SOURCE: “Theodicy, Tragedy, and the Psalmist: Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy,” in Drama in the Renaissance: Comparative and Critical Essays, edited by Clifford Davidson, C. J. Gianakaris and John H. Stroupe, AMS Press, 1986, pp. 192-215.

[In the following excerpt, Kaufmann sees The Atheist's Tragedy, like many Jacobean tragedies, as being both subversive and orthodox, as it dramatizes the point of tension in the ethical system it explores. He argues too that the work is a theological play, a dramatization of the 127th Psalm, and a critique of the notion that humans, and not God, are in control of their fate and in a position to mete out justice in the world.]

Evil and good stand thick around
In the fields of charity and sin
Where we shall lead our harvests in.

Edwin Muir

What can be said
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic.

Philip Larkin

Despite the journalists' banal breviary of daily violence, we know very little about the process and structure of evil. Routine information about daily transgressions, stale registers of corruption and titillating intimations of malevolence accumulate steadily but add up to less than nothing. They are a seawall blocking moral explorations as well as a protective barrier allowing us to harbor unproductive illusions about our relation to the larger, less charted state of things. If we have the courage to cherish the fragile occasions of smaller, domesticated happinesses, we will not undervalue such a seawall. Human beings seem to require fairly calm waters to preserve ordinary equilibrium; those deeps beyond the seawalls threaten, with strange analogies, our own inner turbulence. It is as easy to undervalue reason as it is to overvalue it. The moral area between these two modes of misvaluation is tightly squeezed by their converging claims. There is little room for a poised life which is not at the same time an ignorant one.

Tragic enquiry is easily discussed in terms of its centrifugal movement. Standard critical rhetoric assumes the exclusive initiative of the hero. If all tragic literature were the “matter of Ahab” which sees the tragic hero as a serendipitous being tracking his enemy beyond the edge of all ideological maps, this romantic variant would be as sufficient for tragic theory as it is relieving to our mundane frustrations. The harsh persistence of Oedipus, the intellectual stamina of Hamlet, the uncheckable erotic drives of Phaedra, or the absolute imprudence of Medea would constitute the whole story. But they do not. It is important to take some trouble to discover just why they do not.

I

Let Marlowe stand momentarily as an abbreviated instance. Nineteenth-century romantic critics, when they rediscovered Marlowe, quickly enshrined him and his heroes (whom they saw as unambiguous projections of his thrusting ego) as the archetype of rebellious resistance to all that compromised pure individualism. He became a symbol of daring intellectual defiance and of all those things which swelled their connotations for “renaissance man.” This position has been canonized by repetition and reinforced by intelligent critics right down to the present moment. This belief in heroic initiative as the prime motor in Marlowe has not gone unchallenged. Since Roy Battenhouse's book on Tamburlaine in 1941, there has been an ever more fully documented counter-case drawing Marlowe's plays into the tradition of Medieval Christian Humanism or even more narrowly into an anti-humanistic Christian theological connection. This interpretive posture finds its orthodox fulfillment in Douglas Cole's study of Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe in 1962, just as the earlier more romanticized reading reached its summit of sophistication in Harry Levin's The Overreacher a decade earlier in 1952. This polarization is familiar to students of Renaissance drama. Irving Ribner, in his careful appraisal of the state of Marlowe studies for the Tulane Drama Review's special issue in honor of the 400th anniversary of Marlowe's birth, described this radical division of opinion on Marlowe's attitude towards his materials as

a state of confusion, with some critics seeing Marlowe in terms so radically different from those in which others view him that it is difficult to believe that all are writing about the same man.¹

Ribner's point is well made, but it does not get deep enough into the problem, for the conservative, theologically affiliated critics are merely standing the romantic position on its head. Their work is polemic and revisionist; it challenges the adequacy of the romantic reading by exposing its historical naiveté and by demonstrating the presence within Marlowe's texts of elements invisible to romantic critics blinded by their ideological presuppositions. The conservative critics are, nevertheless, bound by the same axioms about the hero's absolute centrality. They recast the hero as a minatory example of presumption, and the process of the play as ideologically repressive rather than subversive, but their method still centers on judgments of the precise moral import of the hero's initiative. There is no theoretical enlargement of the aesthetic or modal issues. Both positions, when developed by their most talented proponents, betray symptoms of chafing under theoretical constraint. On both sides there is concessive talk of “ironic undertones,” “modifying ambiguities of tone,” etc. These concessions function like the epicycular hypotheses of late medieval astronomers struggling to preserve the Ptolemaic cosmology against the slow accumulation of contradictory empirical evidence.

I would like to argue that this problem is eased if we enlarge our assumptions to include a subset of tragic dramas which are deformed in a particular way by the inertial demands of reason, as reason has been defined in any given anterior historical system. In tragic dramas of this sort the protagonist is both enlarged and belittled by the framing theoretical assumptions. These assumptions are clearly too narrow to contain his spirit, but, equally, he is not invested with enough axiologically independent initiative to shatter the frame. Thus the protagonist of such plays is not vindicated by his choices. At the same time, the “editorial” ideology of the play is not confident enough to eliminate the subversive effects of the protagonist's nontraditional selfhood as this is demonstrated within the process of the play. There are numerous examples of this type of play in English Renaissance drama, and they are often tonally the most perplexing to critics. These plays can be differentiated according to their shadings of sympathy for the protagonist, but they are radically of a type. Traditionally they are classified—uneasily—as “dark” comedies or “imperfect” tragedies. Clearly the standard classificatory system is so narrow and rigid, that no one is really satisfied. Some examples of these plays with antinomic protagonists are: Volpone; The Jew of Malta; Timon of Athens; Tamburlaine considered as ten act unit; The Atheist's Tragedy; and The Dutch Courtesan. Other plays might be added, but the list is long enough if the case can be made; if it can not, then additional examples would be superfluous.

To do justice to the historical register of tragic enquiry, we must abandon stiff, normative definitions of the tragic. Tragedy as a category is best seen in terms of a Wittgensteinian “family of resemblances,” wherein the possession of some combination of the familial attributes qualifies a play for membership in the class. Individual plays can differ so much from each other that only their restoration to the larger definitional harmony of the “family” can validate their affinity. The Wittgensteinian theory of definition does not stretch the category, “tragedy,” into meaningless looseness, since there are crucial attributes as in any familial grouping, but it does prevent the tiresome error of arguing from a magisterial (or patriarchal) example to which all aspirants to inclusion must be made narrowly to conform.

Rigid, normative definitions of tragedy can stand in the way of critical clarity. Tragedy is a mode not a format. It is an address toward motive, providing a means of evaluating the consequences of choices which deflect moral responses outside traditional grooves of judgment. The accepted logic of a culture in important ethical matters can become an illusory structure which dupes instinct and makes unwonted forms of energetic initiative automatically repellent. Tragedy is a device for rousing thoughtful attention to novel increments of behavior that have been rejected or classified thoughtlessly. A tragedy can function as a critique of passivity; it can also function in a converse manner as a critique of ill-judged activisms which threaten an ideologically anchored passivity. Since the Book of Job, the dramatic form has been useful in providing this kind of laboratory for ethical reappraisals. Job is both right and wrong in his view of himself. He is not “wrong” as compared to his shallow, reflexive “comforters,” but, structurally, he is “wrong” in supposing he has any means to evaluate God's motives or intentions. We are required to grasp both these qualitative relationships in a new light in order to “understand” the explanatory force of Job. Tragedy is a means of Re-Cognition, wherein a larger circumference of experience is used as our contextual frame, when we “think” the hero and what his agon connotes.

What I am talking about is similar to but still crucially distinct from the problem of “tainted heroes” as this phrase is applied to Shakespeare's later protagonists. In these late plays Macbeth, Antony and Coriolanus purchase our respect through a tenacious truth to self. In their struggle with genuine and often formidable structures of authority, however aberrant their moral vision may be, they obstinately preserve their hold on one rigidly conceived aspect of their life. They are noble and fixated, imbued with folly by an irreversible commitment. In each of these plays, their energy steadily subsides, their freedom is progressively cribbed and confined. Each dies having lost his love of self and his love of life. The process of the play is the attrition of antecedent nobility. The plays I'm concerned with are quite different.

These plays display aberrant energy in forms of social activism which bears no general endorsement. The hero is an outcast or intruder, a parvenu, an immoral opportunist, or culturally ineducable. He has more energy than anyone else in the play. In Tamburlaine, which is a simplistic paradigm of the mode, the earlier sections of the play are devised to show almost allegorically what a state of “maimed empery” (in Marlowe's phrase) or, in more modern terms, what a power vacuum exists. The typical world confronting the protagonist of these plays is dispirited, slack, cynical or directionless. The feeble Mycetes, whose pathetical simulations of authority in Tamburlaine always end with a question, is the satiric embodiment of this state of affairs. Where the normative characters opposing the hero are not ridiculous or faint nullities, they are often committed to an ethic of repression or to a quite abstract idealism. Whichever way the received morality is depicted in these plays there is a sense of exhausted sanctions.

In Measure for Measure, which is a comedic variant of the form, Vincentio has failed to embody authority convincingly with the result that disorder reigns; his self-transformation eventually effects a cure, but though he is hygenically admirable, he smacks of moral contrivance; so the process of reëducation and moral rehabilitation of the world of Vienna remains too schoolmarmish to satisfy us that Lucio, for example—so tonically amoral—is wholly to be despised, despite the clearest possible structural cues directing that judgment. Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois likewise divides our sympathies and our judgment. Bussy is egotistical to the point of silliness, his braggadocio and thin-skinned vanity stand directly in the path of our solicited admiration for his virility and his courageous exposure of the snobbish pretensions of the unsatisfactory courtier world he sets out to conquer. We want to approve of him more than we can. Volpone and Mosca, on the other hand, provoke more admiration than we can readily justify and no amount of careful scholarly reconstruction of their cupiditas suffices to annul our gratitude for their sheer joy in activity in a world otherwise as stagnant as the Venetian canals which are the literal and symbolic setting for their enterprise. Marston's Dutch Courtesan (unquestionably his most vibrant play) has an infra-structure in which the expression of positive sexual energy seems preferable to any other mode of existence—and this despite the editorial elements of the play which deliberately contradict this sensation.

The common denominator of this group of plays is a final irreconcilability between the activated energies they dramatize and the playwright's capacities for disciplining this released energy in an authoritative manner. There is a noticeable hiatus between his overt moral intentions and his covert sympathy for these agents whose activities are ideologically reprehensible. The ethical frame does not really cage the aberrant protagonist's energies. Hence these plays are at one and the same time subversive and orthodox. They dramatize points of stress in the ethical system, issues on which the engines of doubt are being brought to bear. It is in this light that we should look at Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy. In the end, D'Amville's “voice” lingers in our minds even though he has been “proved” wrong. Historically speaking, the play is an act of exorcism rather than effective refutation, and its dramaturgical stress pattern is most readily explained when we operate from these assumptions in interpreting it.

By this definitional procedure, tragic dramas in which the classic distribution of sympathies is disturbed: by farcical counter-currents, as in The Jew of Malta; or where compassion is extruded and hence lost, as in Timon of Athens; or where theological anxiety leads to excessive reinforcement of the play's ideology and consequently to a kind of emblematic literalism as in The Atheist's Tragedy, need not be patronized as false instances of the tragic. They can be seen instead as members of the tragic family under the forms of stress peculiar to that family. A just apprehension of the distinguishing traits of that family derives in part from a sense of the family's stress pattern. Neurotic fears can be manifested in the structure of a play as well as in its content. No slippery depth analysis of Cyril Tourneur is required to suppose that (if he is the author both of The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy) the excited fascination he seems to feel for evil in the former play, might well be countered therapeutically by the punitive binding of D'Amville's ideologically provocative arguments in the latter play. The excessive weight of these needed reinforcements in The Atheist's Tragedy partially deforms the tragic structure, partially cripples and de-sophisticates his art, just as obsessions deform the psychic economy of the individual.

We can designate this subset of tragic dramas “Dramas of Ethical Display” so as to direct critical attention towards the qualitative frame in which the protagonist is placed, and less towards “protagonal biography,” in its opposing forms of romantic Prometheanism or disciplinary, negative exempla. These “Display” plays have heroes who, while stimulating fascination with the outre and larger-than-life, are not fully humanized. But, it is inaccurate to think of them as allegorical. Allegory does not require such detailed identification of the agent it seeks to reprehend. These “Display” protagonists are specimens whose proper dramatic identification obliges the playwright to draw upon many defining analogues, including evocations of allegorical prototypes from the cultural repertoire accessible to the playwright and his audience. However, these traditional analogues function much like the mutually qualifying metaphors of a good lyric poem, so that we are being historically retrograde if we label as “allegory” these dramatic efforts to identify novel refractions of human energy, and thus to augment an inadequate traditional typology. The drama of ethical display is not a mechanical application of canonized typological similes. They have to do with what is troublingly new.

II

Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy is an explicit dramatical projection of the themes of the 127th Psalm, “Nisi Dominus, nothing can be done without God's grace,” and a Calvinist reading at that. The correlation is detailed, so that the imagery and governing ideas of The Atheist's Tragedy are brought into intimate dramatic conjunction.

In his Third Ennead, writing of Providence, Plotinus reminds us:

All is just and good in the Universe in which every actor is set in his own quite appropriate place. … What is evil in the single soul will stand a good thing in the universal system; what in the unit offends nature will serve nature in the total event—and still remain the weak and wrong tone it is, though its sounding takes nothing from the worth of the whole, just as, in another order of image, the executioner's ugly office does not mar the well-governed state: such an officer is a civic necessity; and the corresponding moral type is often serviceable; thus, even as things are, all is well.²

These calm, reliant words sum up well the substance of Tourneur's hopes. Some of the images are even specifically appropriate to his play. They put us firmly in touch with that theodiciacal tradition of high Christian thought running from Augustine, who imbibed here, through Calvin and Milton, to come seasonably to rest in Pope. Though the terms, being simple and essential, remain the same, the ease with which they are believed varies. The tone in Tourneur is urgent and to a degree fearful. His play is a careful construct to bind up and intensify conviction. That he partly fails in this is a direct outcome of his excessive concentration on making his case.

Tourneur evidently shared with Calvin a liking for one of the latter's favorite Psalms, the Auxilium Domini (No. 127, or No. 126 in the Vulgate). Its repertoire of subjects appeals to those devoted to a life of aggressive political stewardship under an authoritarian God:

Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

What precisely Calvin has to say of this psalm could almost be inferred by a student of his theological position, but we will seek detailed evidence of his comment later.

Meanwhile let it be stated that this is a short psalm of only five verses, but in its brief compass it neatly incorporates: 1) a text for the doctrine of work; 2) a clear image of God's overlordship and Providence; 3) an assertion of the primary value of children; while 4) stressing their contingent derivation. Moreover, since among the central drives of post-Reformation life were the establishment of a house, the building of a family, and the fathering of a business house, and since all of these are readily fused in standard English usage, so that in the context of provident familial ambition, “house” and “family” mean the same thing, Psalm 127 provides a side-by-side association of two things that become one—the desire to build and the desire to have children, to found a house and to have a family. The theme of the Psalm in Elizabethan terms is “building a family,” and “Happy is the man,” the Psalmist assures us, “that hath his quiver full of them.” Tourneur's play it will be remembered is about the naturalist D'Amville who seeks to “found a house.” First, then, pertinent excerpts from Calvin's commentary on the 127th Psalm:

1. The initial precis made by Calvin:

The Conteyntes of the CXXVII Psalme

It sheweth that the order of the world, as well in publicke affaires as in household matters, standeth not by the pollicie, diligence, and forcast of men, but by the only blissing of God, and that issew of mankind is his singular gift.

(p. 204, column 1)

2. The significance of house:

By the woord house hee not onely betokeneth a building of timber or stone: but also coprehendeth the whole order of householding: like as a little after, by the woorde citie hee betokeneth, not onely the building or compasse of the walles, but the general state of the whole comon weale. And in the words [builder and keeper,] there is the figure Sinecdoche.

(p. 204, columns 1 & 2)

3. On the Fathering of Children:

The most part of men dreameth, that after God had once ordeyned it at the beginning, from thence foorth children are bred and borne by the secret instinct of nature, and God dooth nothing unto it: yea and even they that be indewed with some feeling of godliness: although they denye not that God is the father and fownder of mankynd: yit acknowledge they not that his providence descendeth too this peculiare charge, but rather thinke that men are begotten by a certeyne universall motion.

(p. 205, column 4)³

These bear with exact particularity on the tightly related themes of the play; a further passage on the “Suffering of Believers” will be adduced later when it is time to show its bearing on The Atheist's Tragedy's longest and most peculiar scene, the churchyard scene (IV.iii).

This special exegetical comment should be related to the more philosophical theology of the relevant portion of Calvin's Institutes. I refer to chapter xv of Book I, where we have Calvin on Providence, entitled, “God's Preservation and Support of the World by His Power and His Government of Every Part of it by His Providence.”

Calvin's chapter gives a galaxy of arguments for believing that nothing happens which is not a part of God's perfectly detailed design for the universe—nothing is fortuitous, nothing may be ascribed to chance or fortune whose reified philosophical utility Calvin specifically refutes, while doing scholastic cartwheels to distinguish his perfectly resolved and totally non-permissive God from he pagan Fate. The distinction Calvin makes has considerable historical validity but no philosophical force, since there is no reason why Fate as the source of Necessity should not have acted just like the necessitarian God had it been so imagined; that it did not do so is an historical accident. The most relevant passage in Calvin's argument shows how the sun serves as God's instrument to promote natural growth. Calvin waxes as near lyrical as his severe lawyer's mind will permit him to do (these botanical ramifications of God's efficacy through the “sun” are usurped, along with much else, by D'Amville, as we will see shortly):

trees likewise and vines, by his genial warmth, first put forth leaves, then blossoms, and from the blossoms produce their fruit!⁴

Intermixed with this rhapsodic strain there is a darker, more tragic element, as subsequent degeneration of puritan doctrine has dramatized. The agon of the Calvinist nature defines itself as a struggle for authentic status, which easily devolves into a self-circumscribing, swelling of the Will. For the Calvinist, God's essence is remote and inviolate, but functionally the need for spiritual confirmation is so great that Godhead is expropriated lest one be forced to confess, “God knows, man does not know.” Calvinism loves the scriptures and wants to use them as a means to certain knowledge of God's aims, but since God's nature is radically unknowable beyond his empirical functions as predestinate and omniscient shaper of a total pattern, man's use of the scripture is philosophically irrelevant. Hence, the unmistakeable fear that man's activity is compulsive and unintelligible to any but the unknown God grows. Calvinism is a brand of self-subverted Socratism. It loves the search for knowledge but it can't believe in its righteousness or its efficacy. It sees life as a threatening game of reading the signs aright, a game in which disaster is equivalent to sin and possesses the same shaming force. The prudent man, being in harmony with God, reads the signs aright or, like Charlemont in The Atheist's Tragedy, waits patiently (if somewhat priggishly) until matters are clarified. The depraved man (the fool) is wrong and lost—a pragmatic tautology. The fool is condemned because he is the kind of man to whom such things are permitted to happen. The objectively “tragic space” in Calvin's world-view is marked out by the ethical contradictions inherent in their conception of prudence (or, in Tourneur's terms, in being provident). Not to be prudent advertises folly; to be prudent invites arrogation of divine privilege. Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy is a dramatic meditation on this meta-ethical quandry. Calvinists need one set of statements about God and another set of notions about human responsibility; their doctrine is metaphysically schizoid, but this metaphysical no-man's land of doubt creates the situation for a peculiar kind of tragedy. One must choose definitively but without confidence in the act's meaning; this moves us close to the absurd, and The Atheist's Tragedy teeters on the brink of black comedy or “gallows humor” much of the time.

The Atheist's Tragedy is a theological play. This does not mean, as Ornstein in his otherwise excellent study strangely assumes,⁵ that the aim of the playwright should have been to have his heroine, Castabella, systematically refute the evil, naturalistic doctrines of her would-be seducer, the play's hero and her father-in-law, the atheist D'Amville. There can be no water-tight, philosophical refutation of total atheism, since the atheist and the theist reside in different communities of discourse. Tourneur was perhaps wise enough not to send his gentle heroine on such an errand. To refute atheism before a community disturbed in the year 1610 by some nearly unformulatable doubts about the ways of providence could only be done through that mode of pragmatic ritual we call drama. The dramatist could employ emblematic means to show that as a course of action atheism does not work. At its most philosophical, drama, as an imitation of an action, is truest to itself when it is pragmatic. It operates through actions which are brought to meaning by the playwright's provision of motive and by the audience's imaginative concurrence in this plastic diagnosis.

The Atheist's Tragedy is thus a concrete reanimation of a distinctively pictorial variant of the traditional Christian view. In an iconographic fashion it composes a complete specific action, the life-choices of D'Amville against an architectonically intelligible world order. It is a dogmatic celebration of the agency by which life is ordered. The ideas that Tourneur sets to work are commonplaces, though they are less prevalent in the drama of the time than one would suppose from reading the routine criticism of the play. The language of the play is not so original and exciting as the nervous and impatient idiom of The Revenger's Tragedy, but the deliberately managed mutual interplay of concept and rendering image is more consistently sustained than in any other play of its general kind outside of Shakespeare.

Though the play is explicitly homiletical in its dramatization of the 127th Psalm, H. H. Adas excluded it from his book on Homiletic Tragedy. The Psalm establishes an economical format of relationship between: the play's iterative imagery; its informing concepts; and its ground theme. The theme of the Psalm is the extent and nature of God's providence. Tourneur has thickened the texture of his study of Christian hybris by punning on the seminally divergent meanings of one word, “Providence.” It means both God's benevolent and interested participation in men's affairs and man's prudent and carefully considered superintendence of his own affairs. In Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes (1586), the crocodile's alleged ability to anticipate the rise of the Nile is used as an emblem of Providence; this image and his commentary on it indicate that prudent foresight is one of the primary meanings of the term: “When anie one doth take in hande a cause … longe thereon to ponder” (p. 3). This second meaning of “providence” is just emerging historically as the play is written. Though Tourneur opposes the two readings of providence in a too relentless manner, the play is composed with great care. Tourneur has succeeded better than most dramatists do in discovering adequate objective correlatives for his moral prevision. When The Atheist's Tragedy is classified with plays of the same mode, what I have called “Dramas of Ethical Display” or Neo-parabolical dramas—like The Jew of Malta, Measure for Measure, Volpone, Timon of Athens, and A New Way to Pay Old Debts—Tourneur's borderline interplay between realism and emblematic dramatization does not seem so crude as the rigid, illusionistic presuppositions of earlier critics of Tourneur caused them to believe.

III

Unless the Lord build the house they labour in vain that build it

and

Behold the inheritance of the Lord are children: the reward, the fruit of the womb.

These two verses express in brief the two important constituents of the short 127th Psalm; they equally clearly state the central themes of The Atheist's Tragedy as well as accounting most economically and exactly for the imagery in which Tourneur expresses the atheist's desire to supersede God in his creative dominion over object and person. Stated most concisely The Atheist's Tragedy presents the didactically rationalized account of one who questioned God's providential power, arrogated to himself in specific terms the traditional operations of that Providence, tried to build a monument for himself and for his posterity through that posterity and thereby achieve through the sons whom he had generated the secularized immortality which he had a need for. The play is then a dramatization of man in his finitude contesting the rights of time and death and losing ignominiously. The contest, it turns out, isn't even close.

D'Amville's projected relationship to his real antagonist, who is not the “Christian-Stoic-Pure one,” Charlemont, but rather the Deity Himself, reflects in its neat working out the pattern of the whole play. There are two clear and divergent usages of the word “Providence”: 1) God as the supervising author of all things creates not only man but also the “plot” that man acts out. All creatures are part of the cast who wait on His will and occasionally move forward on the stage to become intelligible enough parts of the great design to be called “instruments.” God's universe is His work, and He may be said to have built it in fact, or to seem to be building it from our limited viewpoint in time. Furthermore, if God oversees our lives He has to watch us. To express this men's fancy has adopted two standard and iconographically related emblems: a) the eye functions as the symbol for the all-knowing and ever-present God; and b) the stars which in Sir John Davies' simple but eloquent lines, are seen as

The lights of heav'n (which are the World's fair eies)
Looke downe into the World, the World to see.(6)

God as the author, director, hovering over the world-stage of man's action and seeing all is contrasted to 2) the simulation of this providence in the activities of D'Amville, the modern provident man (i.e., foresighted and carefully planning). The language of the play is most explicit in its reflection of Tourneur's attempt to show D'Amville as the very usurper of God—His ape and His intended supersessor.

In the first scene D'Amville is already speaking of himself in the terms we are directed to recognize as an especially Christian kind of hybris. He is characteristically engaged in the familiar ritual of the ambitious man, discussing his “plans” and his reasons for them:

A man has reason to provide and add
For what is he hath such a present eye,
And so prepar'd a strength that can forsee,
And fortify his substance and himself
Against those accidents, the least whereof
May rob him of an age's husbandry?

(I.i.47-52; italics mine)⁷

He adds that as my children multiply, “so should my providence.” Notice not only that he begins to pile up the words denoting specifically providential activity but that with the phrase “fortify my substance” the imagery of building the structure of one's strong, lasting house is already under way.⁸ The marriage of hybris to this Elizabethan desire to found a house and to live on in it is accented by the exaggerated frequency with which D'Amville is made to use the pronoun my, mine, etc. In this same thematic first scene, Borachio, D'Amville's creature, uses the word “providence” to signify schemes to defraud the good nephew Charlemont of his inheritance. Then D'Amville's two sons enter almost as if in dumb show for choral exegesis by their father. The dramatic device underscores the sons' contingent role in their father's ambitious schematization of human relationships,

Here are my sons. …
There's my eternity. My life in them
And their succession shall for ever live,
And in my reason dwells the providence
To add to life as much of happiness.

(I.i.123-127; italics mine)

To make D'Amville's abuse of this word even more overt Tourneur has him make light of his brother's fears for his son, Charlemont's death in war by affirming his own belief in Fate which makes death a matter

                                                            so certainly unalterable,
What can the use of providence prevail?

(I.ii.50-51)

Here only the fact of his own egocentricity prevents him falling into a contradiction.

There is a much more elaborate analogy to convince one that D'Amville (damned villain?) is developed in the play as the tragically absurd one who seeks to usurp the governing role of the providential God, but before coming to that let us speak about the ethical quality of his proceedings as these are evaluated in the play. One of the aspects of a belief in providence is that God has to use people to effect his plans. They are His instruments. D'Amville uses all other human beings to effect his ends. He has an instant genius for the main chance which makes him constantly able to convert the routine follies of men to prudent advantage. After D'Amville's creature Borachio has several times gloried in his self-identification as

Your instrument shall make your project proud

(I.ii.241 and e.g., I.ii.223)

D'Amville, viewing the drunkness of his brother's servants, and deciding to murder his brother says,

Their drunkenness …
Shall be a serious instrument to bring
Our sober purposes to their success.

(II.ii.19-21)

This notion of making instruments of any and everyone is brought to a species of emotional climax, when immediately after the treacherous and stealthily executed murder of his ailing brother, D'Amville in an ecstasy of self-congratulation speaks a hectic duet with his creature, Borachio. At this point in the play, the notions of plotting, of building, of planning, of scheming so coalesce as to become indistinguishable. Since the legitimate definition of providence includes not only the dimension of planning and foreseeing but of benevolent intent, D'Amville's parody of the divine power grows more appallingly grotesque. Calvin is very specific on this point. A key remark in the Institutes provides a virtual epigraph for Tourneur's play:

For how does it happen that a prudent man, consulting his own welfare, averts from himself impending evils, and a fool is ruined by his inconsiderate temerity, unless folly and prudence are in both cases instruments of the Divine dispensation?

(op. cit., p. 195)

Flourishing the rock with which his brother was brained, D'Amville in a speech of black-comic burlesque on Christ's words proclaims,

Upon this ground I'll build my manor house
And this shall be the chiefest corner-stone.

(II.iv.99-100)

And then, intoxicated by his own boldness, he refutes all other claims to a part in the design of events,

Not any circumstance
That stood within the reach of the design
Of persons, dispositions, matter, time,
Or, place, but by this brain of mine was made
An instrumental help. …

(II.iv.103-107; italics mine)

Then in operatic duet, the two conspirators gleefully catalogue the steps of the scheme, in which friendly conviviality between members of the family, D'Amville announces, was economically

… us'd by me to make the servants drunk,
An instrument the plot could not have miss'd.

(II.iv.125-126; italics mine)

The servants and friends walking with them were made unwitting accessories (“The instruments, yet knew not what they did” [II.iv.135]). And then lest we miss the extent of D'Amville's claim, Tourneur in the undaunted pedantical fashion that differentiates him from all his contemporaries has D'Amville explicitly generalize it:

That power of rule, philosophers ascribe
To him they call the supreme of the stars.

(II.iv.136-137)

In short, what the supposedly wise call Providence (“that power of rule”), I have just embodied by “creating” and “executing” this scheme through a series of instruments. The play's precise flavor cannot be tasted unless we see that D'Amville, unlike the usual subphilosophical villain, is more interested in the meaning of his own actions than in the acts themselves. He is not seeking power in any ordinary sense; his challenge is to the Deity. In the same fashion that Marlowe's Tamburlaine is a dramatized critique of the concept called Nemesis, so The Atheist's Tragedy is an emblematic critique of the arguments for the primacy of human providence. Another constituent of the play echoes D'Amville's argument but in a more ceremonial mode.

At the opening of Act IV there is a little inset scene which bears the same relationship to the whole play as the porter's speech to Macbeth or to a dream interlude in a modern novel, i.e., it condenses the thematic content, or to put it another way, it is the inert meaning of the play divorced from the action. Here, moreover, as in the case of Macbeth, it is the “meaning” of the play seen sub specie unmediated by human intention or concern. Macbeth's actions transform any world he can know into Hell; the “porter scene” helps us to modulate from the fairly objective world of the early scenes to the subjectified latter scenes, where Macbeth actively tries to recreate the world in his own image. Similarly in The Atheist's Tragedy, Tourneur's inset scene involves a minor, thematic character, the Bawd, Cataplasma (i.e., “poultice,” or one who applies something warm and soothing to swollen members) and her maid. They are doing needlework. The prior scene has just closed on Rousard, D'Amville's sickly son, who has been married to Castabella as part of D'Amville's master plan to raise his posterity to wealth and dignity, where the sickly Rousard (indeed he is dying) is made to say,

A gen'ral weakness did surprise my health
The very day I marry'd Castabella,
As if my sickness were a punishment
That did arrest me for some injury
I then committed.

(III.iv.63-67)

The sins of the father are not only visited upon the son, they are symbolically figured in his physical condition. That there is a direct connection between D'Amville's scheming and botanical iconography is shown in D'Amville's hypocritical remarks to Charlemont whose father he has murdered just preceding the inset scene itself:

I will supply your father's vacant place,
To guide your green improvidence of youth
And make you ripe for your inheritance.

(III.iv.51-53; italics mine)

The scene that follows this with the two sub-plot females (Cataplasma and her maid) is pointless in itself, i.e., we have no reason to be interested in their opinions for their own sake. The two are examining a piece of needlework:

What's here? a medlar with a plum tree growing hardy by it; the leaves o' the plum tree falling off; the gum issuing out o' the perished joints; and the branches some of 'em dead, and some rotten; and yet but a young plum tree. … The plum tree, forsooth, grows so near the medlar that the medlar sucks and draws all the sap from it and the natural strength o' the ground, so that it cannot prosper

(IV.i.2-9)

and then immediately following a slightly varied repetition of the scene's point:

But here th'ast made a tree to bear no fruit. Why's that?

and the answer:

There grows a savin tree next it.

(IV.i.10-12)

Savin is an irritant poison used to cause women to abort. The point is somewhat subtler and more functional than might readily appear. The medlar's symbolic force isn't limited to its familiar application to the prostitute, though, of course, the scene is heavily charged with sexual puns in keeping with the lust-ridden atmosphere of the play's quasi-comic subplot. The medlar also symbolizes the wisdom that supposedly accompanies the natural decline of physical strength—that is it betokens a certain kind of maturity. Under “Mespilus” in Philippo Picinello's Mundus Symbolicus we find that its famous property “non maturum prius, quam putridum” is to be understood “in Plato's words” to mean:

Mentis oculus tunc acute incipi cernere, cum primum corporis oculus deflorescit.⁹

We then are to understand that a natural process of growth would produce wisdom and spiritual insight in D'Amville and that by this means he should be able to nurture and promote the ready growth of his children towards the independent strength which the plum tree conventionally symbolizes. In the very first scene D'Amville has linked his specious “providence” with the image of a tree:

And as for my children, they are as near to me
As branches of a tree whereon they grow,
And may as numerously be multiply'd.
As they increase, so should my providence,
For from my substance they receive the sap.
Whereby they live and flourish.

(I.i.53-58; italics mine)¹⁰

But we see both in the play and in the thematic iconography of this little scene that this is not so. His age being wisdomless simply draws off the independent life of the child, since his roots are deeper, which is to say that his power to gratify his own needs is greater. The savin (i.e., the juniper) image emphasizes that, while all the time talking of his concern for his posterity, he is actually aborting natural growth through usurpation of his children's independent status as souls.

From this inset, emblematic scene onwards, the play's tempo picks up as D'Amville's elaborate, self-serving schemes begin to fall apart. Since the crucial indicators of the play's tone as well as of its consciously composed referential system reach a point where the action is virtually swamped under the burden of the preconceived meanings it must bear, it is time to stand back a moment, so that we can see the contours of the play more clearly.

The basic or main plot of the play is very simple by Jacobean standards. D'Amville wishes to seize the wealth of his baronial neighbor, Montferrers, and to raise higher the fabric of his own house. His drives are less from greed than to magnify his posterity and so to secure his name against eclipse by death which he fears to an unnatural extent. Hence he has the double aim of murdering Montferrers and replacing with his own son Montferrers' son, Charlemont—the play's exemplar of goodness—as the husband-to be of Castabella, daughter of D'Amville's brother, Belforest, who is also a baron. By this design, D'Amville can arrogate to himself all three large estates: his own, his brother's and his neighbor's. The treacherous cupidity which serves this aim, and his self-lauding way of premeditating and executing it, make him into a kind of parodic trinity. With Charlemont out of the way at the wars in the Low Countries, his father murdered and Castabella married to D'Amville's son, Rousard, D'Amville will have achieved a puny version of omnipotence over both the present substance and the potential for the future of his “world.” The first two acts of the play in an almost diagrammatic fashion exposit this scheme and trace its swift and adroit accomplishment. The real substance of the play, to which the first two acts are a circumstantial premise, follows in the last three acts which open with the lyric hypocrisy of D'Amville's funeral eulogies over the body of the murdered Montferrers and before the empty monument of Charlemont whose pretended death at the seige of Ostend D'Amville has contrived to promulgate, so as to speed the marriage of his son to Castabella now left bereft by this specious death.

The action from this point is one immense peripety, multiplying evidence of the foundationless nature of D'Amville's apparent “providential” design. Modern critical discussions of the play are faithful enough to its obvious structural movement, but they diverge in the most misleading way from its tone as a felt experience when reading it.¹¹ If these modern readings are permitted to become surrogates for the experience of the play, we conclude that the play is intellectually relentless, sombre in tone and almost dirge-like in tempo. It isn't at all. Much of the action has the pace and intricacy of bedroom comedy; a large percentage of the dialogue is allocated to Sebastian, D'Amville's reckless, sexually rampageous but still rather decent younger son; to the garrulous puritanical imposter, Languebeau Snuffe, and his sneaky if inept lechery; to the ever hopeful intrigues of Castabella's lusty step-mother, Levidulcia; and the trivial clownish antics of Soquette and Fresco, the would-be sexual objects of these hustling lechers.

Moreover, the play has a double plot structure reminiscent more of The Changeling or The Dutch Courtesan than of the standard revenge or heroic plays to which it is conventionally compared.¹² The sub-plot roughly parallels the main action: Cataplasma “founds a house” of ill-fame where women can meet secretly with their lovers. This part of the play is a fairly spirited, saturnalian parallel to the main plot. Its hallmark is a licentious and “free” thinking, sexual naturalism which is the grosser physical analogue to D'Amville's philosophical licentiousness. Just as D'Amville's older son Rousard is spiritually sick and wholly impotent as scion of that godless foundation, his father's house; so is Sebastian, the younger son, a kind of moral castrate who is all cheerful, unabashed, headlong libido. Both die appropriately; Rousard just gutters out like a feeble flame—snuffed out by the miasmic atmosphere of his father's ethos; Sebastian dies in a bawdy house quarrel, striving in his not ignoble but thoughtless fashion to protect the non-existent honor of his uncle's wife, Levidulcia, with whom he had meant to copulate. He kills his uncle and dies himself in the encounter. His death is almost wordless. He is snuffed out too in darkness and confusion, with shouts of the converging nightwatch as his death's noisy continuo. The hysterical penitence of Levidulcia when she discovers his bloody corpse seconds later, culminating in her stagy, implausible and unregarded suicide, offers suitably minute recompense for his genial imprudence. The point here is the almost negligible quality of these unilluminated lives. The impact of the play is meager if we view it too solemnly; but if we sense its partial affinities to the theater of the absurd, then Tourneur's play, no longer the awkward product of humorless ineptitude, takes on new vitality.

D'Amville's manipulative and egocentric talents presumptuously claim immense foresight, whereas the latter part of the action is conducted in almost surrealistic confusion. D'Amville is perpetually surprised by the turn of events. As personified in his two sons, he has neither staying power nor circumspection, rather poor credentials for a would-be providential deity. D'Amville, largely through his high-spirited and conscienceless “instrument,” Borachio, does some evil things. He murders a guiltless man, and with gleeful hypocrisy he publicly mourns him; he “uses” others constantly in direct contradiction to Kant's updating formulation of the central imperative of Christian charity: that “No man should ever be treated as a means to anything but always as an end in himself”; he incestuously propositions his virtuous daughter-in-law, Castabella; he vainly plots the murder of the guiltless Charlemont. But, in the frame of the play these acts are not so much horrible as pretentious. No one he actually succeeds in harming is a fully realized character; his designs are like the false pregnancy which forms one of the images of the play, “a tympany” (i.e., a swelling or tumor) which “turns but to a certain kind of phlegmatic windy disease” (IV.iii.38-40)—in short, a gigantic fart, the noisy evidence of false claims.

D'Amville and Borachio, a physically lazy but ingenious master and his utterly amoral and frisky instrument, are more like Volpone and Mosca than threatening presences from the world of tragic revenge. And, this is not because of lamentable artistic incapacity on the part of Tourneur; it is because the premises of D'Amville's providential schemes make him seem more foolish than terrible. The magnitude of his possible accomplishment is so trivial and vain when held up against the theoretically posited God who is omniscient stage-manager of Tourneur's world, that everything he does to invite direct comparison to providential sovereignty shrinks him smaller. In the end, D'Amville is sleepless—as far from the peace of self-contentment as Faustus or Macbeth. His insomniac condition has been prefigured, by contrast, in the play's longest and most overtly symbolic scene, that in the churchyard when Borachio is killed by Charlemont and D'Amville's hopes are thereby irretrievably lost. In this dark setting replete with charnel house, gravestones, skulls and numerous ghostly shenanigans, the “good ones,” Charlemont and Castabella, surrounded by foes and apparently lost, “lie down with either of them a death's head for a pillow” and sleep (IV.ii.190-204). Here let us recall a further section of Calvin's commentary on the 127th Psalm which the play dramatizes:

On the Suffering of Believers:

If any man obiect ageyne, that the faythfull doo often broyle in sore cares, and thoughfull [sic] for the morrow when they be pinched with want of all things and destitute of all meanes to come by any thing. I answere that if there were perfect faith & devotion in the woorshippers of god, the blissing of God which the prophet mencioneth should bee apparant. Therefore as oft as they be tormented without measure: that happeneth through their own default, bycause they rest not throughly upon Gods providence. And this I say further, that they be more streightly punished than the unbeleevers, because it is necessarie for them to bee haryed hither and thither with unquietness for a tyme, that they maye come too thys sleepe in the ende. But yet in the meane whyle Gods grace preuayleth, and shyneth foorth alwaye in the middes of dark nesse, bycause the Lorde cherisheth hys children as it were by sleepe.

(p. 205, col. 2; italics mine)

If we can accept the vantage point which makes undue thinking foolish (and Hamlet, who has superior credentials for making such a judgment, supplies a classic text in his “I defy augury” speech), then it is readily possible to see not only why D'Amville proceeds towards absurdity as a limit but also to catch hold of the comedic force of his unintentional self-execution at the end of the play. This episode has been, and possibly will remain, an embarrassment to Tourneur's admirers. D'Amville, before a court of judgment which is charged with the trial and sentencing of the virtuous young couple, Charlemont and Castabella—and here again the trial scene invokes for us not the tragic courtroom of Webster's The White Devil but the plight of the equally idealistic and misused Celia and Bonario in another “Drama of Ethical Display,” Volpone—breaks with all decorum in characteristic display of impatience. At no point in the play's action has he been content to let the initiative reside with God or with any other man. Hamlet's “Readiness is all” is utterly beyond his absurdly restricted moral capacities. Typically, then, he usurps the court's function, and proceeds to play judge, jury and, though not intentionally, executioner to himself. When he leaps to the platform, seizes the executioner's axe and “As he raise up the axe strikes out his own brains,” we are not to see this as God's hand reaching down as in a crude 15th century woodcut, but as a further example of the cosmic silliness of D'Amville's usurping role. When the dying D'Amville says, “The lust of death commits a rape on me” (V.ii.267), the flamboyant figure is quite precise. As the latter part of the play makes clear, D'Amville's basic drive has been to cheat death of its fearfulness, thus the overweening impulse to arrogate initiative to himself in his swollen efforts to simulate Providence which assigns death's moment as it closes each life account. We have seen in the “churchyard” scene, with its explicit commentary by Calvin, that patience (which is thus a by-product of faith) is most perfectly manifest in an untroubled disregard of death and its unpredictable coming as symbolized by the childlike sleep of the virtuous. D'Amville's insomniac restiveness is the polar opposite to this and is implicitly a form of self-destruction, of suicide. Still more, when married to such relentless self-advertisement as D'Amville's, to such sterile misuse of all other lives, it becomes grotesque—repellent yes, but absurd too. His silly expropriation of the instrument of death, the axe, symbolically recapitulates his misconceived life style. Like Agamemnon's treading on the scarlet carpet in the Oresteia, the final act of D'Amville is not the cause of his death in itself, it is the emblematic summation of the process of his life.

The Atheist's Tragedy is unusually self-consistent as, indeed, a play of Calvinistic inspiration should be. There are many plays in the Tudor-Stuart period which have a strong religious orientation. Tragedy often stems from a sense of the problematic nature of providence. In Tourneur's play, however, an extra step towards theodicy is taken. He believes God's intentions are explicit and demonstrable, so that for him God's justice literally vindicates itself. Whenever an artist operates from a convinced sense of God's express availability as a deus ex machina of unlimited prerogative, there is bound to be a comedic infusion, since divine judgment is full, irresistible and provides a context for the action so much more embracing than any dramatizable alternative, that human ambition is transposed into the cosmic silliness of unfounded presumption. Dramas of Ethical Display have a special competence for molding philosophical ironies into dramatic structures which invite a disjunction of response. This special inflection of the tragic may be summed up in the figure oxymoron: D'Amville is “displayed” as a “tiny monster,” or as a “dangerous trifler,” or as “vigilant blind man,” or as a “life-hoarding suicide.” What seem to be contradictions in the play's tonal stresses are resolved, when we see that Calvinism places a low valuation upon human life qua life: its stress is on innocence and theoretic virtue. Hence, we are unfaithful to the theological imperatives of the play, when we permit a few deaths (or life annulments) to darken our sense of the sovereign concerns of the play as a symbolic action. The Atheist's Tragedy possesses considerable energy when we accept all its elements and do not diagram it according to some magisterially fixed notion of the tragic. As a dramatization of the 127th Psalm, it takes a very high point of vantage in measuring human capacity. From such heights our plannings seem like scurryings, our deflections are returns, and our selfish escapades, as in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale of which The Atheist's Tragedy is a remote descendent, lead to surprising, yet obvious retributions.

Notes

1. Tulane Drama Review, 8 (1964), 215-16.

2. Plotinus: The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London, 1956), p. 177.

3. The Psalmes of David and Others with J. Calvins Commentaries, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1571): STC 4395.

4. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia, 1930), II, 184.

5. Robert Ornstein, “The Atheist's Tragedy and Renaissance Naturalism,” SP, 51 (1954), 194-207.

6. Cf. innumerable scriptural references and a standard handbook such as George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), p. 64. For Davies, see his “Nosce Teipsum,” in The Poems, ed. Grosart, p. 25.

7. All quotations from The Atheist's Tragedy are from Irving Ribner's edition for The Revels Plays (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Methuen, 1964).

8. M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), pp. 175-80, notes the pattern of building imagery as does Una Ellis-Fermor in “The Imagery of The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy,” MLR, 30 (1935), 296 et passim. Indeed, the building imagery is so functional and explicit that one supposes all readers must in some sense note its presence.

9. Philippo Picinello, Mundus Symbolicus (Rome, 1729), I, 576.

10. As suggested by my earlier comment on Calvin's rhapsodic passage on the fertilizing and nurturing power of God's seminal instrument the sun, D'Amville tries to usurp the natura naturans aspect of Godhead as well as God's more administrative functions. His sterile efforts in this sphere act as an ironic doubling of his groundless presumption. The play's deepest image stratum has to do with the negation of growth, the abortion of natural process.

11. Irving Ribner in the introduction to his useful edition of The Atheist's Tragedy which I have already cited as my own text for quotation, supplies a good review of critical discussion of the play over the past thirty years or so. Essays by L. G. Salingar (1938), Harold Jenkins (1941), Michael Higgens (1943), John Peter (1956), and Inga-Stina Ekeblad (1959) may be joined to those of Ornstein, Bradbrook and Ellis-Fermor already cited to get a sense of the tradition. Ribner's own commentary is also valuable.

12. After completing this essay, I read Richard Levin's useful essay, “The Subplot of The Atheist's Tragedy,” HLQ, 29 (1965), 17-33. This carefully schematized study supplies welcome confirmation of my general claim of the deliberate reflections of the main-plot issues in the secondary plot. It is full and particularized in establishing the conscious artistry with which the parallels are developed. Since Professor Levin's perceptions of the tone, movement and intellectual tendenz of the main action are wholly in tune with the conventional critical commentary, his interpretation of Tourneur's use of his subplot and my own are healthily complimentary rather than in competition.