definite aim before him. For a needy youth of twenty, fond of pleasure and full of poetry, the metropolis was at that time anything but a paradise. Inclination drew him to the theatre, and necessity induced him to turn actor. He appeared on the stage for the first and last time in 1672, in the character of the "King" in Mrs Behn's drama of the Forced Marriage, at Sir William Davenant's theatre in Dorset Garden, Salisbury Court. "But he being not used to the stage," says Downes, "the full house put him to such a sweat and tremendous agony, being dash't, spoilt him for an actor." (Roscius Anglicanus, p. 48, 1789.) This was not encouraging for young Otway; but had not Shakespeare and Ben Jonson failed before him in the player's art? and why should not he succeed, like them, in writing dramas, if he could not act them? It took Otway three years to give a practical solution to this problem. Meanwhile he ran after rank and courted fashion, his gay wit and jovial disposition gaining him ready access to the society of the great. The witty and profligate John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the chosen patron of nearly all the vices, was likewise the patron of "Tom Otway;" and the ardent adventurer followed his chief into the wildest of his excesses. Sated for a time with the dissipation into which he was led, and perhaps tired of hanging by the skirts of dissolute men of fashion, he directed his attention to dramatic composition. His tragedy of Alcibiades, the first and poorest of his productions, appeared in 1675, when Otway was in his twenty-fourth year, and met with some success. It was not borrowed from the French, as Johnson surmises (Lives of the British Poets); but it was written in rhyme, according to the absurd custom then much in vogue; and neither in sentiment nor in language did it give any promise of future eminence. His Don Carlos of the next year was a decided advance on his first attempt; but the extraordinary popularity to which it attained was owing more to adventitious circumstances than to the inherent excellence of the performance. Rochester was fond of playing the tyrant in literature; and having quarrelled with Dryden, who was too strong a man to submit to such despotism, his lordship, after various despicable attempts to ruin the fame of his rival, selected Otway as the most respectable antagonist he could find to pit against the sturdy laureate. Heralded by so great a name, Don Carlos became "the first heroic play of the age;" and, as the honest prompter tells us, "being admirably acted, it lasted successively ten days; it got more money than any preceding modern tragedy." (Roscius Anglicus, p. 46.) Dryden, as might be expected, had not the greatest reverence for the Prince of Spain; yet it says much for his candour, that, despite his animosity towards his young antagonist, he confessed that Otway had a power of "moving the passions" which he himself did not possess. Otway, meanwhile, in the flush of his sudden triumph, turned a satirical shaft against the laureate, and allied himself with Shadwell, the well-known "MacFlecknoe" of Dryden's famous satire. Otway's next contribution to the stage consisted of a tragedy and a farce, both translated from the French,—Titus and Berenice from Racine, and The Cheats of Scapin from Molére. These pieces were performed together at Sir William Davenant's theatre in 1677, and had good success. During the same year Otway made bold to pay court to the comic muse in his Friendship in Fashion. Apart from other defects, it was a very immoral play; considered "very diverting" by the play-goers of the time; but hissed off the stage in 1749 for its indecency. (See Langbaine's English Dram. Poets.) It was obvious enough that the author was not qualified to shine in the comic drama.

In 1677 Otway exchanged the pen for the sword, having received a cornet's commission, through the Earl of Plymouth, the king's natural son, in a new regiment of horse destined for Flanders. Here again fortune played him false. The troops to which he belonged were soon after disbanded; the money designed for their pay was diverted to other purposes; and the unfortunate soldier had to be content with debentures at a very low credit. Otway returned, therefore, to his muse again, in a state of deplorable indigence and distress. Rochester was no longer his friend. That brilliant libertine made the unfortunate poet the butt of his malicious wit in a lampoon called A Session of the Poets. Otway had committed the mortal offence of presuming to rival his lordship in an attachment to Mrs Barry, a famous actress of the day, who never failed to draw tears from her audience in her representations of Otway's "Monimia" and "Belvidera." The poor poet's affection for this woman was tender, passionate, and enduring; and although unrequited, his letters to her display a pathos and eloquence not inferior to the finest passages in his tragedies. In 1680 he produced his tragedy of Caius Marius, in great part avowedly transferred from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The author had now ranged himself on the side of Dryden and the Tories; and he contrived in this play, as well as in The Poet's Complaint to his Muse, published the same year, to expose the violences of the opposite party. The promise which Otway had early given of rare pathetic power was fully confirmed in his Orphan, founded on a popular novel of the day, and represented in 1680. It is a domestic tragedy, drawn from middle life, not possessing great elegance or splendour of diction, but with a power of moving the heart unknown to any tragedy of that time. "This is one of the few plays," says Johnson, "that keep possession of the stage." Passing over his comedy of The Soldier's Fortune, acted in 1681, and its second part, called The Atheist, printed in 1684, both as poor as they were popular, we come to Otway's greatest performance. He was constrained to keep toiling for his daily bread; and this necessity tended to expand his genius and mature his powers. In Venice Preserved he had larger scope for variety and contrast of character, and a more elevated sphere for the display of his peculiar genius, than he had found in his Orphan. In strength of imagery and force of expression he had made a decided advance, but his former faults were still observable. As before, this play is deficient in fire and high imaginative power; it is sometimes false in sentiment, and often poor in poetry; but it possesses a power of melting quite unsurpassed in the English drama. "Nature is there," said Dryden, "which is the greatest beauty;" and Johnson has re-echoed the judgment. Addison says of him (Spectator, vol. i., No. 39) that he "shines in the passionate parts more than any of our English poets;" and Goldsmith, a little forgetful, perhaps, of the merits of some of our earlier dramatists, says that Otway was, "next to Shakspeare, the greatest genius England ever produced in tragedy" (The Bee, No. 7). "Gentlest Otway," as Collins sings of him, is certainly, with all his faults, the most pathetic of our dramatists. Time was gradually maturing his genius; and he was just emerging from the bewildering fevers of youth into clear poetic activity, when his unhappy career was brought to a close. Having retired from the importunate demands of his creditors to an obscure ale-house on Tower Hill, he was seized with a fever, occasioned by the violent pursuit of an assassin who had murdered one of his friends in the streets of London. This cut him off on the 14th of April 1685, at the premature age of thirty-four. The current story of Otway's having been choked by a crust of bread, which he eagerly swallowed when suffering from hunger, does not seem to be well founded. (For further details respecting Otway's life, see the biography, prefixed to the best edition of his works, by Thomas Thornton, 3 vols., London, 1813.) Otway's minor poems do not possess very great merit.

At the time of his death Otway had completed four acts of a new tragedy, said to have been purchased by Bentley, his publisher. An advertisement for the recovery of the missing MS. appeared in L'Estrange's Observer for 27th November and 4th December 1686, but to no purpose.

(J.D.S.)