Tourneur, Cyril | Robert Ornstein (essay date 1960)
Robert Ornstein (essay date 1960)
SOURCE: “Cyril Tourneur,” in The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, Greenwood Press, 1975, pp. 105-27.
[In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1960, Ornstein argues that The Revenger's Tragedy was in fact written by Tourneur; points out the playwright's fascination with the exotic and the erotic; and considers The Atheist's Tragedy a failure because the complexity of the subject matter was beyond Tourneur's artistic capabilities.]
Studied individually The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy seem curious monuments to the diversity of Jacobean tastes. Studied together as works attributed in the seventeenth century to a single author, they pose a unique critical problem because they seem to express totally opposite moral viewpoints and artistic talents. The problem vanishes, of course, if we agree with eminent scholars that The Revenger's...
[The entire page is 9520 words long]
Navigate
