author
Thomas Otway
1652–1685
A Restoration playwright remembered for bringing raw feeling to the stage, he is best known for Venice Preserv'd and for tragedies that helped shape later sentimental drama.
4 Audiobooks
Venice Preserved: A Tragedy
by Thomas Otway
The Orphan; Or, The Unhappy Marriage. A Tragedy, in Five Acts
by Thomas Otway
Venice Preserved: A Tragedy in Five Acts
by Thomas Otway
Thomas Otway The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists
by Thomas Otway
About the author
Born in Trotton, Sussex, in 1652, Thomas Otway was the son of a clergyman and studied at Christ Church, Oxford, though he left without taking a degree. He later moved to London, tried acting, and turned to writing for the stage during the lively Restoration era.
Otway wrote tragedies, comedies, and adaptations, but his reputation rests mainly on The Orphan and Venice Preserv'd (1682). His plays were admired for their emotional intensity and for the way they focused on love, suffering, and moral conflict rather than the grand heroic style that had dominated earlier Restoration tragedy.
His life was short and difficult, and he died in London in 1685 at just thirty-three. Even so, his best work endured, and he is still remembered as one of the most affecting dramatists of late seventeenth-century England.