About the work
A tragedy in five acts by Thomas Otway, premiered on 9 February 1682 at the Duke's Theatre in Dorset Garden, London, with Thomas Betterton as Jaffeir and Elizabeth Barry as Belvidera.
Plot
The impoverished Venetian nobleman Jaffeir joins a conspiracy against the Senate led by his friend Pierre. His wife Belvidera persuades him to betray the conspirators to save them from execution; when the promised pardon fails to materialise, Jaffeir kills Pierre and then himself, while Belvidera descends into madness and dies.
Cultural significance
With Belvidera as a suffering, powerless heroine, the play became a model for the "she-tragedy" and stayed in the English repertoire for over a century; it carries a political allegory on the Exclusion Crisis surrounding the Earl of Shaftesbury and later gave Hugo von Hofmannsthal the material for "Das gerettete Venedig."