[In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1936, Ellis-Fermor characterizes Tourneur as a moralist and a man who viewed the world as irredeemably evil, and she views his plays as showing a great deal of craftsmanship in their concern with meter, imagery, philosophical reflection, and theatrical effect.]

I

The work of Cyril Tourneur presents one extreme of early Jacobean tragic thought and presents it with a completeness and single-mindedness else only to be found in the deliberate self-absorption of much of the comedy in the evidence of the world about it. Like the middle comedy of Middleton and much of Ben Jonson, Tourneur excludes in his first play specific or implicit reference to that universe of the spirit to which Chapman and Webster in their different ways give positive or negative testimony, and in his later play the references are perfunctory and unconvincing. He, alone among the dramatists who seem to have brought to this problem clear and coherently conscious thought, appears to accept a world-order inherently evil. He alone among the tragic writers of the first decades seems untroubled by the sense of the conflict of two worlds, of the confounding knowledge with knowledge; he accepts, if not the evidence of the world immediately around him, a consistent body of evidence from within his own imagination which gives to his plays a unity of mood absent from those of his contemporaries. He offers thus what is in fact a universe and since his interpretation is tragic, it is a universe of evil that he reveals. This is his peculiar contribution to the various but related conceptions of the major dramatists. His detachment from his characters is nearly as complete as Middleton's in tragedy, but they are produced upon a background of horror and evil fraught with emotional implications from which Middleton's are free. Beside the tragic uncertainty of Webster, on the other hand, who resembles him often in theme and choice of material, his definite affirmation of evil stands inflexible and positive.

Tourneur anatomizes minds. They are specimens that come into his laboratory. On the whole he analyses well and the resulting dissections and articulated skeletons tell us much of what is inside the man. There is far more scientific exposition, far clearer description of the parts and their relations than in the pictures of living people that Webster draws. But the difference is that Tourneur's do not live. He does not enter them and speak from within them. He draws them all (except Sebastian) by inspection from outside. They are laboratory specimens. He does not love them or sympathize with them. Nor do we.

How is it then that we have the effect of tragedy at all in these plays—or have we indeed that effect and not, instead, something approximating to it, imitating it and imposing itself on us for tragedy? Webster has a sense of tragic issues. Some at least of his characters—all the chief ones—he enters. He speaks from within them. Only the less significant remain unanimated, a record merely of observed characteristics. Many of them he loves, admires; certain of their qualities—their resolution and dauntless bearing—move him and us through him to wonder, upon which the ineluctable fate imposes the mood of pity. Man, at war with a fate less noble than he, rouses, in Webster's plays, pity and admiration which become at moments pity and fear. There is a tragic system, if only by means of the implicit commentary on man and his fate. But with Tourneur there is no pity and, I think, no sympathy for his strange anatomies, either from us or from the author. A kind of comment there may be, but it is shrouded. What there is, especially in the Revengers Tragedie, where he conducts himself more nearly in conformity with ordinary dramatic usage, is horror. This, strictly speaking, is the only emotion roused. Much interest we may experience, much speculation, much keen following up of thought, but the only emotion we are subjected to is horror and that comes to us, not from our entry into the characters' experiences but from extraneous aids, not from identifying ourselves with apparently living people, but from two things, one of them the very opposite of this; from the aroma of evil with which Tourneur by the aid of diction and verbal music surrounds these walking anatomies, these galvanized laboratory subjects, and from the very fact that, being dead, they do so adequately mimic life. There is a hideousness (and its effect grows upon us as the play progresses) in the very separation of our observation from the emotions that should accompany it, in watching this simulacrum of experience where there is no experience. That absence of sympathy in Ben Jonson which hinders sometimes the full experience of comic emotion in his reader and gives us a sense of detachment and so eventually of unreality is met and combated in Tourneur's work by the deep sense of horror implicit in the very circumstance of being. And, paradoxically, when once that has got to work, it is only enhanced by the unnatural absence of normal human feelings. It is not in fact tragedy which Tourneur offers us, but something which, by presenting a deeply inhering fear and by the lifelike movements of these figures so devoid of life, blinds us momentarily to the absence of the equally essential tragic pity which the approach to character by way of inspection can never give to us. Tourneur, thus excluding from his mind and ours pity and that part of normal tragic fear which is sympathy, leaves us face to face with a form of horror that is in tragedy the logical inference from a universe denuded of spiritual significance. It is Tourneur's peculiar function to accept single-mindedly this denuding and its implications where the other dramatists hesitate, confounding knowledge with knowledge.

II

To find a world vibrant with imaginative horror as was Tourneur's we must fetch a wide compass and shall not even so find it easily. It swings between the tingling dread of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce and the ‘implacable dejection’ of James Thomson. We have entered indeed a ‘City of Dreadful Night’, and if we pass beyond its bounds it is into that world where Hamlet dwelt for a time, ‘a sterile and barren promontory’, ‘a pestilent congregation of vapours’, where the ‘intellectual tapers’ are ‘fed with Hell's flame’ and the poet himself knows that the agony of his mind ‘Doth make his gesture seem a troubled story’:

Ev'n from the artique to the antartique pole,
          All in a rowe in ranke proportionate;
Subject unto th' unstedfast moones controle
          Do stand the lights that should truth animate;(1) …

It is indeed a universe upon which Mutabilitie has seized and in his earliest poems we find Tourneur still struggling in vain to compose it again with the ‘Stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd upon the pillours of Eternity’. For the ultimate guardian of this universe is not for him, as for Spenser, ‘Great goddesse, great Dame Nature’, but a strange anticipation of a Nature more like De Sade's, a ravening and dominating force, destroying and urging on the destroyer. Indeed, it is with De Sade and his successors, particularly his later successors, the followers of Baudelaire, that we next breathe the atmosphere of the Revengers Tragedie (an atmosphere which is hardly dissipated when it is rationalized in the Atheists Tragedie). There is a metallic quality, the acrid taste of brass, in this atmosphere; the very thoughts and words of the people have about them the clang of a brazen gong and the light by which we see them comes from a sky that is itself a brazen disk. Like Satan in La Révolte des Anges the author seems to wake into a world of shades. ‘Et quand j'eus accoutumé mes yeux a l'ombre épaisse, j'aperçus autour de moi mes compagnons d'armes gisant par milliers sur le sol solfureux, où passaient des lueurs livides. Mes yeux ne découvraient que solfatures, cratères fumants, palus empoisonnés … un ciel d'airain pesait sur nos fronts.’ … ‘Un ciel d'airain’, ‘les compagnons d'armes gisant … sur le sol solfureux’; there we have the setting of Tourneur's drama.

It is by the great scenes of this kind in his two plays that we at first remember him; Vindice waiting with the skull of his mistress in the dark hunting lodge for the Duke her murderer; Lussurioso after his attempt on Vindice's sister unwittingly swearing him to the performance of the very vengeance he seeks; D'Amville, his brain staggering under the sudden realization of his crimes, repeating in an agony of fear and repentance the very imagery in which he had earlier proclaimed his criminal exultation; D'Amville again, in the last moment of his life, searching feveredly for the Cause that can supersede the law of that Nature he has hitherto worshipped.²

Vindice with his mistress's skull hardly recalls at all those prototypes of his, Hamlet in the grave-yard, Hippolito of the Honest Whore with his easily forgotten ritual,³ for the scene is no longer, as in these plays, a relief between two periods of stress, but is itself the climax of the action, the skull the veritable reminder of deaths past and to come, and both deed and setting have a terrible economy and relevance. It is no longer an expression of the irrelevant arabesques of Hamlet's melancholy, but the concentrated and ironic malice of a mind which, if it were once melancholy, is now compact of action, formed all of an insane and fiendish purpose:

(Enter Vindice, with the skull of his love dresst up in Tires.) [Vindice and his brother are waiting in the Lodge in the park for the Duke, the murderer of his betrothed, who has appointed that place for an assignation with a lady Vindice has promised him.]

Vin. Madame, [speaking to the decorated skull] his
          grace will not be absent long.
Secret? nere doubt us, Madame; twill be worth
Three velvet gownes to your Ladyship—knowne!
Few Ladies respect that—disgrace?
Ile save your hand that laboure Ile unmaske you.
Hip. Why, brother, brother
Vin. Art thou beguild now? … Here's an eye,
Able to tempt a great man—to serve God,
A prety hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble;
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 …
Who now bids twenty pound a night, prepares
Musick, perfumes, and sweete-meates? All are husht.
Thou maist lie chast now … See Ladies, with false
          formes
You deceive men, but cannot deceive wormes.(4)

This has the right Thyestean ring, perhaps the only scene in Jacobean drama that is true kin to Seneca's own supreme imaginative achievement. Yet it is at the same time more than this, for the economy, the irony, raise it beyond Seneca's range into momentary comparison with those same qualities in Oedipus Tyrannus.

Vindice poisons the lips of the skull and draws on the mask again. ‘Hide thy face now for shame; thou hads't need have a mask now’—one of those jests which hold the essential flavour of Tourneur's mind, jests which, if we gather into recollection all that has preceded this in the play and before the opening scene of the action, are seen to be instinct with an insane horror, ushering the play in triumph to its fit climax. The Duke enters and all is ready.

Vin. Brother, fall you back a little With the bony Lady.

Duke. Piato, well done; hast brought her, what Lady ist?

Vin. Faith, my Lord, a Country Lady, a little bashfull at first, as most of them are, but after the first kisse my Lord the worst is past with them, your grace knowes now what you have to doe; sha's somewhat a grave looke with her—but—

Sophocles need not have been ashamed of this, one of the moments when the pun, in its apotheosis, becomes no longer the misplaced frivolity that Jonson so misliked in Shakespeare, but, rather, the charged receptacle of bitter and terrifying irony. The same quality runs through the scene where Lussurioso unknowingly swears his own murderer to the performance of vengeance, Machiavellian outwitted by Machiavellian:

Lus. … The ingreatfull villayne,

[The ‘villain’ had been VINDICE spying upon him in disguise and the episode quite other than his description. But LUSSURIOSO had not realized this.]

To quit that kindnes, strongly wrought with me …
With jewels to corrupt your virgin sister.
Hip. O villaine.
Vin. He shall surely die that did it.
Lus. I far from thinking any Virgin harme,
          … would not endure him.
Vin.Would you not my Lord?
Twas wondrous honorably donne.
.....Lus. Thy name, I have forgot it?
Vin. Vindice, my Lord.
Lus. Tis a good name that.
Vin. I, a Revenger.
Lus. It dos betoken courage, thou shouldst be valiant,
And kill thine enemies.
Vin. That's my hope, my Lord.(5)

Where the irony of Sophocles derives in part at least from the motionless indifference of fate, Tourneur's has a restless, mordant quality deriving from the infusion of implacable and purposed malice.

The Atheists Tragedie is a later comment upon the imagined world which is revealed in the Revengers Tragedie without comment, even with complete subjection and identification of the poet's mood with the unbroken mood of the world he watches. In the later play he detaches himself, portrays again this world of lust and intrigue but leads the virtuous characters to triumph and not merely to escape and sets the chief characters to work to analyse their motives and rationalize their moods. The world upon which they (and Tourneur through them) are working is less terrifying than that of the Revengers Tragedie because it is less all-embracing, it is a world not darker but meaner, more sordid and more immediate. With the figures of Languebeau Snuffe and Levidulcia, it seems less detached from the world of Jacobean London than the Revengers Tragedie with its deep imaginative coherence. But the last act and at least one speech in the fourth act have that strange fineness peculiar to Tourneur at the height of his power. They have the half-apocalyptic, half-hysterical quality—like the leap of lightning and the crash of thunder on a mountain—which alone can reflect the convulsions of D'Amville's mind:

D'Am. Why doest thou stare upon me? Thou art not
The soul(6) of him I murdered. What hast thou
To doe to vexe my conscience? … And that Bawde,
The skie, there; she could shut the windowes and
The dores of this great chamber of the world;
And draw the curtaines of the clouds betweene
Those lights and me about this bed of earth,
When that same Strumpet Murder and my selfe
Committed sin together. Then she could
Leave us i' the darke, till the close deed
Was done: But now, that I begin to feele
The loathsome horrour of my sinne; and (like
A Leacher emptied of his lust) desire
To burie my face under my eye-browes, and
Would steale from my shame unseene; she meetes me
I' the face with all her light corrupted eyes,
To challenge payment o' mee.(7)

This imagery, magnificent as is its sustained and cumulative power, gains impressiveness in its setting by its close integration both with the preceding scenes and with the earlier scene of the murder of Montferrers, that scene where D'Amville hails in exultation the black night sky, the ‘Beauteous mistress of a murderer’. This gathering up in one climactic speech of the images whose tones have been running through the play, gathering them to such different purpose and with such reversal of their earlier effect, is the work of a precise artist, just such, in fact, as we recognize in Tourneur as soon as we attempt any closer examination of his work.

For it is this very quality of control, this steady, cool handling (even in the tempest of passion) of the forces he has set going that distinguishes most notably Tourneur's conduct of a play, extending from his handling of imagery and metre (which most clearly of all reflect the essential quality of his mind) to the revelation and manipulation of the characters and even to the narrative itself.

Isolated images in both plays have this sudden and surprising virtue, this moving power which is yet precise in its minute articulation: Spurio, in the Revengers Tragedie, yielding at last to the Duchess's persuasions:

Oh one incestuous kisse picks open hell.

Vindice with his denunciation of the lust of the court, where the changing rhythm and the imagery bear equal parts in the apocalyptic, lightning-stroke of the words:

                                                                                O howre of Incest!
Any kin now, next to the Rim ath sister,
Is mens meate in these dayes, and in the morning,
When they are up and drest, and their maske on,
Who can perceive this? save that eternall eye,
That see's through flesh and all.

Or, yet again, D'Amville in the later play, after he has struck the blow by which he kills himself:

D'Am. What murderer was hee that lifted up
My hand against my head?
1st Judge. None but yourselfe, my Lord.
D'Am. I thought he was a murderer that did it.
1st Judge. God forbid.
D'Am. Forbid? You lie Judge. He commanded it.(8)
To tell thee that mans wisedome is a foole.

But there is more in Tourneur's precise art than mere isolated flashes of power. There is, in his use of imagery, a sensitiveness to the underlying harmony of image and character, image and setting, or image and situation which deserves no less a term than the much-loved Elizabethan ‘decorum’. This appears already in the earlier play, but it is almost invariable in the later one. To D'Amville and to Vindice, the focuses of passion, fall most of the images of strong imaginative or poetic power; those of Sebastian are homely in source, pithy and effective in application; Charlemont's imagery, whatever his circumstances, is obvious and simple; Gratiana's is slipshod like her mind, superficially effective but uncertain in its clinch as often are the metaphors of rapid, fluent talkers; the Duchess's metaphors, like Levidulcia's, have more force than Gratiana's, and, like Castabella's, though they have little poetry, have a practical effectiveness and some penetration. Nor is this all. Sometimes the most important undertones of a scene are referred entirely to the imagery; the glib, profuse, conventional imagery that ornaments D'Amville's speeches at the funeral of Montferrers and Charlemont,⁹ the elaborate but shallow artistry of Charlemont's parting speech to Castabella,¹⁰ even the conventional images of the unconvincing mourning of Castabella at her lover's supposed tomb,¹¹ all these give us warning, obviously or subtly, that something lying beneath the actual statements is quite other (and far more important) than the logical content of the words.¹²

The same subtle but precise impression is left, by the mood of any given character, scene or situation, upon the metre, and here again, with a meticulousness which shows Tourneur to have been one of the most careful of all Jacobean workmen. In the passages already quoted this has been apparent enough. The lines are crisp and hard and clear more often than mellifluous, but they have a capacity for modifications of tempo that makes them flexible to any mood and at all times a ringing quality that reveals a mind alert and clear in command. The rhythms are never sensational, though they sometimes, like Ford's, demand a training in the subtleties of their cadences:

D'Am. Now to myselfe I am ridiculous.
Nature thou art a Traytur to my soule.
Thou hast abus'd my trust. I will complaine
To a superior Court, to right my wrong.
I'le prove thee a forger of false assurances.
In yond' Starre Chamber thou shalt answere it.
Withdraw the bodies.(13)

But they vary, within their own range, from character to character and from mood to mood:

Grat. Dishonorable Act?—good honorable foole,
That wouldst be honest cause thou wouldst be so,
Producing no one reason but thy will.
And t'as a good report, pretely commended,
But pray by whome? Meane people; ignorant people;
The better sort Ime sure cannot abide it.
And by what rule should we square out our lives,
But by our betters actions?(14)

The impression of a clear, presiding mind which we receive from a study of the details of Tourneur's work and particularly his correlation of detail in imagery and metre, is confirmed when we come to consider his control of his characters. Hardly ever do we feel, as we do with the characters of Shakespeare, Marston, Webster and others of his contemporaries, that they are organic growths developing in the mind of the author, taking charge of the play and almost it might seem of the poet. Rather are they, like the pair in Mr. Shaw's Methuselah, ‘thought-out and hand-made’. Only Sebastian shows signs of breaking away and possessing the author; the rest are all too obviously possessed by him.

In the Revengers Tragedie they are for the most part embodied passions, the men clearly and definitely portrayed, but except for Vindice a little remote, the women slighter still, except for the figure of Gratiana where the workmanship is uneven. This effect is emphasized by the perfunctory labelling with the descriptive names of the morality and humour comedy tradition: The Duke, Lussurioso, Spurio, Ambitioso, Supervacuo, Youngest Son, The Duchess, Castiza. These all obey their names more or less faithfully and it is probably the absence of individualizing inconsistencies in this automatically moving body of evil spirits that gives to the play its unique atmosphere of compact and irrefragable evil. Like corpses animated by Voodoo magic they move about their tasks, horrible simply because, but for this one trait of inhuman consistency, they are so nearly human. Castiza, who has a slightly drawn but definite personality, is a preliminary study for the far more fully thought-out Castabella of the later play; the Youngest Son, whose elimination was essential to the survival of the atmosphere, anticipates Sebastian. Gratiana alone seems to have puzzled the author, but the inconsistencies or unexplained passages in her character are the result of gaps in his observation, not of individuality in what he observed. The first scene of the second act, for instance, is a mixture of close and penetrating observation (‘Ay, that's the comfort on't …’ or the hurrying anger of the speech ‘Dishonourable act!’)¹⁵ and lapses into undramatic self-analysis of which such a character in such a moment is generally incapable.¹⁶ In the main, however, she is the most nearly human figure in the play, one that Tourneur modified and developed in Levidulcia of the later play. He seems to know these women when they reveal themselves in emotion, though he cannot readily enter their minds in everyday moods. In the second act of Revengers Tragedie he portrays without faltering the hurrying, half-hysterical, breathless movement of the mind, where thought pours in upon thought till persuasion rises to indignation, indignation to anger, in a throbbing crescendo of emotion that feeds upon itself and at last overbears pretence, laying bare the coarse, vulgar, scheming mind of a shallow virago. He knows their fluent, sentimental repentances too, just as he knows their coarse, domineering anger and the scene (IV, iv) so highly praised of Lamb, has its chief merit in this unflinching revelation of facile tears. The same theme is worked out more fully in the death scene of Levidulcia.

In the later play a similar attitude to the characters produces a rather different group. Levidulcia and Sebastian seem integral and almost organically growing things, while an immense amount of thought has gone to the construction of most of the others, particularly Castabella, Charlemont, D'Amville. But these others, and the minor characters too, have ceased now to be embodied passions and are becoming embodied principles or ideas. The danger that threatened Tourneur from the beginning, of over-control amounting sometimes to manipulation of his personages, has grown more marked. He appears to think that the opinions a man holds (atheism, nature worship, conventional piety) can be regarded as the sources from which his actions spring; in fact, that conduct rests directly upon principles and ideas. Thus his characters now tend to become aggregations of interesting problems or of qualities with no necessary relation each to each. Some show more unity of principle than others and some more connexion between principle and conduct, but all tend to the same unreality of effect because we are not aware, as we are with Shakespeare's people, of an underlying relation between the different qualities in the character and so of a relation between action and motive or sentiment and motive. The more carefully he works upon a character, the more fully he elaborates its ideas. This does not mean that he succeeds in making it move as a whole: the parts are excellent, but they do not integrate. Almost he would seem to tell us that what is not thought-out is not real, an unconscious misconception that seems to have been shared by Ben Jonson in his early comedy and Bacon as a psychologist and is peculiarly fatal to dramatic art. This is revealed very clearly in the figure of Levidulcia, the innate whore of Jacobean drama who must yet, in the middle of her instinctive, animal existence, first realize that ‘the god [she] serves is [her] own appetite’ and then evolve a philosophy of appetite like any modern hedonist. It is a queer tribute to Tourneur's power and to the deepness of his conviction that she is never more convincing than when she is expounding this philosophy.¹⁷ The Atheists Tragedie is a play written primarily to satisfy this desire to think out positions, a play whose chief characters are nearly all self-conscious exponents of the springs of their own motives, simple or complex, related or unrelated.

D'Amville is the clearest and at the same time the extremest of these. He is a conscious theorist and as such might pass muster, were it not for the logical finality with which his every action, up to the time of his defeat and disintegration, is referred to his theory. A deliberate atheist (which seems to mean for Tourneur a nature-worshipper,¹⁸ what we might call a materialist), he makes his every action a demonstration and delivers brief explanatory lectures on the application of his theory even in the heat of action, plotting or crime. We cannot say categorically ‘This cannot be’, but we derive more pleasure from taking him to pieces and examining his philosophy in isolation than from contemplating him as a human being or as the agent of the plot. Castabella is clearly presented but is a rigid figure. She seems at first sight obsessed with a rather priggish sense of the importance of her virginity and on nearer view to be a study of what was probably becoming a common type on the fringe of the Jacobean court, a young girl suffering from a violent revulsion from the lasciviousness about her. This links her at once with Isabella of Measure for Measure (among other later studies) and indeed she seems to owe much to her; even the inhumanity of her chastity, which has not escaped Tourneur's notice, is akin to Isabella's. But she has vigour and scorn and, in the scaffold scene, a touch of Belphoebe's or Brunhilda's quality, which redeems her. Charlemont is less of a piece than either of the others; at one moment the mouthpiece of chivalric sentiment, he at another repudiates Castabella as basely as Claudio does Hero; the self-constituted redeemer of the revenge motive, he is at one moment falsely romantic, at another falsely cynical. A prig and a cad he yet conducts the action to a successful end—supplying us by the way with some excellent annotations on the psychology of dreams. Did Tourneur mean to make this of him or has the character, as it were, come apart in his hands through his trying to make it represent simultaneously too many groups of insufficiently related ideas? (Possibly the same weakness is to be traced here as in Chapman's somewhat similar figure of Clermont.) We turn with relief to Sebastian. Here is the man after Tourneur's heart and, like Shakespeare in a similar predicament with his blood-brother Mercutio, he was obliged to kill him or he would have wrecked the play. Sebastian and his predecessor the Youngest Son in the Revengers Tragedie are (with the possible addition of Levidulcia) the only characters of the two dozen odd in the two plays in whom Tourneur shows any sign of joy in the creating or of affection to the creation. They like the Bastard Falconbridge are staunch advocates of the kind of truth that shames not so much the devil as the unco' guid—there is better fun to be had out of the unco' guid than out of the devil. Sebastian is in fact a Jacobean Devil's Disciple, from his first appearance, where he scandalously interrupts the course of justice with a far too apt monosyllable, through his whimsical redemption of Charlemont from prison, to the moment when, uttering a jest worthy of Cyrano, he dies in a strumpet's quarrel. Like Blanco Posnet again, he never disappoints us and is never quite predictable. But he is alone—except perhaps for Levidulcia, that frank and refreshing blend of Thierry and the Insatiable Countess with a dash of Mistress Page; in contact with her vital, salacious garrulity we forget (perhaps pardonably) that this is all part of the service paid to the abstraction Nature and remember only that we have here a blood-relation of Doll Tearsheet, Mistress Quickly, Francischina and Frank Gullman translated to a slightly higher social sphere.

The measure of the difference in the treatment of character in the two plays can be seen in their titles: the revenger is the incarnation of a passion and he acts; the atheist is the receptable of certain opinions and theories, and, though he also acts, his prime function from Tourneur's point of view is to test the operation of these theories in the theatre of the world. And so we are haunted throughout the play by a pair of protagonists who do not appear on the character list, abstractions who threaten to push the human automata from the stage or at least to direct the action by pulling the cords that control them. If, as in Hardy's Dynasts, we could have a momentary transparency that showed us the cords at work upon the figures, we should see that the real causes and controls were these abstractions, Nature (or materialist philosophy) and her less clearly defined antagonist Heaven (or the religious sense). From them emanate the host of opinions and loyalties—the atheism of D'Amville, the piety of Montferrers, the animalism of Levidulcia, the chastity of Castabella, the stoicism of Charlemont. And these in their turn are not, as in Beaumont and Fletcher, the topics of debate bandied to and fro between the characters (who, when they come to their senses, act on instinct and disregard them); they are embedded deep in the action, acting as the springs of personality, so that D'Amville pursues his quest of Nature to the verge of life itself and Levidulcia, compact of lust, is yet never so powerful or so convincing a figure as when she rationalizes it as natural law.

The drama of Tourneur, then, is at bottom that of a poet-philosopher who approaches his theme with a thesis in mind and groups his abstractions, embodying them in dramatic persons whose first task is to expound them. His lucid and admirably thought-out psychological theories break through, again and again, in explicit analyses, especially in the later play; D'Amville on atheism and natural causes, Charlemont on dreams, are lucid and logical theorists like their creator; Levidulcia in self-analysis, Castabella disputing upon incest with D'Amville, have a surprising fluency and coherence of thought. But this does not mean that Tourneur is defective in his dramatic effect, still less in his sense of his theatre. His understanding of startling effects and settings, the vigour with which his people live in and plead for their theories would alone give power to the two plays, conceived as they are so entirely in terms of Jacobean tradition. Apparent weaknesses are often found to be short cuts to an effect desired by the audience with the help of a convention accepted by them. The acting quality is invariably excellent; indeed, so obviously is this in the poet's mind that a passage, a line, is sometimes no more than a hint to be developed by the tones and gestures of the actors. [In] the opening scene of the Revengers Tragedie … a fine dramatic and a keen theatrical sense are combined. Other scenes, only second in effect to this, stand out in the reader's memory: the murder of the Duke in the hunting-lodge, the indictment of Gratiana by her sons, the masquerade and murder of Lussurioso, all in the earlier play; and from the later, the murder of Montferrers in the chalk-pit, the scene in the charnel-house, the judgement scene and the death of D'Amville at the end. There are parts even of these which do not bear careful examination as drama, but always they are effective theatrically and here, as in certain cases where the work seems to be scamped with an almost perilous indifference to illusion, the theatrical effectiveness will generally be found to justify the dramatic weakness. It is, of course, never accompanied by metrical weakness (so far as we can judge from such texts) and certainly never by slovenly imagery; the final effect therefore is not of careless workmanship but of indifference to something not germane to his purpose as are metre, imagery, philosophic reflection and theatrical effect.¹⁹

Even the weakness of the supernatural passages can be justified by theatre convention. Montferrers, a courteous old gentleman in life, makes but a bald and mannerless ghost; he has somewhat elementary sentiments which he utters (once in four, once in five lines) without expansion or circumlocution and forthwith vanishes again. But we are in, or about, the year 1610. The ghost of King Hamlet, with his full explanations and minute instructions, is fresh in the audience's mind; the revenge theme is familiar to them in this and other forms from ‘a’ to ‘z’. They are not interested in ‘supernatural soliciting’ and are willing to accept the briefest of short-hand formulae for all that. What they do want and what Tourneur proceeds to give them—hastily and before their attention flags—is a new interpretation of the position and duty of the avenging son, indicated and summed up by Montferrers himself: ‘But leave revenge unto the King of Kings.’²⁰

Tourneur's later critics have from time to time spoken well of him, so well indeed that we must judge him one of those artists who induce in those who make them their special study a fineness and precision of phrase not unlike their own. J. Churton Collins, in 1873, J. A. Symonds, in 1885, have summed up Tourneur's genius (though Symonds took only two paragraphs) with unforgettable insight. Swinburne, in 1908, gives him the highest and in some passages the most penetrating praise he has ever received, commenting especially on his style, ‘the hard Roman style of impeachment by photography’. Marcelle Schwob and his French descendants have the same inspiration and it continues among our immediate contemporaries: ‘Mieux que tout autre, il garde le farouche élan, l'éclair métallique; et les machinations de Vendice sont réglées comme une machine infernale.’²¹ ‘Its [the Revengers Tragedie] motive is truly the death motive, for it is the loathing and horror of life itself. To have realized this motive so well is a triumph: for the hatred of life is an important phase—even, if you like, a mystical experience—in life itself.’²²

Notes

1. The Transformed Metamorphosis, stanzas 16, 42 and 44.

2. Revengers Tragedie [R.T.], III, v, and IV, ii. Atheists Tragedie [A.T.], IV, iii, and V, ii.

3. Honest Whore, Part I, IV, i. Still less is it aesthetically related to the opening of Chettle's Hoffman's Tragedy, which else it resembles closely.

4. R.T. (ed. Nicoll), III, v, 46 seq., passim.

5. Revengers Tragedie, IV, ii, 143 seq. The italics are mine, but, in effect, every line of Vindice's italicizes itself.

6. scull, Q. 1611.

7. A.T., IV, iii, 239-58.

8. A reminiscence of Faustus that, like a later one in this same play, is not unworthily applied.

9. A.T., III, i.

10. Ibid., I, ii.

11. Ibid., III, i.

12. In one case (II, iv, 38-55) the lapse into lurid, Marstonian imagery by a character (D'Amville) whose images at other times, though often passionate and sometimes of the highest order, are never sensational, is seen, upon closer view, to be exactly similar to Macbeth's words about Duncan's ‘silver skin laced with his golden blood’ and in an exactly similar situation. Each man is overacting, in a crisis, the part of the horror-stricken discoverer of a murder he has in fact himself committed.

13. A.T., V, ii.

14. R.T., II, i.

15. See supra, p. 162.

16. As when she receives money from Vindice to corrupt her own daughter Castiza:

    Gra.                                                                                                    These are
    The means that governe our affections—that woman
    Will not be troubled with the mother long,
    That sees the comfortable shine of you,
    I blush to thinke what for your sakes Ile do.

    (R.T., II, i.)

17. A.T., I, iv.

18. The atheism of D'Amville is extremely interesting. It owes something to Jacobean Machiavellianism in its refusal of religious sentiment, in its cult of aggression and in its frank pragmatism. But his use of the term ‘Nature’ (more frequent than his use of ‘atheist’ or ‘atheism’) goes back to the middle ages. Its connotation varies from passage to passage, but always, I think, within the scope of the three main medieval usages or an obvious modification of them. It is at one time the law that governs the physical universe, the creative power in the universe (controllable by man) (Natura Naturans), at another time the particular manifestation of the governing law in man or animal (Natura Naturata) and at others ‘the loving Mother of us all’, who does not ‘purpose anything for nothing’ (Natura Dea). The conflict between the idea of supreme Nature, Natura Dea, and the idea of a power above Nature relegating her, as with Bacon, to the position of Second Cause, or limiting her solely to her double aspect of Natura Naturans and Natura Naturata forms, of course, the climax of the spiritual career of D'Amville. (See A.T., V, i, and V, ii passim.)

19. There is, in fact, only one passage in the two plays for which there seems to be no sufficient justification, the criminal foolishness of Charlemont and Castabella in being overtaken by slumber in a critical moment in the charnel-house so that ‘They lie downe with either of them a Death's head for a pillow.’ True, this gives rise to a satisfactory crop of catastrophes and confusions that save the play from a threatened fourth-act decline and set it going robustly for another act and a half. But probability has been too ruthlessly sacrificed. The other cases that come to mind, the unnaturally elaborate recital of Borachio in II, i, D'Amville's similar over-acting his part in II, iv, the abrupt arrival of the dead body of Sebastian at the moment of D'Amville's exultation in V, i, would all fall into their place on the stage, the first two in accordance with the law that a speech must be ludicrously theatrical if it is to outgo the dramatic heightening of the rest of the play and appear theatrical in the theatre, the second because, however abrupt the stage direction (‘Enter servant with the body of Sebastian’) or the modern entry, the deep Jacobean stage would give an entry slow and solemn enough for a pause of horrified realization most potent in effect.

20. Even the most unfortunate line in either play, that of the Executioner (Atheists Tragedie, V, ii, 263-4) as D'Amville strikes his own death-blow:

    In lifting up the axe
    I think he's knocked his brains out,

    is necessary for an audience that could not otherwise realize what it was required to imagine, and presents, after all, no more difficulty to an intelligent producer than Malcolm's notorious ‘Oh! By whom?’ the bugbear of Shakespearian actors.

21. La Tragédie de la Vengeance, traduit de l'anglais par Camille Cé et Henri Sarvajean. Paris, 1925.

22. Cyril Tourneur. T. S. Eliot, Elizabethan Essays [Faber, 1934.]