Success of The Play
Otway was the toast of London after Venice Preserv'd, and yet the financial situation of the theatre meant that he did not grow wealthy from his work. In 1692, Robert Gould (To Julian, Secretary of the Muses) wrote, "Otway, though very fat, starves." Venice Preserv'd has not survived to the 21st century as a byword for tragedy, but it was one of the best-known and most important of English tragedies for over 100 years.
On April 10, 1865, John Wilkes Booth told Louis J. Weichmann that he was done with the stage and that the only play he wanted to present henceforth was Venice Preserv'd. Although Weichmann did not understand the reference at the time, it was later assumed to be a veiled allusion to the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
Read more about this topic: Venice Preserv'd
Famous quotes containing the words success of, success and/or play:
“Much of the success of life depends upon keeping one’s mind open to opportunity and seizing it when it comes.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But when we play the fool, how wide
The theatre expands! beside,
How long the audience sits before us!
How many prompters! what a chorus!”
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)