[In the following essay, Cameron claims that earlier critics' dismissals of Tourneur's early poem The Transformed Metamorphosis are too harsh, and that the poem about the exploits of a gallant English knight reveals considerable learning and poetic feeling.]

Cyril Tourneur's first attempt to achieve literary fame—The Transformed Metamorphosis (1600)—has long been the subject of abuse. It has been described and dismissed as “an involved allegory,” “written in uncouth jargon,”¹ and as “absurd verbiage,” “composed on the principle that to be intelligible is to be found out.”² But while every reader of the poem will agree that it is both obscure and affected, these judgments are too harsh. The Transformed Metamorphosis is clearly the work of a very young man, and a young man of wide, though desultory, reading, who has done considerable thinking along certain lines. The knowledge exhibited of theology and the sciences—in particular astrology—is quite extensive; the flow of the verse is smooth and pleasing; and many passages show a true poetic feeling for word and phrase. But the chief value of the poem for us to-day lies in the light which it throws upon the development of the mind which later produced The Atheist's Tragedie and The Revengers Tragædie. The strange ideas and motives which dominate those works are evident, as it were, in embryo in the early poem. The same unusual and tortured mind, the same perverse intensity of emotion which characterize the plays and make them unique in Elizabethan drama are clearly discernible behind the barbaric jargon and obscure allegory of The Transformed Metamorphosis. For this reason alone it is worth while attempting an explanation of the poem.

There has been only one attempt at a complete explanation so far, that by Churton Collins in his edition of Tourneur in 1878; and one fragmentary explanation, consisting mostly of disconnected suggestions, by Professor Allardyce Nicoll in his The Works of Cyril Tourneur (1930). Collins's solution was accepted by T. Seccombe for his article on Tourneur in the D.N.B., and by C. E. Vaughan in The Cambridge History of English Literature. Neither Collins nor Nicoll, unfortunately, bases many of his deductions on fact, and their explanations are of little use to the serious researcher. The only possible thing to do, it seems to me, if we are to produce a theory that has any scientific value at all, is to stick to the facts at our disposal, meagre though they may be.

In the first part of the poem the writer describes the “metamorphosis” of the world. Good is overthrown and evil reigns supreme. The Church of Rome is extending her corrupting influence everywhere. With the aid of the wealth of “India” she is attempting to enslave “Pan,” who “was wont upon the fertile ground of Arcadie to feed”—a pretty clear reference to the Church of England in view of Spenser's similar use of “Pan” in The Shepheardes Calendar (May Eclogue). The poet is appalled at the likelihood that

Barb'rous India should ouer-peer
Fruitful Arcadie, the world's great Peere,

and calls upon heaven for aid.

He then somewhat abruptly turns to an island called Delta, where the inhabitants enjoyed an idyllic existence and would have continued to do so “had not a beast spoil'd this their sweetned rest.” This beast lay in wait for them and lured them into thickets:

With such chaung'd voice no mortal wight could say
But that the notes with voice of man he sung.

Fortunately, a “gallant Knight,” Mavortio (i.e. martial, warlike), roused to indignation by this state of affairs, attacks the beast and after a fierce fight slays it. Mavortio then apparently goes to heaven, and the poem closes on a note of hope for the future. That which has been “metamorphosed” is to be “transformed” again to its former glory.

“The key to the poem,” wrote Collins, “is in the English history at the time it appeared, i.e. the dread and hatred of Papal power, which was creating a great deal of alarm; the power of Spain, which was supported by Rome; the conditions of Ireland, which Spain and Rome were endeavouring to incite against England; the expedition and death of Essex, and the consequent supposed depression of art and literature, of which he had ever been the ready and liberal patron; the hope that the coming of King James VI of Scotland would put everything right.”³

That the religious conspiracy of Spain and Rome plays a big part in the poem is clear, but Collins has little to support his contention that either Essex or Ireland is involved. Professor Nicoll quite rightly argues that such a theory is made highly improbable by the fact that Essex was in disgrace in 1600, that a favourable reference to him would be highly dangerous, and that his fall was largely engineered by Sir Robert Cecil, with whose family Tourneur had, some years later, the most intimate connections. But while Professor Nicoll has fairly satisfactorily disposed of Collins's suggestion, he has none of much consequence to put in its place. His main contention is that the poem falls into two parts, the first being general and the second dealing with the adventures of Mavortio in Delta (which Collins had interpreted as the expedition of Essex to Ireland). The first part Professor Nicoll considers of later composition than the second because it contains “more coined and barbarous words.” Beyond making this division, and remarking that Ireland has roughly a delta shape, Professor Nicoll does not go.⁴

In attempting a fresh interpretation it is essential, as was remarked above, to stick to the facts at our disposal. The first fact worth noting is that the poem is dedicated to one Sir Christopher Heydon, an old soldier and companion-at-arms of Sir Francis Vere, who was then living in retirement on his Norfolk estate.

The second fact is that a peculiar picture of a dog which adorns one of the preliminary pages represents, as neither Collins nor Nicoll seems to have noted, the Heydon crest. As the dedicatory sonnet to Heydon is clearly a plea for assistance—probably in commencing a military career—we should expect that the poem would contain matter pleasing to Sir Christopher and might even concern itself with him personally.

The third, and most important, fact is that the dedicatory sonnet in praise of Heydon, which begins as follows:

Thou, thou that art the Muses Adonie,
          Their Pyramis, adorner of their mount,
Thou Christalizer of their Castalie,
Thou Lillian-rose, sprung from the horse-foote fount,
To thee, Artes Patron, Champion to the highest,
          That giuest the Sunne a fairer radiance,
          To thee Musophilus, that still appliest
          Thy sacred soule, to be Trueths esperance,

is clearly parallel to the praise meted out later in the poem⁵ to the hero Mavortio:

O peerlesse worth! O worth Mauortian!
          Heau'n vpholding Atlas; warres melodie;
          Knight of the lilly; heauens champion;
          Artes patron; Muses dearest Adonie;
Vrania's soule refreshing Castalie;
Pieria's darling; cleare-streaming Helicon;
          Bœotia's pearle; the nine-voic'd harmony;
          Heart crystalline; tongue pure Castalion;
          Delta's Adamant; Elizium's melody;
Vrania's selfe that sung cœlestially;
Was then for Mars apt, by the Muses nurs'd
For Mars his knights are 'squires to'th muses first.

Though both Collins and Nicoll noted this similarity, neither of them favoured the most obvious conclusion, that Mavortio was Sir Christopher Heydon. This is made even more likely when we remember that Heydon was celebrated as an astronomer and the author of two books on the subject,⁶ one of which called forth a long and erudite controversy.⁷ Only in view of this do the frequent references—as in the passages just quoted, for instance—to Urania, muse of astrology, have any significance. Other references occur in lines 595, 603, and, in particular, lines 481-3:

He [Mavortio] bent his mind to pure Vranian vses,
Vranianie, him did to heau'n vpreare;
And made to man, him demi-god appeare.

It will also be noticed that Heydon is praised in part as a patron of art and an author. While we have no examples of his literary skill extant, I take it that he probably, like so many English gentlemen of the time, indulged in verse and prose, and (like Mavortio—“For Mars his knights are 'squires to'th muses first”) fancied himself as an author rather than a soldier, a failing not uncommon among men of action with literary aspirations. That none of his writings has survived—except those on astrology, which may possibly be what Tourneur is referring to as entitling him to a place among the poets: “Urania's self that sung coelestially”—is not surprising when we consider the aversion, real or affected, of the Elizabethan gentleman to print.

I reject Professor Nicoll's hypothesis that the poem falls into separate parts, composed at different periods. The first half of the poem is clearly an attack by a young and fervid Protestant on the vices of the Catholic Church and its alliance with Spain—hence the numerous references to the evils caused by the use of the wealth of “India” (i.e. the West Indies, source of Spanish riches) for the conversion of Arcadie to Catholicism. The second half—Mavortio slaying the beast that was assailing the island of “Delta”—I take to be a description of some exploit of Heydon's directed against this encroachment of the Catholic Church. “Delta” I take to be England and not Ireland; for while Ireland, according to Elizabethan notions of geography (Abraham Ortellius's maps) is oblong and almost square in shape—anything but the shape of delta (Greek Δ)—England is so perfect a delta that strips of paper placed along its borders will form an exact triangle.

The attack on the Roman Church in the first part is not disguised. Rome (l. 59):

Whose seau'n hill'd head did ouer all aspire,
Is now transform'd to Hydra-headed vice.

With the aid of the wealth of “India”—“noysome filth, the poison of our time”—she conspires to overthrow “Pan” (who in The Shepheardes Calendar symbolizes Christ):

Somnus, awake: hell and the world conspire:
          Pan is transform'd, and al his flocke neere drownd
          Pan that from heau'n receiu'd his due paid hyre,
          He that was wont, vpon the fertile ground
          Of Arcadie to feed, wherein was found,
No golden India that might preuent
That high estate of poore, meane, rich content.

Arcadie I take to mean England in the (imagined) good old days when the Protestant Church (Pan) reigned supreme and its ministers were firm of faith. Now it is “metamorphosed” by the corrupting wealth of “India” (Spain) used by the emissaries of Rome.

The second half begins somewhat abruptly, and it is this abrupt start—the usual failure of the immature author to effect a smooth transition—that made Professor Nicoll think that there were really two poems (ll. 330 f.):

In Delta that's enuironed by the sea,
          The hills and dales with heards are peopled,
          That tend their tender flocks vpon the lea.

Soon this idyllic existence is shattered by a “beast” which (ll. 344 f.):

Among the shrubbes had set him priuily,
          To spoyle the lambes that sometimes did estray;

The “gallant Knight” Mavortio then appears and after a fierce struggle slaughters the monster. This is what Churton Collins took to be a description of Essex's military expedition to Ireland. If we accept his point of view, then the poem certainly falls into two parts, but there does not seem to be much point in first launching an attack on the machinations of the Roman Catholic Church in England, which is apparently preparatory matter for the second half, and then describing a military expedition in Ireland. But if we take Delta to be England—noting how the description of it just quoted tallies with that of Arcadie—and take the struggle depicted to be a religious one, then the two parts of the poem fit naturally together. The language—“heards,” “flocks”—is clearly that of a religious allegory.

The Heydons were an old Norfolk family, far-famed in the county, and, to judge by the numerous rectors and vicars appointed by them,⁸ fervently Protestant in their belief. Sir Christopher's grandfather had been engaged in anti-Catholic activity,⁹ and apparently Sir Christopher himself followed in his footsteps, for in July 1599 Chief Justice Popham (Chief Justice of the King's Bench from 1592 to 1607) wrote to Sir Bassingbourne Gawdy—“touching Bruerton [a recusant] I have written to Sir Christopher Heydon allready for that he is near him.” This sounds as though Sir Christopher were well known as a staunch supporter of the new faith and an active persecutor of recusants. Apparently his zeal in this direction did not slacken with the years, for in 1620 he condemned a loan for the recovery of the Palatinate on the grounds that “the Papists were as ready to assist the Emperor as the king was to assist the King of Bohemia, and that they met at the house of Mr. Henry Kervill … upon which Kervill was sent for and imprisoned.”¹⁰

When we note that Norfolk was a hotbed of recusancy at the time—as is witnessed by the autobiography of Father John Gerrard, who in 1588 visited “nearly every gentleman's house in the county”—and that in some districts nearly all the squires, headed by the notorious Walpole and Yelverton families, were recusants,¹¹ and that the jails of Norwich were actually overflowing with these religious prisoners, it seems extremely likely that Sir Christopher Heydon engaged in a campaign against them, and that Tourneur, in his eagerness to secure his patronage, flatteringly exaggerated this into a national salvation.

I would suggest, too, that Tourneur is using the same purposely exaggerated flattery in his apparent reference to the death of Mavortio, when his spirit rises to heaven and “Urania, onelie's seated on the Twin top'd hill.” He means, I take it, that Heydon was so versed in astrology that he, in spirit, visited heaven—“Uranianie him did to heau'n vpreare”—a type of hyperbolical compliment in perfect accordance with Elizabethan literary convention. The poem concludes with a reference to the coming of a “Unicorne,” which, as Collins suggests, probably refers to the future enthronement of King James.¹² And in the last stanza I interpret the line “Urania sits amid Pernassus vale” as meaning either that the astrologer Heydon has written poetry or that he has turned the writing of astrological theses into a literary art. Finally the poet hopes in the future:

That India it selfe, may sweetly raise,
Her well tun'd notes in high Iehouah's praise.

This shows that a distinct connection is meant to exist between the first and second parts of the poem.

To sum up: the poem is dedicated to Heydon and adorned with the Heydon crest; the praise allotted to Heydon corresponds to that allotted to Mavortio; Mavortio is connected with astrology and, like Heydon, is a “gallant Knight”; Delta means an island with a triangular shape, a description which exactly fits the Elizabethan conception of England; the poem, therefore, deals with an exploit of Sir Christopher Heydon, and the scene is laid in England.

As the first part of the poem is an indictment of the Catholic Church and her designs upon “Arcadie” and the language of the second part is that of a religious allegory in which an island beset by a monster suggests the machinations of Rome in England, it is almost certain that the two parts are connected. The seriousness of the recusant problem in Norfolk and the militant Protestantism of the Heydons make it likely that the second part describes an attack made by Sir Christopher Heydon upon the adherents of the Catholic faith.

Notes

1. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. vi, p. 166.

2. Seccombe and Allen, The Age of Shakespeare, vol. ii, p. 188.

3. Churton Collins, ed., The Plays and Poems of Cyril Tourneur, vol. ii, p. 178.

4. The Works of Cyril Tourneur, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, pp. 8-16.

5. Nicoll's edition p. 70, stanza 3; p. 71, stanza 3.

6. A Defence of Judiciall Astrologie, 1603, and An Astrological Discourse, a much smaller work, which was not published until 1650, but which, according to the preface, was presented to one Dr. Richard Foster, by Heydon, “some years after king James his coming to England.” It is probable that one or both of these works were known in manuscript before 1600.

7. The Madnesse of Astrologers, by G. C. (George Carleton), 1624; Judicial Astrology … Condemned, by William Rowland, M.D., 1652. Both are vigorous and learned attacks on Heydon.

8. See Blomefield's History of Norfolk, vols. vi-ix.

9. For the anti-recusant activities of Sir Christopher's grandfather see Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, vol. ix, p. 283. He even went to the extent of persecuting his own brother-in-law, Robert de Grey. See also Augustus Jessopp, One Generation of a Norfolk House, p. 108.

10. W. B. Haydon, The Heydons in England and America (London, 1877, p. 20).

11. Victoria History of Norfolk, vol. ii, pp. 269-73.

12. As Professor Nicoll points out, the royal arms of Scotland consist of a unicorn.