ABSTRACT
More successful were a few plays based upon a more modern interpretation of domestica facta that encouraged the writing of “domestic” or bourgeois tragedy. Edward Moore’s prose Gamester7 (1753) was a proper successor to George Barnwell. The hero, Beverley, confirmed in the vice of gaming, loses his whole fortune through the machinations of a melodramatic villain-friend (who remotely recalls Iago and Jonathan Wild), is accused of murder, and poisons himself just before learning that he has succeeded to the wealth of his uncle. The tears of the virtuous Mrs. Beverley doubtless seemed both affecting and “natural” Similarly in the very successful Douglas (1756), the masterpiece of “the Scottish Shakespeare,” John Home8 (1722-1808), Lady Randolph’s ever fresh grief for an infant son lost twenty years ago, and now recovered only for a tragic fate, marks the play as devoted to “simple nature.” Its emotional power kept it on the stage for a century or more in spite of obvious defects. Richard Cumberland’s prose tragedy, The Mysterious Husband (1783), with a plot based on secret marriages, was somewhat less lurid than Walpole’s unacted Mysterious
Dramatic Fare of the Time
Tragedies
Mother (1768), but not powerful enough to strengthen the domestic tradition in tragedy, which was doing better in France and Germany than in its native England. Remotely lofty plots were still in demand; and if stories from English history were used with increasing frequency, Orientals, Peruvians, royal slaves, and noble Romans still made highly acceptable tragic heroes. The continued influence of Voltaire, from whom, for example, Arthur Murphy’s Orphan of China (1759) derived, may account in part for the Oriental vogue. Pretentious poets, like William Whitehead, might still use classical stories, but the swing was away from that cult. William Mason, to be sure, used Greek tragedy as a model for his British stories of Elfrida and Caractacus, thus combining two traditions. But tragedy lacked the freshness necessary to hold its own against the increasing popularity of sentimental comedy.
