The story, not long ago too well known to need retelling, relates how Jaffier, in poverty and desperation, is induced to join a conspiracy against the state, and is then persuaded by his wife, Belvidera, to save the state and her father by turning informer. He seeks to sacrifice himself for the friend whom he has betrayed, and in the end stabs both himself and his friend upon the scaffold. A curiously Elizabethan prolongation of the catastrophe follows in the apparition of the ghosts of the friends, and the madness and death of Belvidera. The essentials of great tragedy, of Shakespearean tragedy, are here. The opposition of character, the struggle of the generous but pliable Jaffier under the conflicting influences of his wife and the steadfast 'Roman' Pierre, the joy and tenderness and ruin that come with his love for Belvidera, are all drawn with a truth of passion in conception and language that reaches the heart. "Nature is there," wrote Dryden, "which is the greatest beauty." Marred as a whole by buffoonery and excess, the play is still among the two or three best tragedies of the Restoration. If it were all equal to the tremendous fourth act, Otway would be sure of a place among the immortals. Marked by the same power of swaying the emotions of tenderness and pity, "The Orphan" attains these effects by means of the situations rather than through the study of motives. The plot deals with the rivalry of two brothers in love with their father's ward. She is secretly married to one; the other substitutes himself by trick on the marriage night. The situation, which has parallels in preceding tragedy, is abhorrent enough to kill all interest in the persons concerned; but Otway's power to depict love and distress triumphs over one's repugnance. The play is remarkable in many ways. Its few characters, its observance of the unities, its confinement of the action, give it the simplicity and directness of French tragedy. Its theme and its poetry recall Elizabethan rather than Restoration examples. But it departs from the canons of either theatre in presenting neither historical persons, nobles, kings, nor illustrious actions. Based on a story, supposedly of fact, related in a contemporary pamphlet, it merely transfers the scene to Bohemia, without adding the usual accessories of tragedy. Though it keeps something of a court setting and does not venture into middle-class society, it is like the Elizabethan plays of crime in its presentation of contemporaneous fact, and like Heywood's "A Woman Killed with Kindness" in telling a story of domestic distress. It might by a little extension of the term be called a domestic tragedy, and it still further departs from the canons in relating the misery of an innocent sufferer who is the victim of a cruel mistake. Otway should, therefore, be remembered as a dramatist who, in a time when tragedy