[In the following essay, Ornstein argues that in The Revenger's Tragedy Tourneur depicts a world of moral rogues in which ethical law is absent or ineffectual but in which an ethical design operates through the processes of human psychology, and that this moral order, like Tourneur himself, is disillusioned in its outlook on life but orthodox in its values.]

Although a just appreciation of Tourneur's artistry has replaced the nineteenth century celebration of him as a master of satanic revels, recent critical attention has centered more upon explaining the mind that created The Revenger's Tragedy than upon analyzing the play as dramatic literature. We need not inveigh, however, against “irrelevant conjectures,” for after paying homage to Tourneur's management of plot and dramatic irony and to his poetic genius, the critic must inevitably attempt to relate Tourneur's vision of licentiousness and depravity to either the world as normally apprehended by the reader or to the creative process which embodies an artist's perception of life in literature. U. M. Ellis-Fermor has suggested that Tourneur accepted (imaginatively at least) “a worldorder inherently evil,” “a universe denuded of spiritual significance.”¹ T. S. Eliot has attributed The Revenger's Tragedy to an adolescent hatred of life.² Harold Jenkins has inferred that Tourneur's mind was “instinctively aware only of the sin everywhere rife in the world.”³ Michael H. Higgins has found in Tourneur's drama a Calvinistic revulsion against human corruption and moral perversity.⁴

But it does not seem to me that a disgust with life or with humanity is the deeply ingrained characteristic of Tourneur's mind and art. I would suggest that The Revenger's Tragedy metaphorically expresses the intense, but only temporary, disillusion of a very orthodox and very conservative mind.⁵ Indeed, despite its lurid and seemingly eccentric depiction of life, the play is cast, as we shall see, in an ethical design as subtle, sophisticated, and intellectual as that of Jonson's great comedies.

It is indicative of Tourneur's artistic powers that even recent critics, overlooking his use of conventional materials, interpret The Revenger's Tragedy as a direct transcription of an inflamed emotional outlook. Yet the play is set in the Italy familiar to Elizabethan Protestant imaginations—the Italy so vividly described in Ascham's Scholemaster as a sink of atheism, luxury, and corruption. Other Jacobeans, to be sure, use Italianate settings in tragedy, but only as backdrops for such glorious villains as Flamineo and De Flores. Tourneur's characters, however, do not transcend the Italianate—they epitomize it. His imagination triumphs over nature and reality by distilling the essence of Italianate horror, by pre-empting and refining a conventional image of sensuality and violence.

Like his dramatic universe, Tourneur's characters seem peculiarly his own and unrelated to their many conventional Elizabethan analogues. For though these allegorical figures are not sophisticated by psychological complexities, they bear the unmistakable stamp of their creator. Their ruling passions swell, not from within, but from one central, inexhaustible reservoir of emotion that animates virtuous and vicious alike and that gives the play its superb unity of tone. Cynicism, outrage, loathing, and horror: all are present, fused and focused by Tourneur's morbid fascination with the erotic.

To the mind that created Vindice's world, the sexual is as intriguing and repelling as a hideous disease. The most characteristic and memorable lines in the play are concerned with some facet of illicit sexual desire or bawdry. There are, of course, other vices in Vindice's society, but they are subsidiary ones; the lust for murder is always the desire to avenge some rape, incest, or adultery. Like the medieval satirist, Vindice castigates the frailty and concupiscence of women, but unlike the medieval satirist, he is vastly amused by their sly tricks. Knowing their coy whoredoms, he trusts no woman's virtue, not even his mother's or sister's. His erotic imagination transfigures even his dead mistress' skull as he recalls when

                                                                                                    'twas a face
So farre beyond the artificiall shine
Of any womans bought complexion
That the uprightest man, (if such there be,
That sinne but seaven times a day) broke custome
And made up eight with looking after her.

(I. i. 23-28)

Similarly, Vindice cannot think of night without imagining strange and fulsome lusts:

Night! thou that lookst like funerall Heraulds fees
Torne downe betimes ith morning, thou hangst fittly
To Grace those sins that have no grace at all.
Now tis full sea a bed over the world;
Theres iugling of all sides; some that were Maides
E'en at Sun set are now perhaps ith Toale-booke;
This woman in immodest thin apparell
Lets in her friend by water, here a Dame
Cunning, nayles lether-hindges to a dore,
To avoide proclamation.
Now Cuckolds are a quoyning apace, apace, apace,
          apace.
And carefull sisters spinne that thread ith night,
That does maintaine them and their bawdes ith daie!

(II. ii. 149-161)

This is hardly Elizabethan paganism. Vindice's thoughts do not hover on feminine beauty or on the physical pleasures of sex. He is aroused and revolted not by what is seen, but by what is imagined—by the hugger-mugger, the backstairs work, the juggling behind the arras, and the stealing away by torchlight. He is fascinated with stealth rather than with sex. He is the Peeping Tom turned moralist and moralizing with the fevered sexual images dwelt upon by the impotent or the frustrate.

If the eroticism of The Revenger's Tragedy were confined to Vindice's speeches, we might credit Tourneur with a penetrating study of psychological abnormality. But actually the erotic is woven into the total fabric of the play, present as it is in every act and almost every scene. Indeed, we find in both of Tourneur's tragedies a consistent association of the sexual and the macabre, a lingering over “fulsome lusts” and assignations in graveyards and with skulls.⁶

At the same time that Tourneur places his individual stamp, as it were, upon the decadent world which he depicts, he isolates that world from any contact with larger or more normal realms of experience. Other Jacobean playwrights attempt to universalize the action of their dramas by the use of philosophical reflection. Tourneur admits none within his play (unless, of course, we call Vindice's choric commentaries “philosophical”). Other dramatists, using traditional parallels and correspondences, enlarge their dramatic scene; their characters, vehicles for philosophical and moral attitudes, become archetypal Stoics, politicians, and good or evil kings.⁷ Tourneur's allegorical method of characterization paradoxically denies universal importance to such major villains as the Duke or Lussurioso. They may personify particular vices, but they are cross-sectional samplings of a depraved world, not archetypal figures.

Actually Tourneur suggests the existence of his dramatic universe not by philosophical expansion of his immediate scene, but by the use of perspective. He draws a group of characters who are, depending upon their prominence in the play, “large” or “small,” distinct or vague. In the foreground are Lussurioso, the Duke, and Vindice; slightly “behind” them are the Duchess, Spurio, and Hippolito. Further in the background, and therefore smaller and less distinct in outline are Ambitioso and Supervacuo. Almost fading into the background itself is Junior, the “yongest sonne,” and behind him are all the shadowy figures of the court. But there is no essential difference between the Duke, the “yongest sonne,” and any of the lesser courtiers, except that the Duke's villainy is writ large, while the courtiers' lusts and assignations are only vaguely sketched. Tourneur lacks the power to convince us that his tragic world is the human world itself, but he skillfully creates an illusion of depth in his flat, two-dimensional scene by suggesting that the Duke's court extends and merges imperceptibly with a larger world which, if brought into the foreground, would be no different from the group of sensualists which Tourneur examines in detail.

No less skillful is the handling of character and dialogue in The Revenger's Tragedy. Although a sustained bitterness permeates the lines, Tourneur's intellect is always in control. We would never, for example, mistake Vindice's attacks upon lechery, gluttony, and pride for the spontaneous overflow of powerful moral feelings. Addressing the skull of Gloriana he says:

                                                                                                    … here's an eye,
Able to tempt a greatman—to serve God,
A prety hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble;
Me thinkes this mouth should make a swearer tremble,
A drunckard claspe his teeth, and not undo e'm,
To suffer wet damnation to run through e'm.
Heres a cheeke keepes her colour; let the winde go
          whistle,
Spout Raine, we feare thee not, be hot or cold
Alls one with us; and is not he absurd,
Whose fortunes are upon their faces set,
That feare no other God but winde and wet?

(III. v. 57-67)

Vindice's sermon is brittle and premeditated. Each word, each image, and each line falls perfectly into place. Some kind of moral frenzy is perhaps implicit, but it is a frenzy that has been transmuted into detached bitterness. Some shock of intense disillusion and horror has given way to the cynicism that turns all of life into a sardonic joke. And it is not only the vanity of evil that amuses Vindice; it is the whole futility of a life in which there are but three kinds of human beings: the completely abandoned, the hypocritical, and the rare, impecunious, malcontented good.

That Vindice serves as Tourneur's moral chorus we cannot doubt, but he is more importantly a character in the play, one whose moral perceptions are limited, and in the end, perverse. It is fittingly ironic that Vindice, the cynic, should uphold morality in his world, and that it should be the task of one who is contemptuous of all feminine modesty to protect virginity and to avenge murdered innocence. Vindice loathes vice, but he has no faith in virtue. He makes a jest of religion as of everything else. “Save Grace the bawde,” he remarks, “I seldome heare Grace nam'd!” And when Gratiana insists that all the riches in the world could not make her an unnatural bawd, he answers:

No, but a thousand Angells can;
Men have no power, Angells must worke you too't,
The world descends into such base-borne evills
          That forty Angells can make fourescore divills.

(II. i. 98-101)

Vindice wittily imbues a conventional Elizabethan pun with new meaning. These are the angels whose potency he does not doubt; when he speaks later of the heavenly angels and their “Christall plaudities,” he is much less convincing. His opposition to evil, though violent, lacks both direction and ultimate goal. He may use the phraseology of religion and of moral philosophy; he may assert that evil is unnatural. But his cynicism springs from an awareness that his world has departed from its natural course.

Within his society Vindice represents the only possible moral order, one that is perverse in nature and eminently corruptible because it has no higher purpose than the accomplishment of revenge. Vindice sees himself as the instrument of divine justice, but he interprets that justice as a lex taliones which gruesomely requites villainy with villainy. When the tortured Duke screams, “Is there a hell besides this, villaines?” Vindice answers:

Villaine?
Nay heaven is iust, scornes are the hires of scornes,
I nere knew yet Adulterer with-out hornes.

(III. v. 197-199)

To be sure, the Vindice who says this is not the Vindice who originally set out to revenge his murdered love. Although he can save his sister and mother from shame, he cannot save himself from his own cynicism. After murdering the Duke, he can watch with satisfaction an innocent man condemned for telling the truth, because such travesty of justice vindicates his own “moral” viewpoint. By the end of the play little semblance of Vindice's moral purpose remains; he and Hippolito are hardly distinguishable from the men they slaughter. Murder piles on murder, revenge upon revenge, as hate, lust, and ambition set lechers, adulterers, and assassins at each others' throats. Vindice and Hippolito are sent off to execution, not because the moral order is restored, not because the Goddess Astraea returns to earth, but only because Antonio is a politic ruler who fears that those who killed the old Duke might also kill him.

To all appearances the ending of The Revenger's Tragedy is quite amoral. In the last judgment, life and death—all's one. Two self-satisfied murderers unexpectedly “go to it” because of one final ironic twist of fate. The adventitious destruction of evil does not in itself reaffirm moral values unless we draw our conception of morality from such sources as The Spanish Tragedy. And yet the denouement of Tourneur's play is moral, in fact inevitably moral, for even as Vindice's character disintegrates, the incorruptible, remorseless moral order that governs his abandoned world reveals itself slowly and subtly, but unmistakably.

Throughout The Revenger's Tragedy a malicious Fate seems to thwart the best laid plans of sensualist and revenger alike. But on no character does irony weigh more heavily than on Vindice. Seeking only to revenge himself upon the Duke, he is hired first to procure his own sister for Lussurioso. Then he is engaged to pander for the Duke; and lastly he is employed by Lussurioso to murder Piato, i. e., to kill himself. But in his most trying moment Vindice appreciates the grim comedy of his situation, for it is the kind his intellect can savor. Above all he enjoys his superior knowledge and position in the deadly game of pretending which he must play. Vindice can always see through Lussurioso's pretenses, but his own disguises are impenetrable. He always knows Lussurioso's masked motives, but his own are well hidden. Thus his outbursts against Lussurioso are tempered by an unholy enjoyment of the game in which he is—or so he believes—always master.

Vindice is not, at the beginning, one of those half-mad revengers introduced to the stage by Kyd. He is a malcontented scholar brooding over his wrongs, morbid but not depraved. He will have none of society until Hippolito relates that Lussurioso has asked him:

To seeke some strange digested fellow forth:
Of ill-contented nature, either disgracst
In former times, or by new groomes displacst,
Since his Step-mothers nuptialls, such a bloud
A man that were for evill onely good;
To give you the true word some base coynd Pander.

(I. i. 84-89)

Vindice seizes this opportunity to obtain revenge and undertakes to disguise his true self in a mask of evil:

And therefore ile put on that knave for once,
And be a right man then, a man a'th Time,
For to be honest is not to be ith world.

(I. i. 101-103)

Having temporarily assumed the guise of knave, Vindice jestingly asks Hippolito, “Am I farre inough from my selfe?” and calls upon Impudence,

Thou Goddesse of the pallace, Mistris of Mistresses
To whom the costly-perfumd people pray,
Strike thou my fore-head into dauntlesse Marble;
Mine eyes to steady Saphires: …

(I. iii. 6-9)

His pretense of knavery is brilliantly successful, so successful in fact that it would seem he has a natural talent for it. Yet he is shocked to learn that he must launch his new career by procuring his own sister for Lussurioso:

Oh.
Now let me burst, I've eaten Noble poyson.
We are made strange fellowes, brother, innocent
          villaines.

(I. iii. 190-192)

Nevertheless, Vindice's distrusting nature and his desire for revenge lead him to test his mother's and sister's virtue. Again he plays he role of scoundrel so brilliantly that he converts his mother, Gratiana, into an unnatural bawd. Later defending herself, Gratiana claims that only the disguised Vindice could have suborned her. And it is hard to disagree, for there was no one better fitted to play the pander.

With Vindice's success as a pander, the richer irony of his disguises begins to unfold. When we witness his fiendish murder of the Duke we realize that this “innocent villain” has put on the knave not for once, but for all time. He has indeed gone far from himself, and yet he must go even farther. After the Duke's murder the game of seeming becomes so hectic that Vindice is forced to assume disguise upon disguise until he completely forgets his nature. Hippolito sees more clearly than his brother what is happening, and when Lussurioso hires Vindice to kill Piato (Vindice's “former self”), he cries out, “Brother we loose our selves.” But Vindice brushes aside this fear, for he now sees the opportunity for perfect vengeance and finds the humor of the situation irresistible:

Thats a good lay, for I must kill my selfe.

Brother thats I [the Duke's body]: that sits for me: do you make it, And I must stand ready here to make away my selfe yonder—I must sit to bee kild, and stand to kill my selfe, I could varry it not so little as thrice over agen, tas some eight returnes like Michelmas Tearme.

(V. i. 3-7)

Vindice does not yet know that he is the butt of his own joke. He exults in his continued triumph over Lussurioso, unaware that Lussurioso has triumphed as well. Lussurioso sought to hire a villain and he succeeded. He sought to hire a cunning pander and he succeeded in that too. Finally he hired Vindice to kill himself and Vindice does so. By the end of the play Vindice has learned so well the roles that Lussurioso hired him to play that his “outward shape, and inward heart / Are cut out of one peice.” And it is altogether fitting that Vindice, who hated the revels of the court, becomes in the end one of the court masquers. This is his last disguise, and he goes to his death precisely because of the courtly impudence he once mockingly assumed. He exists annoyed but unpenitent, chiding Hippolito:

May not we set as well as the Dukes sonne?
Thou hast no conscience, are we not revengde?
Is there one enemy left alive amongst those?
Tis time to die, when we are our selves our foes.

(V.iii.151-154)

Since he is a man who is “for evill onely good,” Vindice does not know how meaningful these last words are. But before he leaves the stage he seems to glimpse the design of past events and to penetrate, for the first time, beyond the immediate irony of the situation:

This murder might have slept in tonglesse brasse,
But for our selves, and the world dyed an asse;
Now I remember too, here was Piato
Brought forth a knavish sentance once—no doubt (said
          he)
                                                                                                                                  [but time
Will make the murderer bring forth himselfe.
Tis well he died, he was a witch.
And now my Lord, since we are in for ever:
This worke was ours which else might have beene
          slipt.

(V.iii.157-164)

Vindice has not lost his sense of humor. Knowing that it is he and not the world that dies an ass, he joins in the offstage laughter that has greeted every successive act of his “flawless” knavery.

Although there is little comedy in the ordinary sense in The Revenger's Tragedy, its ethical design is not very different from that of Volpone. Like Jonson, Tourneur depicts a world of rogues and scoundrels in which moral law seems absent or ineffectual. Yet governing this world is a moral order, detached and ironic, which operates through the inevitable processes of human psychology. In Volpone the operation of the moral order produces comedy—the comedy of futility, of the Seven Deadly Sins—which establishes, if only by inference, that God's in His heaven even though all's not right with the world. But no laughter can purify the horror of Vindice's deeds. The moral order governing his universe is like Tourneur himself: unerring in its craftsmanship, disillusioned in its outlook on life, but orthodox in its values. It is in keeping with the “comic spirit” of the play that Vindice's one moment of redeeming human joy results in the cruelest jest of all. Upon reforming his fallen mother, he enjoys a single interlude of happiness, only to be reminded by Hippolito that he forgets his task of revenge. Vindice answers:

                                        … ioye's a subtill elfe,
I think man's happiest, when he forgets himselfe.

(IV.iv.92-93)

Finally, we must face the question which has been growing implicitly in the preceding discussion of The Revenger's Tragedy: namely, how are we to reconcile Tourneur's apparently eccentric vision of human depravity with the subtle ethical design of his play? His fascination with sex and his use of the Italianate do not in themselves explain the passion and the conviction of his dramatic portrait. The explanation would seem to lie, rather, in his literalistic religious viewpoint. Despite his sophisticated Jacobean artistry, Tourneur's intellectual and spiritual roots were in a pre-Renaissance past. The medieval cast of his thought is evident in most of his works—in his predilection for allegory and in his preoccupation with the themes of vanitas, memento mori, and contemptus mundi. A literalistic religious viewpoint is, of course, far more apparent in The Atheist's Tragedy than in The Revenger's Tragedy, but even in the latter the degeneracy of the world is measured by its divergence from a medieval conception of the universe as the theatre of God's judgment. Why has virtue no reward? asks Castiza.⁸ Vindice wonders:

Why do's not heaven turne black, or with a frowne
Undoo the world—why do's not earth start up,
And strike the sinnes that tread uppon't?

(II.i.275-277)

And after listening to Lussurioso's murderous plans, he exclaims:

Is there no thunder left, or ist kept up
In stock for heavier vengeance?

(IV.ii.223-224)

Without identifying Tourneur's thoughts with those of his character, I would suggest that his was a mind that dealt with satisfaction upon the medieval De Casibus. To the modern reader D'Amville's death is a bit preposterous; to Tourneur it was simply an example of inevitable divine justice. When the bad bleed, then is Tourneur's tragedy good.

Such a literalistic mind, whose faith was attached to the material “facts” of God's universe, may well have been appalled when those “facts” failed, when radical change destroyed the “divine” scheme of things. It has been effectively argued that Tourneur's pattern for society was feudalistic and that he viewed the decay of the manorial system as the distintegration of the moral order itself.⁹ In Vindice's society abundancy has replaced sufficiency as the goal of men's lives, and the new Deadly Sin of Trade has replaced the ancient sin of avarice. “Why are there so few honest women,” Vindice asks his mother,

but because 'tis the poorer profession? that's accounted best, thats best followed, least in trade, least in fashion, and thats not honesty—beleeve it, and doe but note the loue and deiected price of it.

(II.i.250-253)

A mind that could see in “patrimonyes washt a peices” the deterioration of the moral order would have been even more profoundly shocked by the seeming decay of religion itself. If we may judge by the early seventeenth-century apologists, the orthodox minds of Tourneur's age were gravely disturbed by the real and imagined spread of disbelief. To the orthodox, an atheistic world was literally one possessed by devils and, of course, by animal sensualists.¹⁰ Thus, while it is unlikely that Tourneur's vision of satanic evil resulted from atheistic convictions, it may well have been shaped by the ungodliness which he later refuted.

But if the terms of religion and moral philosophy seem little more than empty commonplaces in The Revenger's Tragedy (especially when mouthed by irredeemable sinners), their conspicuous presence indicates a traditional frame of reference which Tourneur did not easily abandon. And if heaven is a remote possibility, sinners like the Duke find their hell on earth; for Tourneur exercises the artist's prerogative of creating in literature the pattern—in this instance, the moral pattern—missing in life. We need not posit then that Tourneur experienced a religious “conversion” between The Revenger's Tragedy (1607) and The Atheist's Tragedy (1611). More than likely, the later play simply chronicles a return to the orthodoxy that was Tourneur's fundamental position after a disillusion which he immortalized in Italianate metaphor.

Notes

1. The Jacobean Drama (London, 1947), pp. 153, 155.

2. See “Cyril Tourneur,” Selected Essays (New York, 1950), pp. 159-169.

3. “Cyril Tourneur,” RES, XVII (Jan. 1941), 21-36.

4. See “The Influence of Calvinistic Thought in Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy,” RES, XIX (July 1943), 255-262.

5. Even the curious Transformed Metamorphosis (1600), which appeared seven years before the R. T. seems to convey hyperbolically and obscurely some shock of disillusionment. See the Prologue and first hundred stanzas (The Works of Cyril Tourneur, ed. Allardyce Nicoll [London, 1930], pp. 55-60. All citations from Tourneur in my text are to the Nicoll edition.

6. It is worth noting, moreover, that the most effective characterizations in the A. T. are Levidulcia and Sebastian, and that the most famous passage in the play is in D'Amville's soliloquy in the graveyard (IV. iii. 244 ff.).

7. Some Jacobeans allow their characters “moral digressions” of unexpected clarity and profundity in order to present essential ideas. Tourneur's characters, however, never step momentarily out of character to comment on their world, because their very existence in the reader's imagination depends upon the consistent pulse of the vicious passion which they embody.

8. Castiza's purity remains unsullied, but her moral convictions do not appear to be much stronger than her brother's. In her only soliloquy (II.i.1-8), she reveals that she is far less self-assured than is Milton's “Lady,” who never pities herself and whose crystal tower of virginity is proof against assault.

9. See L. G. Salinger, “‘The Revenger's Tragedy’ and the Morality Tradition,” Scrutiny, VI (March 1938), 402-422.

10. According to Renaissance belief all atheists are necessarily immoralists and primarily sensualists. See John Dove, A Confutation of Atheisme (London, 1640 [first ed. 1605]), p. 2; Bishop Martin Fotherby, Atheomastix (London, 1622), p. 113.