SOURCE: “Cyril Tourneur,” in The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, Greenwood Press, 1975, pp. 105-27.

[In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1960, Ornstein argues that The Revenger's Tragedy was in fact written by Tourneur; points out the playwright's fascination with the exotic and the erotic; and considers The Atheist's Tragedy a failure because the complexity of the subject matter was beyond Tourneur's artistic capabilities.]

Studied individually The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy seem curious monuments to the diversity of Jacobean tastes. Studied together as works attributed in the seventeenth century to a single author, they pose a unique critical problem because they seem to express totally opposite moral viewpoints and artistic talents. The problem vanishes, of course, if we agree with eminent scholars that The Revenger's Tragedy was written by Middleton. But this solution leads in turn to an equally vexing question of interpretation, for The Revenger's Tragedy is, I think, more alien in spirit to Middleton's art than to Tourneur's. It is difficult, in fact, to believe that the poised, detached observer of life who gave us Middleton's comedies and tragedies could ever have felt the moralistic passion that informs Vindice's lines.

My reasons for assigning The Revenger's Tragedy to Tourneur are set forth in the present chapter and, to some extent, in my later discussion of Middleton. Compared to the precise scholarship of those who argue for Middleton they may seem unscientific; but I do not expect here to settle a controversy that hangs in such even balance as to permit only personal conclusions. If the stylistic evidence in favor of Middleton is impressive, so too is the stylistic and bibliographical evidence supporting the traditional attribution to Tourneur. Moreover while the parallels of expression in The Revenger's Tragedy and Middleton's plays may suggest influence or imitation, they do not establish a single authorship.¹

Approaching the question from another direction, I would suggest that the artistic relationship between The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy has not been adequately explored because the latter play has not received the close, careful critical attention lavished on the former. When we study in detail the polemical intention and achievement of The Atheist's Tragedy, however, we find strong evidence that it is a product of the same mind and talent which created The Revenger's Tragedy. Indeed, as we shall see, Tourneur's success as a melodramatist is the chief clue to his failure as a didacticist.

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. But the purists need not complain; for after paying homage to Tourneur's poetic and dramatic powers, critics must inevitably attempt to relate his vision of licentiousness and depravity to some realm of normal experience. Not surprisingly Tourneur has divided the critics as well as the bibliographers. Miss Ellis-Fermor and Harold Jenkins speak of Tourneur's instinctive awareness of universal evil.² John Peter and Samuel Schoenbaum place Tourneur in the tradition of the medieval moralists.³ Michael Higgins finds in Tourneur a Calvinistic revulsion against man's depravity.⁴ And lurking behind most recent discussions of The Revenger's Tragedy is Mr. Eliot's influential opinion that the play expresses an adolescent hatred of life.⁵ Such diversity of opinion suggests that before we can celebrate the wedding of moral vision and artistic form in Tourneur's drama we must first carefully distinguish between the two.

Unlike Chapman and Jonson, Tourneur is completely at ease with the techniques of popular melodrama and totally uninterested in political themes and problems. The Revenger's Tragedy lacks even the shadowy political background which provides a framework of great events for the sensationalism of The Spanish Tragedy and The Jew of Malta. Like Chapman's heroes and like Jonson's Cicero, Vindice is pitted against a decadent society, but one that is corrupted by sensual appetites, not by political opportunism or tyranny; its villains are, for the most part, ambitious only in their lusts. Like Bussy, Vindice is a malcontent, isolated from society, who faces the problem of virtuous action in an evil milieu and who finds that he must flank policy with policy to gain revenge. In The Revenger's Tragedy, however, there is no disjunction of moral argument and revenge fable, for Tourneur's ethical vision is perfectly imaged in the dramatic action; his moral argument and his plot are one.

Inspired by the literary and scholarly idealism of Renaissance humanism, Chapman and Jonson find their tragic fables in the pages of history. Untouched by their classicism, Tourneur finds the materials of tragedy in the popular myth of Italianate evil, which had already become a common property of the stage. It is a tribute to Tourneur's powers that with all our knowledge of dramatic convention we still feel that The Revenger's Tragedy expresses an intensely personal view of reality, though we know its setting is the Italy of the novella and of Elizabethan Protestant imaginations, the Italy described so vividly by Ascham and others as a sink of atheism, luxury, and sensual abandonment. In other Jacobean tragedies, Italianate settings are used more or less as backdrops for such glorious villains as Brachiano or Ferdinand. 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.

At the same time that Tourneur's genius presents the Italianate image in all its lurid perfection, his artistic discipline (a rare attribute in Jacobean dramaturgy) makes it difficult to penetrate beyond the image to the mind that created it. Other Jacobean playwrights universalize the action of their dramas by philosophical reflection. Tourneur admits none in The Revenger's Tragedy unless we call Vindice's choric commentaries “philosophical.” Other dramatists use traditional parallels and correspondences to enlarge their dramatic scene; their characters, vehicles for philosophical and moral attitudes, are archetypal Stoics or politicians. Tourneur's allegorical method of characterization paradoxically denies universal importance to such automata of evil as the Duke and Lussurioso, for though they personify particular vices they are no more than samplings of a depraved world. They cannot vary or develop; they cannot step momentarily out of character to comment on their world because their existence in the reader's imagination depends upon the consistent pulse of the vicious passion which they embody.

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 cannot convince us that his tragic universe holds a mirror up to nature, but he skillfully creates an illusion of depth in his 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.

Even as Tourneur isolates his Italianate scene from contact with normal experience he places upon it the stamp of his unique temperament. The ruling passions of his characters 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 are fused in The Revenger's Tragedy 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 ancillary; the lust for murder is almost always a desire to avenge some rape, adultery, or incest. Like the medieval satirist, Vindice castigates the frailty and concupiscence of women, but unlike the medieval satirist, he is 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.(6)

(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. 149-61)

This is far removed from 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 huggermugger, 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 in 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. We cannot, however, view the hectic sexuality of The Revenger's Tragedy as an unconscious Freudian revelation when in fact it is a superbly fashioned poetic and dramatic motif. Despite the intense feeling that animates Tourneur's lines, his ironic intellect is always in control. We would never, for example, mistake Vindice's attacks on luxury and sensuality 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 and image falls perfectly into place. Some kind of moral frenzy is 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. It is not the vanity of evil alone that amuses Vindice; it is the utter futility of a life in which there are only 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 slightly distorted at the beginning 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, yet 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 philosophical conviction and an ultimate moral goal. Although he uses the phraseology of religion and moral philosophy, and although he complains that evil is unnatural, his cynicism springs from an awareness that his world has irrevocably departed from its natural course.

Within his society Vindice represents the only possible moral order, one that is warped 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, which he interprets as a lex talionis that 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. 197-99)

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 mother and sister 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. When the carnage ends, Vindice and Hippolito are sent off to execution, not because the moral order is restored or because the goddess Astraea returns to earth, but only because Antonio is a politic ruler who fears that those who killed the old Duke may also kill him. The royal lechers have paid for their crimes, but we do not feel that their blood has cleansed the Augean filth of the court.

To all appearances, then, 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 a final ironic twist of fate. Evil (or at least some evil) is purged adventitiously but in the process the once virtuous agents of retribution are corrupted. The fact that the stage is littered with corpses does not convince us of the existence of some higher moral order, for in Vindice's society the good die as horribly as the evil, and the triumph of justice requires something more than balanced double entries in the ledger of Death. We must have a deeper understanding of the “why” of Vindice's fall—we must recognize some pattern of ethical causality in the loathsome incidents of the plot—if we are to believe that The Revenger's Tragedy draws to a moral conclusion. Such a pattern of causality does emerge; in fact it grows more distinct with every step of Vindice's descent into criminality, until at last we see that far from exploiting irony for irony's sake, The Revenger's Tragedy is cast in an ethical design as sophisticated and intellectual as that of Jonson's greatest comedies.

The apparent imitations of Volpone in The Atheist's Tragedy support my belief that The Revenger's Tragedy was also influenced by Jonson's play. The same dark, cynical, satiric spirit broods over Volpone and The Revenger's Tragedy. Both plays center on the conflict between a pair of cunning, knavish minds. They have similar allegorical characters, ironic reversals, and uses of disguises and deceptions. Like Volpone's, Vindice's disguises reveal more of the inner man than they hide, since a mastery of deception requires some natural affinity for the assumed role.⁷ “I have considered,” Jonson writes in Discoveries, “our whole life is like a Play: wherein every man, forgetfull of himself, is in travaile with expression of another. Nay, wee so insist in imitating others, as wee cannot (when it is necessary) returne to our selves. …”⁸ Here in sober commonplace is the moral “lesson” of Volpone and The Revenger's Tragedy.

Throughout Tourneur's play a malicious Fate seems to thwart the best laid plans of sensualist and revenger alike. But on no other character does irony weigh more heavily than on Vindice. Seeking only to revenge himself upon the Duke, he is hired first to procure his 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. In his most trying moments, however, Vindice appreciates the 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 that he must play. He can always see through Lussurioso's pretenses, but his own disguises are impenetrable. He always knows Lussurioso's masked motives, but his own are inscrutable. Thus his outbursts against Lussurioso are tempered by an unholy enjoyment of the battle in which he is (or so he believes) always master.

In Vindice's society seclusion and retreat are the only ways to preserve one's integrity against the degrading temptations or coercions of the court. Seclusion, however, breeds its own spiritual ills—among them “discontent,” the nobleman's consumption. Vindice's opening soliloquy reveals that bitterness and cynicism have already eroded his moral beliefs. He has already seen too much of the world—his own beloved murdered, virgins surrendered, families destroyed, all that men prize bought and sold like so much merchandise. Obsessed with vengeance, he broods in isolation and castigates the court from a distance until Hippolito brings word 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)

Here is an irresistible temptation to assume, for a little while, the way of the world in order to obtain revenge. Seizing the opportunity Vindice decides to disguise his true self in a mask of evil; he will “put on that knave for once” and be “a man a'th Time.” Adopting his temporary role Vindice jestingly asks Hippolito, “Am I farre inough from my selfe?” and he calls upon Impudence,

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

(I. iii. 6-9)

Perfect in his disguise Vindice plays the villain so brilliantly that it would almost seem he has a natural talent for it. He is shocked to learn, however, that he must launch his new career by procuring his own sister for Lussurioso. He complains to Hippolito that they are made “strange fellowes,” “innocent villaines.” And yet the idea of testing his sister's and mother's virtue is not wholly repellent to his distrusting nature. Again he plays the role of scoundrel so well 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 literally forgets himself. Hippolito sees more clearly 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 he 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 marke 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. When Lussurioso curses over his father's body, Vindice exults in his continued triumph, in his knowledge that with the game nearly over, Lussurioso has “lost.” He does not see that Lussurioso has in his own way 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, because he comes to love the game of evil for its own sake and to relish the murder rather than its “moral” purpose. By the end of the play he has learned so well the roles that Lussurioso hired him to play that his “outward shape, and inward heart / Are cut out of one piece.” 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 which he once mockingly assumed. He exits annoyed but unpenitent, chiding Hippolito:

May we not 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. 151-54)

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 himself.
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. 157-64)

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

Like Jonson, Tourneur depicts a world of rogues and scoundrels in which there is no true regard for moral principles. 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 though all's not right with the world. No laughter, however, can purify Vindice's deeds. The moral order governing his universe is like Tourneur himself: unerring in its craftmanship, disillusioned in its view of life, but orthodox in its values. It is in keeping with the “comic spirit” of the play that Vindice's one moment of redeeming joy produces the cruelest jest of all. Upon reforming his fallen mother, he allows himself a stolen 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)

We do not have to resort to psychoanalytical conjectures to understand how a mind capable of this moral subtlety could have spent such artistic care on, and poured such intense conviction into, a bizarre portrait of decadence. For Tourneur's Italianate portrait, like Chapman's vision of political decadence, is a poetic protest against the decay of long established moral and social ideals. 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 all of his works—in his satiric passion, his predilection for allegory, and in his use of the themes of vanitas and memento mori. L. G. Salingar has very effectively argued that Tourneur's pattern for society was feudalistic and that he viewed the decay of the manorial system as the disintegration of the moral order itself.⁹ In Vindice's society abundance has replaced sufficiency as the goal of men's lives; the new Deadly Sin of Trade has replaced the ancient sin of Avarice, and the love of money has corrupted the love of the soil. “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. 250-53)

Tourneur has the scorn and indignation of medieval satirists, not their religious or moral security. His faith, attached as it was to the material “facts” of God's universe, may well have been shaken when these “facts” failed—when economic change destroyed the immemorially stable, feudal agricultural scheme. Even in The Revenger's Tragedy we can see that he hungered for the kind of literal reassurances which The Atheist's Tragedy offers to the believer. That is to say, the depravity of Vindice's world is measured by its divergence from a medieval conception of the universe as the theater of God's judgment. Why has virtue no “revenewe”? complains Castiza. 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. 275-77)

And after hearing Lussurioso's murderous plans he exclaims:

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

(IV. ii. 223-24)

Without identifying specific lines of the play with Tourneur's personal thoughts, I would suggest that his was a mind that lingered with satisfaction on the medieval De casibus. To the modern reader D'Amville's death in The Atheist's Tragedy is a bit preposterous; to Tourneur it was simply an example of inevitable divine retribution. When the bad bleed, then is Tourneur's tragedy good.

It would not be difficult to link the attack on “luxury” in The Revenger's Tragedy with the orthodox moralism of The Atheist's Tragedy, which emphasizes the association of atheism and sensuality. A mind that could see in “patrimonyes washt a pieces” a deterioration of moral order would have been even more profoundly disturbed by the real or imagined spread of disbelief in the early seventeenth century. But there is no reason to assume that the atheism which Tourneur conventionally refutes explains the satanic vision of his first tragedy. And there is certainly no evidence that his second tragedy expiates an earlier sin of disbelief. If the terms of religion and moral philosophy seem empty commonplaces in The Revenger's Tragedy (especially when mouthed by abandoned sinners), their conspicuous presence indicates a traditional frame of reference which Tourneur did not easily cast off. And if heaven seems 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 latter play simply chronicles a return to the orthodoxy that was Tourneur's fundamental position after a temporary disillusionment which he immortalized in Italianate metaphor.

THE ATHEIST'S TRAGEDY

If tradition did not associate Tourneur's name with The Revenger's Tragedy, it is not likely that many readers would be interested in The Atheist's Tragedy today. Its artistic virtues are genuine enough yet not so dazzling as to make us forget its wooden characterizations and its heavy-handed moralism. Here the artist in Tourneur gives way to the didacticist, and the moral lesson can persuade only those who require no persuasion. T. S. Eliot remarks that Tourneur's genius “is in The Revenger's Tragedy; his talent only in The Atheist's Tragedy”;¹⁰ I would add that Tourneur's genius and talent are very closely related, for The Atheist's Tragedy is most effective when it most resembles The Revenger's Tragedy. Its most convincing portraits are of Levidulcia and Sebastian, who would be equally at home in Lussurioso's society; its most brilliant poetic passage is D'Amville's Vindicean soliloquy in the graveyard. Curiously, however, the inspiration of The Atheist's Tragedy is as peripheral as it is sporadic. Its liveliest characters are minor figures and, worse still, its most awkward and unconvincing moments occur at crucial points in the dramatic action. This is so, I suspect, because Tourneur's subject, though congenial enough to his moralizing temper, was quite beyond his artistic capacities.

Tourneur's art leans consistently towards the hyperbolic and the bizarre. The Transformed Metamorphosis, The Revenger's Tragedy, and The Atheist's Tragedy all give evidence that he possessed a fantastic imagination which required the impetus of great feeling to avoid vulgarity and absurdity. He had the kind of brilliant technique which could triumph over its limitations in a tour de force like The Revenger's Tragedy, but which was not suited for all dramatic occasions. Quite understandably, his allegorical method was more successful in characterizing an abnormal obsession than a normal personality. The beleaguered Castabella, for example, is a more convincing portrait of femininity than is the acrid-tongued, steely-edged Castiza, but like Charlemont, Castabella always threatens to become a purely conventional emblem of virtue. Inflexible in his dramatic methods, Tourneur paints D'Amville with the same brush that depicted Lussurioso even though the fable of The Atheist's Tragedy demands a hero-villain of Faustian proportions. Like the automata of The Revenger's Tragedy, D'Amville is an abstraction impelled by a monomaniacal lust, only his is (theoretically at least) intellectual rather than sensual. There are such men in the world around us, but they are rarely driven, as D'Amville is, to commit rape to vindicate their philosophies.

Had Tourneur been able to free himself from the satiric obsessions of The Revenger's Tragedy, he might have created a more successful hero in his second tragedy. It would seem, however, that the portrait of D'Amville incarnates the same protests against superfluity and economic opportunism that we find in Tourneur's earlier play. On its practical level, D'Amville's materialism is that of a New Man, a Jacobean parvenu with a criminal appetite for wealth and status. Indeed, were it not for D'Amville's atheistic naturalism and his sneers at Languebeau Snuffe, we might easily believe that he is at heart a Precisian, for his “piety,” his moneylending, his mercantile vocabulary, his equation of material success and providential aid, and his deification of “industry” smack more of the elect than of the damned. No wonder then that D'Amville seems neither fish nor flesh. While his ideology “dignifies” his policy, his crass ambitions cheapen his blasphemy, so that all in all he is—as Tourneur no doubt intended—a feeble opponent of an omnipotent God.

If the moralizing spirit of The Revenger's Tragedy prepares us somewhat for the didacticism of The Atheist's Tragedy, it does not prepare us for the painfully obvious and labored moralism which blankets the latter half of Tourneur's second tragedy. Even if we assume (as I think we must) that The Atheist's Tragedy is a polemic—a dramatic counterpart of Renaissance confutations of atheism—we can still say that the polemic is too crudely handled to be convincing. But while saying this, we have to keep in mind that a very literal faith in providential order was as much a part of intellectual Calvinism as of popular belief. Moreover while D'Amville may seem to modern readers a ridiculous straw man, he is, as I have shown,¹¹ an archetypal Renaissance atheist, synthesized from commonplace opinions about the character and career of disbelievers. He had, if nothing else, a mythic reality for Tourneur's audience.

One might even argue that the polemical intention of The Atheist's Tragedy demanded the sacrifice of the subtlety which Tourneur demonstrates in The Revenger's Tragedy. In both plays he relies heavily on irony for dramatic effect. Just as the ironic reversals of The Revenger's Tragedy culminate with Vindice's self-denunciation, so too the ironic reversals of The Atheist's Tragedy culminate with D'Amville's confession of guilt and self-murder on the scaffold; both heroes, we note, bring down upon themselves an unlooked-for but perfect judgment. Compared to Vindice's unconsciously willed self-destruction, however, D'Amville's peripeta is a crude coup de théâtre. Could not Tourneur have found a more convincing way of having his villain hoist with his own petard? The answer, I think, is that Tourneur could not allow D'Amville to effect his own destruction in the way that Vindice does, because D'Amville is not an overreacher who is victimized by his own ego. An enemy of religion, he is struck down at the height of his prosperity by God, who is, according to Renaissance apologists, the implacable foe of atheists, and who accomplishes the honest man's revenge. But since God does not actually appear in Tourneur's play His intervention must be made unmistakable to the audience. Tourneur must literally explicate his fable so as to make clear that when the bad bleed—when D'Amville knocks out his brains in a preposterous accident—then is God's power revealed. In other words, the essential point of The Atheist's Tragedy would be lost if the plea for divine vengeance in The Revenger's Tragedy were not answered with a vengeance—if we were not made to feel the “unnaturalness” and miraculousness of D'Amville's catastrophe.

On the other hand, we cannot apologize for the artistic failings of The Atheist's Tragedy by arguing that it was not intended to be a work of art. Since it was written for the stage and aspires to the laurels of tragedy, it must be judged by literary criteria. Actually we cannot say that Tourneur's genius was enslaved by his subject matter, because Marlowe found in the Faustbook approximately the same ideas about atheism which Tourneur incorporates in his play. If Tourneur had written Doctor Faustus, Faustus would no doubt resemble D'Amville, and if Marlowe had written The Atheist's Tragedy, D'Amville would no doubt possess a Faustian splendor. To put it simply, a broader talent than Tourneur's was needed to realize the potential grandeur of his chosen theme.

There is an implicit confession of inadequacy in Tourneur's heavy reliance on other men's artistic ideas in The Atheist's Tragedy. That he studied literature more than he studied life is apparent even in The Transformed Metamorphosis and The Revenger's Tragedy,¹² but he did not need to borrow extensively from other dramatists in The Revenger's Tragedy because his ingenious mind could work a score of variations on the revenge formulas of earlier plays. For The Atheist's Tragedy, however, he had no archetypal pattern to follow except perhaps that of Doctor Faustus, and the emphasis of Marlowe's play falls more upon the hero's superhuman aspiration than on his denial of Christianity. It is true that Tourneur derived all his ideas about atheism from contemporary prose confutations, in which the atheist is described as an arrogant, villainous blasphemer who recognizes no power above nature, who thirsts for pleasure and power, and who is tormented by a cowardly fear of death. Indeed, the very pattern of D'Amville's fate was suggested by the apologists' assertion that most atheists suffer unnatural deaths (the wages of their sins) and die confessing their sins and their folly of disbelief.¹³ Still Tourneur had to translate these ideas into dramatic form, and for better or worse he chose to imitate playwrights who possessed the philosophical breadth he personally lacked.

To dramatize the atheist's preoccupation with death, Tourneur borrows and transforms the graveyard themes of Hamlet. To dramatize the atheist's disillusionment with nature, he turns to King Lear. The distracted D'Amville, who has lost his faith in nature and who cries out for judgment, is quite obviously modeled on the crazed Lear. Somewhat less obvious is D'Amville's kinship with Edmund, though we can trace the line of descent in such passages as his request for Charlemont's body after execution:

I would finde out by his Anatomie;
What thing there is in Nature more exact,
Then in the constitution of my selfe.
Me thinks, my parts, and my dimensions, are
As many, as large, as well compos'd as his;
And yet in me the resolution wants,
To die with that assurance as he does.

(V. ii. 161-67)

Although the speech as a whole echoes Lear's desire to anatomize Regan, its middle lines specifically recall Edmund's early assertion that “my dimensions are as well compact, / My mind as generous, and my shape as true, as honest madam's issue.” We can also compare D'Amville's exultation after his brother's murder (“Here's a sweete Comedie. T'begins with O Dolentis, and concludes with ha, ha, he.”—II. iv. 101-2) with Edmund's “theatrical” aside about Edgar (“… and Pat! he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o'Bedlam. O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! Fa, sol, la, mi”).¹⁴ Like Edmund, D'Amville hungers for a title and conspires against his own brother. Like Edmund, he is an emancipated intellectual who takes nature for his goddess and laughs at superstitious credulity. It is not accidental, moreover, that D'Amville compares himself with Charlemont in the same terms that Edmund compares himself with Edgar, for Charlemont is merely a Gallic version of Edgar. Like Edgar he is robbed of his inheritance by a close relative, and like Edgar he is falsely condemned as a criminal. If we wish further evidence of Charlemont's ancestry, we need only compare his pious Stoicism with Edgar's speeches in the storm and deep conviction of divine justice.

Tourneur's direct imitation of Marlowe is less extensive than his imitation of Shakespeare, but he probably derived his conception of plot from the celebrated and often reprinted Doctor Faustus. The dialectical opening of The Atheist's Tragedy seems to be modeled on Faustus' great opening soliloquy, even as the crazed D'Amville's yearning for annihilation echoes Faustus' dying thought:

O were my body circumvolv'd
Within that cloude; that when the thunder teares
His passage open, it might scatter me
To nothing in the ayre!

(IV. iii. 277-80)

It is even possible that D'Amville's grotesque catastrophe was suggested to Tourneur by Thomas Beard's account of Marlowe's death, for in Beard's narrative as in Tourneur's play the judgment of God falls on a villainous atheist who, in attempting to kill another man, is mortally wounded in the head with his own weapon.¹⁵

Like Faustus, The Atheist's Tragedy dramatizes an atheist's harrowing journey towards the spiritual and moral knowledge which is gained by less arrogant minds through a simple act of faith. Tourneur's hero, however, begins his journey from an intellectual position that is diametrically opposite to Faustus'. D'Amville has no Faustian hunger for forbidden knowledge; on the contrary, he arrogantly assumes at the beginning of the play that he knows all answers and completely understands the nature of man and the universe. Only when the deaths of his sons ruin his grandiose ambitions does he question the adequacy of his philosophy; and then through personal despair he also learns a very elementary and obvious cosmological truth—that there is a power above nature that controls its force. Faustus, we might say, is the intellectual demon of an Elizabethan world awakening relatively late to the intellectual adventure of the Renaissance and rebelling against the confines of medieval thought. D'Amville, in contrast, is the demon of a seventeenth-century world that has swept away medieval assumptions and seeks a new intellectual adventure in scientific reason. While Faustus' hybris denies the limitations on human thought, D'Amville's hybris imprisons man's mind within the phenomenal universe. While Faustus seeks to penetrate arcane mysteries, D'Amville denies that any mysteries lie beyond the scope of mundane experience and empirical reason. While Faustus aspires to be a god—to gain the power of a prime mover over nature—D'Amville rejects the possibility of any higher power than nature, which is to him the ultimate reality of the universe.

Because D'Amville is philosophically complacent, Tourneur faced a more difficult problem than did Marlowe in translating the atheist's heresy into effective plot, for Faustus' hunger for knowledge provides an immediate intellectual cue to action which is lacking in Tourneur's hero. The villainous goals of pleasure and power are, of course, appropriate to D'Amville, but, as Tourneur recognized, these goals do not in themselves define the unique ungodliness of an atheist. Tourneur therefore relates D'Amville's politic ambitions to a more fundamental and richly ironic obsession: his ruling passion is the very hunger for immortality which, being universal in men, was to the orthodox mind an evidence of the immortality of the soul. Unlike the Christian believer, however, D'Amville seeks immortality in the continuance of his line. He erases through a dynastic vision the fear of death which the orthodox mind eradicates through a vision of eternal spirit.

In D'Amville's immortal longings Tourneur achieved a more sustained motive for dramatic action than Marlowe found in the Faustbook or, so far as we can tell, was able to invent. But his inspired stroke is so faultily delivered that (like D'Amville's axe-blow) it almost knocks out the brains of the play. Whereas Marlowe elevates the conventional libertinism of the atheist to heights of exquisite poetry, Tourneur stages D'Amville's ideologically inspired passion as one of several unnatural graveyard lusts. Requiring heirs, D'Amville attempts to seduce his daughter-in-law, Castabella, and manages thereby to reduce the sensational libertine plea for unconfined love to a dull pronouncement:

Incest? Tush.
These distances affinitie observes;
Are articles of bondage cast upon
Our freedomes by our owne subiections.
Nature allowes a gen'rall libertie
Of generation to all creatures else.

(IV. iii. 139-44)

When the horrified Castabella counters with her own philosophical arguments, D'Amville attempts to rape her, but is frightened away by Charlemont, who is providentially lurking in the graveyard dressed in a ludicrous disguise.

The wild improbabilities of the graveyard scene are one evidence of a flagging imagination. Another is the increasing reliance in the latter half of the play on material derived from other dramatists. Compared, let us say, to the imitations of Othello in Love's Sacrifice, Tourneur's borrowings are creative, but like Ford's imitations, they are an abdication of artistic responsibility. The attempted rape fortuitiously prevented is, I think, a reminiscence of Volpone, as is more certainly D'Amville's glorification of his gold at the beginning of the fifth act. Like Jonson's hero, D'Amville finds an unlooked-for justice in a court of law, where true judgment is meted out despite the frailties of human wisdom. To flesh out the situation borrowed from Jonson, Tourneur refashions Lear's mad scenes. Like Lear the distracted D'Amville cries out for justice to support his belief in the universe. Like Lear he discovers through suffering that man truly needs, not wealth and power, but patience—the resolute assurance in the face of calamity that comes only to the untroubled conscience.

Increasingly indebted to other writers' inspiration in the latter half of The Atheist's Tragedy, Tourneur is also increasingly willing to sacrifice credibility to didactic effect. Charlemont's and Castabella's unexpected drowsiness in the graveyard is absurd, but their chaste slumber on a pair of skulls is a vivid contrast to D'Amville's unnatural lusts and morbid fear of death. In the last act the ironic contrasts grow more and more heavy-handed. As D'Amville gloats over his gold the corpses of his sons are brought on stage. When he tries to buy back their lives with his all-powerful wealth, the Doctor laughs. As he quakes with fear of death, Charlemont and Castabella cheerfully leap to the scaffold. He requires wine to bolster his failing spirits, but Charlemont keeps up his pluck with a glass of water.

I may exaggerate the lameness of the closing scene of The Atheist's Tragedy. What seems painfully contrived on the page may be far more effective in the theater, and a fine actor could no doubt endow D'Amville's distraction with some element of pathos. But I doubt that Tourneur intended D'Amville to seem pathetic, for Tourneur does not feel Marlowe's sympathy for the aspiration he condemns, nor does he make us feel, as Marlowe does, the grandeur as well as the absurdity of his hero's denial of God.¹⁶ At his most poignant moment, when he begs the Doctor to restore his sons' lives, D'Amville is, as he recognizes, ridiculous. Similarly, when conscience first strikes him (in the graveyard scene), he is reduced to comical and quaking fears. By the end of the play it is obvious that he is more of a farcical dupe than a tragic protagonist.

In Doctor Faustus the arch-atheist Marlowe demonstrates that the tragic and the religious view of life are not necessarily antithetical. Tourneur's religious viewpoint, however, almost explicitly denies the possibility of tragedy. It makes of the world a theater of judgment in which the only conceivable dramatic action is a divine farce if not a divine comedy. In this setting the central question of The Revenger's Tragedy—that of action in an evil world—is not so much confronted as annihilated, for Charlemont does not have to take action, nor can he be corrupted by discontent. There is no inexplicable suffering, no tormenting sacrifice of innocence, no unbearable personal agony to shake his faith in this best of all possible worlds.

Because The Atheist's Tragedy was based on a secondhand and academic conception of atheism, it does not convince us that D'Amville's atheism posed a more immediate or alarming threat to Jacobean morality than did the sensuality which Lussurioso represents. But then Tourneur's play was probably not intended as a call to arms against ungodliness. It is true, as E. A. Strathmann points out, that more often than not the Renaissance apologists describe the atheist as a naturalist, “who, through overmuch study of nature, was inclined to exalt her, only the agent of creation, to the role of creator.”¹⁷ And there are enough references to naturalists outside the confutations to suggest that there were men in Tourneur's age who did not accept Bacon's limitations on the scope of scientific reason or who sought to attribute all phenomena to natural causes.¹⁸ Still it seems to me that Tourneur's play, like the usual Jacobean prose confutation of atheism, is primarily a testament of faith; it is the kind of cautionary work, filled with sound and profitable doctrine, that would have been written even if there had been no fear at all of the spread of atheism. It is not so much a refutation of a dangerous contemporary ideology as a celebration of the eternal order of Providence.

And in fact D'Amville's view of nature is not completely refuted in The Atheist's Tragedy. He does not learn that the ultimate reality of nature is rational moral order; instead he learns that his view of nature is incomplete—that reasoning “meerely out / Of Nature” does not produce a valid interpretation of the cosmos. The very orthodoxy of Tourneur's religious position makes all the more significant the fact that the Elizabethan identification of nature and moral law is shattered in The Atheist's Tragedy and never restored. It is true, of course, that D'Amville and Levidulcia are not casually permitted to usurp nature as the justification of their sensual appetites. When D'Amville argues for unconfined love, Castabella retorts that his libertine view of nature degrades man to the level of animals.¹⁹ Nevertheless D'Amville and Levidulcia are not condemned as unnatural for the simple reason that they are the representatives of nature in the play. And the very fact that nature proves to them a false goddess simply confirms the impression that nature is not a reliable guide to the proper conduct of men's lives. Corroborating evidence in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore indicates that as the Jacobean age wore on it became increasingly difficult to deny outright a naturalistic view of the universe.²⁰ It was possible only to insist upon the limitations of naturalistic explanations and upon the validity of the higher truths of religion and morality, which lie beyond the reach and attack of empirical reason. Thus though its viewpoint is antipodal to that of the De Augmentis, The Atheist's Tragedy bears indirect witness to the encroachment of a scientific epistemology on the classical and medieval assumptions which underlay the moral philosophy of the sixteenth century.

Extremes of cynicism and moralism, of high and pedestrian art, are not rare in the works of the Jacobeans, whose tragic inspirations were short-lived and whose descents into mediocrity were often precipitous. The unique problem of Tourneur's drama, however, is that we have only two seemingly disconnected points of reference with which to chart the progress of his art. It is as if we had to piece together Chapman's personality from only Bussy D'Ambois and Caesar and Pompey, or Donne's personality from one song and one sermon, or T. S. Eliot's personality from only The Waste Land and The Cocktail Party. The apparent pattern of Tourneur's drama—the retreat (or return) from skepticism to orthodoxy—is common enough in the literature of ages of anxiety, but we lack other works, other artistic coördinates, which might confirm the pattern. That the mind and talent which created The Revenger's Tragedy found an artistic resting place in The Atheist's Tragedy seems to me perfectly plausible. …

Notes

1. The evidence, stylistic and otherwise, for Middleton's authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy is collected and summed by Samuel Schoenbaum in Middleton's Tragedies: A Critical Study (New York, 1955), pp. 153-82. Because Mr. Schoenbaum argues for Middleton, his discussion of the stylistic evidence for Tourneur's authorship is perhaps less than adequate.

2. The Jacobean Drama, (London, 1947; 1st ed. 1936), pp. 153 ff.; “Cyril Tourneur,” RES, XVII (Jan. 1941), 29.

3. “The Revenger's Tragedy Reconsidered,” Essays in Criticism, VI (April 1956), 131-43; Middleton's Tragedies, pp. 27 ff.

4. “The Influence of Calvinistic Thought in Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy,” RES, XIX (July 1943), 255-62.

5. “Cyril Tourneur,” Elizabethan Essays (London, 1934), pp. 128-33.

6. All citations from Tourneur are from The Works of Cyril Tourneur, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (London, 1930).

7. Even as Vindice becomes more and more like the villain he once “put on,” so Volpone, who complains of cramps and palsies and requires stimulants to bolster his sagging spirits, plays the part of the old man so well because he is rapidly becoming one.

8. Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, VIII, 597.

9. “The Revenger's Tragedy and the Morality Tradition,” Scrutiny, VI (March 1938), 402-22.

10. “Tourneur,” Elizabethan Essays, p. 128.

11. See “The Atheist's Tragedy and Renaissance Naturalism,” SP, LI (April 1954), 194-207.

12. See Nicoll's discussion of Tourneur's imitations in his “Introduction,” Works of Tourneur, pp. 6 ff.

13. See “The Atheist's Tragedy and Renaissance Naturalism,” pp. 201-2.

14. Lear, I. ii. 146-50. See my discussion of Edmund's soliloquy in Chapter IX, pp. 262-64, below.

15. See my discussion of Tourneur and Beard in “The Atheist's Tragedy,” N&Q (July 1955), 285-86.

16. See Robert Ornstein, “The Comic Synthesis in Doctor Faustus,” ELH, XXII (Sept. 1955), 165-72.

17. Sir Walter Ralegh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism (New York, 1951), p. 90.

18. See Le Roy, Of the Interchangeable Course, or variety of things in the Whole World, trans. Robert Ashley (London, 1594), p. 126^v; Guillaume Du Vair, A Treatise of Constancie, trans. Andrew Court (London, 1622), p. 65.

19. Cf. Castabella's argument (The Atheist's Tragedy, IV. iii. 147 ff.) with Malheureux's revulsion against libertine animalism in Marston's Dutch Courtezan (see Ch. VI, p. 162, below). Castabella's thought is remarkably close to François Garasse's accusation that French libertines abuse the term nature to mean the animal part of man (La Doctrine Curieuse [Paris, 1623], pp. 685-86).

20. See Ch. VIII, pp. 203-7, below.