Thomas Southerne
born 1660, Oxmantown, Dublin, Ire.
died May 26, 1746, London, Eng.
Irish dramatist, long famous for two sentimental
tragedies that were acted until well into the
19th century—The Fatal Marriage (performed 1694;
adapted 1757 by the actor-manager David Garrick
as Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage) and Oroonoko
(performed 1695).
Southerne was educated at Trinity College,
Dublin, but spent his life after about 1680 in
London, where he began to study law. His first
play, The Loyal Brother, was produced at
London’s Drury Lane Theatre in 1682. From 1685
to 1688 he was soldiering, but he wrote several
other plays and contributed prologues and
epilogues to John Dryden’s plays.
Both of Southerne’s principal works were
based on novels by Aphra Behn, a popular
17th-century novelist and poet. In their
mingling of pathos with a sometimes flaccid
rhetoric, they owed much to the 17th-century
dramatist Thomas Otway, as well. The Fatal
Marriage anticipated 18th-century domestic
tragedy, and Oroonoko showed affiliations with
the earlier heroic plays of Dryden. The role of
Isabella, which was first played by the great
English actress Elizabeth Barry, gave Sarah
Siddons one of her major successes a century
later. The character of Oroonoko, an African
prince enslaved in the English colony of
Surinam, marked one of the first literary
appearances of the “noble savage,” and the play
was a notably early English condemnation of the
slave trade. As well as writing several other
plays—lively comedies of manners and frigid
tragedies in Roman settings—Southerne also
revised and finished Dryden’s tragedy Cleomenes
(1692).
