SOURCE: “An Approach to Tourneur's Imagery,” in The Modern Language Review, Vol. LIV, No. 4, October, 1959, pp. 489-98.

[In the following essay, Ekeblad argues that attempts to determine that The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy are written by the same hand by comparing the use of imagery in the plays are misguided; instead, she emphasizing a functional approach to the authorship question.]

In the discussion of the authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy two attempts have been made to solve the problem by examining the imagery of the play and comparing it to that of the play known to be Tourneur's, The Atheist's Tragedy.¹ Both Una M. Ellis-Fermor and Marco K. Mincoff make illuminating remarks on the imagery of the two plays; but their conclusions are, somewhat disturbingly, opposed. Professor Ellis-Fermor finds that the same man wrote the two plays, Professor Mincoff that they must have had different authors. Both critics rely largely on the method of analysis first demonstrated by Caroline F. Spurgeon, classifying images by subject-matter and drawing on them for clues to the habits of mind, the interests and the background of the author—or authors. Their contradictory conclusions would seem to suggest that the imagery in the plays examined does not respond to the kind of analysis made. Or, in other words, the statistical-biographical method of studying imagery seems to obscure, rather than reveal, some important qualities of Tourneur's dramatic imagery.

It goes without saying that, if a study of imagery is to be a reliable test of authorship, it must penetrate to the essential characteristics of the imagery examined. It has often been pointed out that Miss Spurgeon's method tends to neglect the relationship of images to the purely dramatic elements of a play: character, plot and dramatic structure.² Now, it seems to me that it is precisely in its relationship to the structure of either play that we find the crucial characteristics of Tourneur's imagery—characteristics which, in this case, are more fundamental than the choice of subject-matter and form of individual images. In this paper I shall try to show that there are important similarities in the use to which imagery is put in the two plays, in the function of imagery as part of dramatic structure and technique.

Elsewhere I have tried to show the basic similarities between the plays as wholes.³ in both drama is, ultimately, conceived of as a vehicle for the expression of moral truth. Both have a firm moral scheme, which in The Revenger's Tragedy holds together the three traditional components of Revenge Tragedy, Satiric Comedy and Morality, and into which in The Atheist's Tragedy the various plot-strands, each with its moral, are fitted. Each is organized by the idea of the exemplum horrendum—for in The Atheist's Tragedy, despite the introduction of the ‘Senecal man’, Charlemont, who has received his full due of critical attention,⁴ it is on the rise and fall of the wicked man, the Atheist, that the interest centres. The basic difference between the plays lies in the way this exemplum is held up ad horrendum: in structure and technique. And in each play the imagery is an integral part of that structure and technique.

The Atheist's Tragedy (to start with the less commented-on of the two plays) opens with a philosophical discussion:

Borachio, thou art read
In Nature and her large Philosophie.
Obseru'st thou not the very selfe same course
Of reuolution both in Man and Beast?

(i. i. 4-7)⁵

The scene continues as a discourse between D'Amville and Borachio—an exposition of D'Amville's naturalist and atheist philosophy.⁶ The speeches have a strictly logical structure. Hypotheses become theses, and these form the bases for new theses. Throughout the play we find that not only D'Amville's speeches but also those of other characters are built as if they were part of a formal discourse. Thus Levidulcia tries to persuade Castabella to marry:

Preferr'st th' affection of an absent Loue,
Before the sweet possession of a man;
The barren minde before the fruitfull body;
Where our creation has no reference
To man; but in his body: being made
Onely for generation; which (vnlesse
Our children can be gotten by conceit)
Must from the body come. If Reason were
Our counsellour, wee would neglect the worke
Of generation, for the prodigall
Expence it drawes vs too, of that which is
The wealth of life. Wise Nature (therefore) hath
Reseru'd for an inducement to our sence,
Our greatest pleasure in that greatest worke.
Which being offer'd thee; thy ignorance
Refuses …

(i. iv. 83-91)

Levidulcia's besetting sin is lust, instead of atheism and avarice, and she is speaking on other matters than is D'Amville. But the structure of her reasoning is no less controlled and balanced. It is based on carefully observed parallelisms and contrasts of adjectives and nouns. Each clause is logically dependent on the previous and simultaneously a step to the following. Imagery is sparse, and when it occurs it is used as clarifying illustration rather than for its suggestive or emotive effect. Abstract concepts are only half personified and remain abstractions. That the author knows what he is doing, and has a conscious purpose when he gives the speeches of the play this argumentative character, is shown by the fact that he is able to shed ironic light on the manner from the outside. The speeches of Langbeau Snuffe, the one comic character of the play, often become parodies of the characteristic manner of speaking in the play:

All men are mortall. The houre of death is vncertaine. Age makes sicknesse the more dangerous. And griefe is subiect to distraction. You know not how soone you may be depriu'd of the benefit of sense. In my vnderstanding (therefore) you shall doe well if …

(ii. i. 147-50)⁷

But it is not only the smaller units of the separate speeches—of which those quoted are extreme examples—that are constructed like would-be logical arguments. The whole play follows the pattern of a gradually progressing argument: scenes and incidents are arranged so as to show, first the postulates on which Evil bases its works and the wrongness of which must be apparent to the audience or reader from the very first lines, then its actual working, and finally its debacle. The denouement in the last scene, when Evil destroys itself, is the logical conclusion of an argument the scope of which is the whole play.

It is in relation to this structure that we must see the chief characteristics of the imagery of the play. On the whole, imagery here serves as clarifying amplification; and we find that, unlike The Revenger's Tragedy, The Atheist's Tragedy tends towards conscious comparisons, with ‘as’ or ‘like’. Hence an image which in The Revenger's Tragedy would have been telescoped into a couple of words becomes in The Atheist's Tragedy a simile of two lines:

… your grauitie becomes your perish'd soule, as hoary mouldinesse does rotten fruit.

(i. iv. 143-4)

The favourite figure of speech is the personification of abstracts: emotions, qualities and relationships. But they never take the whole step over to the concrete. They remain abstract notions, the exact meaning of which—necessary to the general ‘argument’ of the play—is always made explicit:

O Loue! thou chast affection of the Soule,
Without th' adultrate mixture of the bloud;
That vertue which to goodnesse addeth good.

(ii. iii. 1-3)

Immediacy of effect, or suggestiveness, is constantly put aside for strictly logical clearness:

… let thy trust,
          …
Hold measure with thy amplitude of wit;
And thy reward shall paralell thy worth.

(i. i. 131-4)

… must my wisedome that has beene
The obiect of mens admiration, now
Become the subiect of thy laughter?

(v. i. 117-19)

These images, then, are shaped by the same purpose as the structure of the whole play. Even in D'Amville's distracted speech,

… And that Bawde,
The skie, there; she could shut the windowes and
The dores of this great chamber of the world;
And draw the curtaines of the clouds betweene
Those lights and me about this bed of earth,
When that same Strumpet Murder & my selfe
Committed sin together …,

(iv. iii. 244-50)

the imagery is deliberately used to make absolutely clear the situation and its (moral) meaning. By echoing and developing previous images—D'Amville's pretended grief at Montferrers's death,

… 'prithee tell me heuen!
Hast shut thine eye to winke at murther; …

(ii. iv. 43-4)

and his joy, a little later, over the apparently perfect crime,

… Now farewell blacke night;
Thou beauteous Mistresse of a murderer;

(ii. iv. 203-4)

—it insists on the connexion between parts of the play. We are given no chance to forget that the ‘beauteous mistress’ has become a ‘bawd’; that murder will out; and that sin will eventually be punished.

It is important to notice that, just as the dramatic structure is arranged to show the rise and fall of Evil and to build up to the all-concluding moral, so is much of the imagery constructed to conduct a kind of argument. Connected systems of imagery work in the same fashion as the whole play. Most obvious is this in the case of the building imagery. D'Amville's rise and fall are accompanied by the image of the founding, erecting and subsequent ruining of a building. In all but two cases the image is used by D'Amville himself; in the two cases it is used in direct reference to him. It appears twelve times altogether in the play, and each time at a crucial point in the plot, where it receives considerable emphasis and stands out from the context—as in Borachio's one-man show, just before the murder of Montferrers:

Enter Borachio warily and hastily ouer the Stage,
          with a stone in eyther hand.
Bor. Such stones men vse to raise a house vpon;
But with these stones I goe to ruine one.

(ii. iv. 1-4)

The development of the image is extremely methodical. The stages of the rising and the falling of the house move together with the tenses of the verb used in the image, from future and foundation,

… The foundation's laid. Now by degrees,
The worke will rise and soone be perfected.

(ii. i. 136-7)

to retrospective pluperfect and ruin:

… ouerthrowne the pride
Of all my proiects and posteritie;
(For whose suruiuing bloud, I had erected
This proud monument).

(v. ii. 284-7)

Most striking, and most effective as an ironic comment on the situation, is this image in the scene where D'Amville—having just prided himself that

My reall wisedome has rais'd vp a State,
That shall eternize my posteritie—

sees one of his sons carried in dead, while simultaneously hearing the dying groans from the other son. He now realizes that his building is threatened with ruin:

His gasping sighes are like the falling noise
Of some great building when the ground-worke
          breakes.
On these two pillars stood the stately frame,
And architecture of my loftie house.
An Earthquake shakes 'em. The foundation shrinkes.
Deare Nature! in whose honour I haue rais'd
A worke of glory to posteritie;
O burie not the pride of that great action,
Vnder the fall and ruine of it selfe.

(v. i. 92-100)

So the building-image is used to emphasize the de casibus theme of the rise and fall of the wicked man.⁸

While the house-image accompanies the D'Amville plot, a great number of references to, or images of, Nature point the moral of that plot. In the succession of images concerning Nature, spoken by D'Amville and others in the course of the play, we have in fact a discussion of what Nature is and can do. In the development from ‘Nature and her large Philosophie’ in the first scene to ‘Nature is a foole’ in the last we have in a nutshell the exposition and refutation of the naturalist and atheist philosophy which the play at large forms. In a closely similar fashion other key-words—for example, ‘wisdom’, ‘providence’, ‘posterity’—are manipulated through the play, from the introductory to the final scene. ‘Providence’, to take one example, is in the beginning repeatedly used by D'Amville in the sense of his own foresight:

As they increase, so should my prouidence;

(i. i. 62)

or:

… in my reason dwels the prouidence,
To adde to life as much of happinesse.

(i. i. 141 2)

Even in the last scene he comes back to his ‘providence’:

… My [by?] prouidence,
Eu'n in a moment; by the onely hurt
Of one, or two, or three, at most: and those
Put quickly out o' paine too, marke mee; I
Had wisely rais'd a competent estate
To my posteritie.

(v. ii. 82-7)

And therefore the repetition of this word, together with a suggestion of the building-metaphor, in the Judge's comment on D'Amville after his death, points the irony of his fate emphatically:

The power of that eternall prouidence,
Which ouerthrew his proiects in their pride.

(v. ii. 297-8)

So ‘providence’ has here become God's ‘eternall prouidence’—something which D'Amville in his ‘pride’ overlooked.

We have seen that Tourneur uses key-words and images to give firm support to the dramatic structure.⁹ It is significant that these key-images are often used not only to illuminate the chief theme of the play, but also to emphasize effects of irony. For irony in The Atheist's Tragedy is essential as well to the plot-structure as to the whole meaning of the play.¹⁰ There are plenty of ironical situations, pointed by asides (as the scene where the forged news of Charlemont's death arrives), or by language used so that the audience is made to recognize its artificially rhetorical quality (as the funeral scene). Imagery of a more extravagant kind than that usually found in the play helps to stress the irony in D'Amville's epitaphs over the brother he has murdered and the nephew whose death he has falsely announced:

O might that fire reuiue the ashes of
This Phenix! …
          …
And of his goodnesse, was his vertuous Sonne
A worthy imitatour. So that on
These two Herculean pillars, where their armes
Are plac'd; there may be writ, Non vltra. …

(iii. i. 42-52)

But the essential irony of the play—the irony of its action rather than of separate plot-events—lies in the vanity of D'Amville's striving. And it is in the emphasizing of this that the key-images are most effectively used. For example, after the report of Charlemont's death, D'Amville, though actually rejoicing at the seeming success of his plans and his ascendent fortune, must put on a becoming mask of melancholy. (Of the speech that follows, the first lines are, of course, an aside.)

The foundation's laid. Now by degrees,
The worke will rise and soone be perfected.
O this vncertaine state of mortall man!

(ii. i. 136-8)

On the level of stage-effect an ironic contrast is created between the introductory aside and the rest of the speech. It is sharpened by the imagery: the supposedly firm ‘foundation’ as against the ‘vncertaine state’. But this is not all. We are also given, in a condensed form, D'Amville's real dilemma and the moral of the whole play. For the real irony lies in the fact—to which D'Amville is blind—that it is the aside which is the false proposition, whereas ‘this vncertaine state of mortall man’ is true; just as D'Amville's philosophy is false and Charlemont's, built on an understanding of ‘this vncertaine state’, is true.

The last scene is the structural climax as well as the resolution of the argument of the play. Here theatrical irony of situation and deeper moral irony become one, and imagery helps to fuse the two. D'Amville knocks his own brains out with the axe that he was going to use in his self-imposed hangman's task of executing Charlemont. It is a huge practical joke—just as in The Revenger's Tragedy the scene with the Duke and the Bony Lady is a practical joke. The irony is at once farcical and deadly serious, theatrical and moralizing. As D'Amville dies, the imagery in his last words—ironically recalling the scene of his attempted rape—carries the idea of retribution, of ‘the wages of sin’, which is central to the play:

                                                                                                                                            … O!
The lust of Death commits a Rape vpon me
As I would ha' done on Castabella.

(v. ii. 291-3)

Thus, the imagery in The Atheist's Tragedy is intimately related to the play's moral scheme, its structure and its technique. We must now pass on to The Revenger's Tragedy. Much has been written on its dramatic form and its verse,¹¹ and I shall therefore limit myself to those aspects which are strictly relevant in a comparison of the imagery in the play with that of The Atheist's Tragedy.

Obviously the structure of The Revenger's Tragedy is very different from that of The Atheist's Tragedy. The play opens with a kind of tableau: the chief characters passing over the stage in a torch-lit procession. Upon this come Vindice's words:

Dvke: royall letcher; goe, gray hayrde adultery,
And thou his sonne, as impious steept as hee:
And thou his bastard true-begott in euill:
And thou his Dutchesse, that will doe with Diuill,
Foure exlent Characters. …

Vindice is here not really speaking as a character in the play. He is speaking straight out to the audience to introduce the dramatis personae and—most important—their vices. He goes on as a moral commentator,

                                                            … O that marrow-lesse age,
Would stuffe the hollow Bones with dambd desires,

(i. i. 1-6)

and it is only with the apostrophe to the skull of his mistress—‘Thou sallow picture of my poysoned loue’—that he recedes into his plot-part and the Revenge theme is introduced. Throughout the play this alternation between plot-proceedings and direct commentary is maintained.¹² Time and again characters break out of the plot-frame to make a speech which, in fact, says: look here how evil we are (e.g. the Bastard's speech on the gluttonous dinner), or they are (many of Vindice's speeches, the skull-scene, of course, being the supreme example). The two Tourneur plays, then, ask for different responses from their respective audiences or readers. In The Atheist's Tragedy we are asked to follow an argument which eventually proves D'Amville to be wrong and damned; in The Revenger's Tragedy we are asked for immediate responses to the evils that are being demonstrated, through the swiftly moving intrigue, which hurries us from one striking situation to another, and through the out-of-plot speeches. It is in the light of this general difference of aim that we must see the individual images.

We see then that the brief, compressed, metaphors, hitting one with an almost physical force, in which The Revenger's Tragedy abounds, are part of the technique of the play—such metaphors as

Oh one incestuous kisse picks open hell!

(i. ii. 195)

Your Tongues haue struck hotte yrons on my face;

(ii. i. 259)

Now must I blister my soule,

(ii. ii. 40)

to mention only a few out of a multitude. They are images intent on ‘handing over sensations bodily’.¹³ Perhaps the general difference between the shaping of images in the two plays is nowhere to be seen more clearly than in the large groups of personifications. We saw how in The Atheist's Tragedy abstracts remained abstract. In The Revenger's Tragedy they become highly concrete and tangible, often through the use of some verb of bodily motion:

The Crowne gapes for him euery tide,

(ii. i. 71)

Murder will peepe out of the closest huske,

(iv. ii. 236)

Death too soone steales out of a Lawyers lip;

(i. ii. 76)

often through a peculiarly concrete noun or adjective:

… is the day out ath-socket?

(ii. ii. 257)

… now Ile gripe thee
Ee'n with the Nerues of wrath;

(ii. ii. 223)

and often through a combination of both:

A Dukes soft hand stroakes the rough head of law,
And makes it lye smooth.

(ii. ii. 291-2)

‘Revenge’, a thematic word in both plays, is in The Revenger's Tragedy repeatedly personified, or in other ways made concrete. We hear about ‘the vengeance that my birth was wrapt in’, about the ‘fly-flop of vengeance’, and about revenge which ‘shall reach high’. We hear of revenge which ‘hits’ or ‘throttles’, and of nine years' vengeance which ‘crowd in a minute’. But in The Atheist's Tragedy ‘revenge is to be an abstract concept: not to be seen or felt or demonstrated, but to be talked about and meditated upon. Hence it never comes alive in the imagery. When we do meet with it, it is in phrases like ‘Revenge to thee Ile dedicate this work’, or—the motto of the play—‘Leave Revenge unto the King of Kings’.

The reason why I have dwelt on the concrete, compressive and suggestive power of images throughout The Revenger's Tragedy is that this characteristic of the play's imagery has so often made critics think and speak of the imagery as a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, a revelation of Tourneur's morbid and obsessed mind. In fact, it is as much part of the dramatic technique in the play as is the way characters are handled, or scenes arranged, and it is as much related to the general structure of the play as is the more deliberate, often illustrative, imagery of The Atheist's Tragedy to the structure of that play.

Not only, however, is the imagery intended to provoke immediate and violent responses to various dramatic situations; it is also intended to guide our responses. Obviously this is a different function from just ‘handing over sensations bodily’: it is a question of bringing out the meaning of a situation and implying a moral evaluation of it. Sometimes it is as clear as Castiza's image,

A vergin honor is a christall Tower,
Which being weake is guarded with good spirits,
Vntill she basely yeelds no ill inherits,

(iv. iv. 165-7)

which sums up and helps to ‘place’ the temptation scene. This is, of course, the traditional image of holy maidenhood,¹⁴ and it hints that the situation which it comments on is a kind of morality scene, with the tempter assailing the tower of virginal virtue. But often this function is less obtrusive—though no less effective. In the Bastard's speech,

Faith if the truth were knowne, I was begot
After some gluttonous dinner, some stirring dish
Was my first father; when deepe healths went round,
And Ladies cheekes were painted red with Wine,
Their tongues as short and nimble as their heeles
Vttering words sweet and thick …,

(i. ii. 200-5)

the feverish sensuality of the banquet spoken about is re-enacted through a union of images and rhythm. Yet there is no doubt that the ultimate purpose of the passage is to hold up vice to be denounced. Placed safely by the first image—the gluttonous dinner—the passage is firmly held within the moral scheme of the play by the fact, accepted by author and audience alike, that this is Sin personified speaking. The Bastard's words are setting before an audience, fascinated and horrified at the same time, an exemplum horrendum. This is a reflexion, within a brief episode and small speech-unit, of what Vindice's skull-speech does for the play as a whole. In that speech Vindice gives a frame of reference for the whole play; repeatedly in the play individual images do so for a situation. Sometimes they do so through their subject-matter—as when Vindice tells his mother that ‘forty Angells can make fourescore diuills’ (ii. i. 101). Sometimes it is their place in the context that makes them morally effective—we know, for example, that Vindice's ‘pleasure of the Pallace’ speech is persuasive rhetoric, that all he says is wrong and wicked. Therefore the greater the excess and exuberance—

… the stirring meates,
Ready to moue out of the dishes, that e'en now
          quicken when their eaten—

(ii. i. 223-4)

the greater the moral effect. And so, all over the play, imagery points the moralistic-satiric structure of the play, preventing us from taking it at the plot-level of melodramatic Revenge.

It is to be expected in The Revenger's Tragedy that we should not, as we do in The Atheist's Tragedy, find chains of related images developing an argument. We saw in The Atheist's Tragedy how in the last scene the structural climax was supported by the gathering up of functionally used strands of imagery. In The Revenger's Tragedy the climax of the play is not at the end, but very near the middle of the play: in the skull-scene. Instead of being the logical solution to a ladder-like argument, it is the hub from which meanings radiate out over the whole play. Scattered over the play are images dealing with vice in one form or another—lechery, gluttony, avarice and vanity—with death and corruption, and in Vindice's skull-speech all these are gathered up and compressed into a memento mori.

As in The Atheist's Tragedy, the climactic scene in The Revenger's Tragedy contains the central irony of the play. Imagery throughout the play feeds with meaning the many plot-level ironies,¹⁵

A drab of State, a cloath a siluer slut,
To haue her traine borne vp, and her soule traile i'th
          durt; great.

(iv. iv. 80-1)

The daughters fal lifts vp the mothers head:

(ii. i. 127)

but in the skull-scene it points the irony most poignantly. The silk-worm expending her yellow labours, being ‘undone’ for what must eventually become a skull and ‘bare bone’—that is the fundamental irony of the play: vain, sinful, human life against implacable, retributive, death.

A study of the imagery of The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy, then, shows a firm integration, a unity of aim, of the imagery with the dramatic structure and technique. It shows Tourneur to be alert to some important dramatic uses of imagery. It should be clear that the question whether the two plays have the same author can never be answered by a study of the imagery apart from dramatic structure and technique. The problem of authorship in this case must be solved by showing why the structures are different. What I hope to have shown here is the necessity for a functional approach to Tourneur's imagery.

Notes

1. U. M. Ellis-Fermor, ‘The Imagery of The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy’, M.L.R. xxx (1935), 289-301; M. K. Mincoff, ‘The Authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy’, Studia Historico-Philologica Serdicensia, ii (1939), 1-87. The two studies were carried out independently. Professor Mincoff has, however, a postscript (pp. 85-7) where he considers Professor Ellis-Fermor's article.

2. Notably by Wolfgang Clemen in his Shakespeares Bilder: Ihre Entwicklung und ihre Functionen im Dramatischen Werk (Bonn, 1936), revised and translated into English as The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (London, 1951). Cf. also R. A. Foakes, ‘Suggestions for a New Approach to Shakespeare's Imagery’, Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952), 81-92.

3. In an article on ‘The Authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy’, to appear in English Studies.

4. See M. Higgins, ‘The Convention of the Stoic Hero as Handled by Marston’, M.L.R. xxxix (1944), 338-46; ‘Chapman's “Senecal Man”’, R.E.S. xxi (1945), 183-91; and ‘The Development of the “Senecal Man”’, R.E.S. xxiii (1947), 24-33; and also C. Leech, ‘The Atheist's Tragedy as a Dramatic Comment on Chapman's Bussy Plays’, J.E.G.P. lii (1953), 525-30.

5. I quote from Professor Allardyce Nicoll's edition of Tourneur (Fanfrolico Press, 1929).

6. Cf. Robert Ornstein, ‘The Atheist's Tragedy and Renaissance Naturalism’, S.P. li (1954), 194-207. This article is interesting and valuable in showing how D'Amville is ‘the archetypal Renaissance atheist synthesized from contemporary opinion about, and refutations of, atheism’ (p. 195), but it comes to the curious conclusion that ‘D'Amville's view of nature is never actually refuted’, and that Tourneur therefore never quite denies ‘a materialistic interpretation of the universe’ (p. 204). There may be no verbal argument that totally refutes D'Amville's views, but what is the whole action of the play if not a conclusive dramatic argument against his philosophy?

7. Cf. also such a Langbeau line as ‘Since Charlemont's absence I haue waighed his loue with the spirit of consideration’ (i. iv. 40-1), where the use of half-concrete abstracts in the play as a whole is ridiculously overdone.

8. The repeated use of this image is noted by Miss Ellis-Fermor, but the interest she finds in it is that it shows the author to have had ‘an isolated prepossession, the idea of the rise and collapse of buildings’ (op. cit. p. 295).—This is clearly an image which easily lends itself to the illustration of a de casibus theme, but I have not found it so deliberately and consistently used in any other play of the period. It is interesting to notice how this image contrasts with one commonly connected with the sic transit gloria mundi theme, e.g.: ‘If we would but consider well how quickly we shall be placed beneath the feet not only of men, friend and foe alike, but of dogs, and the beasts of the field—where he who now rears and possesses mighty palaces shall have a hall whose roof touches his nose’ (from the Summa Predicantium, quoted by G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, 1926, p. 343). This contrast with D'Amville's ambition is used in the churchyard scene, in Charlemont's homily: ‘Perhappes th' inhabitant was in his life time the possessour of his owne desires. Yet in the midd'st of all his greatnesse and his wealth; he was lesse rich and lesse contented, then in this poore piece of earth, lower and lesser then a Cottage’ (iv. iii. 4-8).

9. Cf. also J. M. S. Tompkins, ‘Tourneur and the Stars’, R.E.S. xxii (1946), 315-19.

10. This needs stressing, for the critics who have discussed the supposed similarity of the irony in The Revenger's Tragedy to that in Middleton's plays have not at all considered irony in The Atheist's Tragedy. See R. H. Barker, ‘The Authorship of The Second Maiden's Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy’, S.A.B. xx (1945), 51-62 and 121-33, and the same author's book, Thomas Middleton (New York, 1958), ch. iv; also S. Schoenbaum, ‘The Revenger's Tragedy and Middleton's Moral Outlook’, N.Q. cxcvi (1951), 8-10, and his Middleton's Tragedies (New York, 1955), notably pp. 17 ff. and p. 31.—Space forbids a detailed discussion of the problem here, but it seems to me that the irony which The Revenger's Tragedy has in common with Middleton's comedies it also shares with practically every other satirical comedy of the period. Dr Schoenbaum limits his comparison to Middleton and The Revenger's Tragedy, without mentioning the comedies of, say, Jonson or Marston.—Furthermore, irony as a dramatic device was conventional in the Revenge play as well as in the satiric comedy.—What The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy have in common is a deeper irony of moral retribution which governs each play, and which at the climax of each play—the skull-scene and D'Amville's death, respectively—fuses comic and tragic material, farce and morality. This, again, is very different from the irony of Middleton's tragedies, which arises out of the blindness of individuals to the consequences of their actions. Middleton's characters deceive themselves into believing that they are doing the right thing, whereas Tourneur's, part of a rigid scheme of goodness and badness, go with open eyes against the moral order of traditional religion. (Witness Lussurioso, taking the first step on the road to his ‘undoing’: ‘It is our bloud to erre, tho' hell gap't wide; / Ladies know Lucifer fell, yet still are proude.’ He could hardly be more explicit about the moral order he knows but acts against.)

11. See M. C. Bradbrook's chapter on Cyril Tourneur in Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1935); L. G. Salingar, ‘The Revenger's Tragedy and the Morality Tradition’, Scrutiny, vi (1938), 402-24; S. Schoenbaum, ‘The Revenger's Tragedy: Jacobean Dance of Death’, M.L.Q. xv (1954), 201-7; Robert Ornstein, ‘The Ethical Design of The Revenger's Tragedy’, E.L.H. xxi (1954), 81-93; John Peter, ‘The Revenger's Tragedy Reconsidered’, Essays in Criticism, vi (April, 1956), 131-43.—R. A. Foakes, ‘On the Authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy’, M.L.R. xlviii (1953), 129-38, has valuable comments on the versification.

12. This morality-like feature of Tourneur's technique was first commented on by Miss Bradbrook and has later been discussed at length by Mr Salingar and Mr Peter.

13. Cf. T. E. Hulme's essay on ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ in Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (London, 1924), p. 134.

14. Examples are legion, in homily, poetry and pageantry; but cf., e.g., Hali Meidenhad, ed. F. J. Furnivall, E.E.T.S. (London, 1922), p. 5.

15. Miss Bradbrook has counted no less than twenty-two ironic reversals in the play (Themes and Conventions, p. 165).