Contrast Preserved: ...Venice Preserved...

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Contrast Preserved: The Opposing Ideals of Venice Preserved’s First Act Through his construction of dichotomies and pairings, Thomas Otway manages to create a play at once united and at odds with itself in the form of Venice Preserved. As such, the play poses some ambiguity, which is eased but not rectified in relocating the play’s conceptual base from Venice to then-contemporary England. This is scholarly maintained to be a proper move, given that political and social instability persisted at the time of Otway’s writing Venice Preserved, and that a direct commentary on England would risk a charge of treason or the play’s censorship; English playwrights frequently changed religious or national identifiers in their works, so this was not altogether uncommon. Once observers have perceived this contradiction between setting and social commentary, they may more confidently compose an historical interpretation of the play. The first act of Venice Preserved introduces the central dilemmas of the play in two main lines of dialogue, both of which form dichotomies and illustrate a society with contradictory or opposing sociopolitical perspectives. The act begins with the introduction of Priuli and Jaffeir, Belvidera’s respective father and husband; Priuli claims that Jaffeir has “stole(n)” his daughter from him (I.52.pp.1691) despite his hospitality (I.19.pp.1691) and Jaffeir counters that she has grown to love him and therefore belongs to him (I.50-51.pp.1691). Here Otway presents the opposition between romantic and sensible love, the progressive against the traditional. Fathers at the time of Otway’s writing had a strong, if not final, influence over who their daughters married (Porter 24); customarily, fathers in this time period arranged marriages for their daughters, and daughters had no social right to object to the marriage set out for them – the decision of
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