Cyril Tourneur

A difficult allegorical poem called The Transformed Metamorphosis (1600) is Tourneur's earliest extant work; an elegy on the death of Prince Henry, son of James I of England, is the latest (1613). Tourneur's other non-dramatic works include a prose pamphlet, Laugh and Lie Down (1605), some contributions to Sir Thomas Overbury's Book of Characters and an epicede on Sir Francis Vere. This poem conveys the poet's ideal conception of a perfect knight or happy warrior. Tourneur's primary dramatic work is The Atheist's Tragedy, or The Honest Man's Revenge which was published in 1611. A case has been made by Johan Gerritsen that Tourneur is the author of the first act of The Honest Man's Fortune (1613), a play from the Beaumont & Fletcher canon usually attributed to John Fletcher, Philip Massinger and Nathan Field. In addition there is a lost play, The Nobleman, and the lost Arraignment of London written with Robert Daborne. Tourneur's current reputation however rests on The Atheist's Tragedy. It confidently reproduces themes and conventions which are characteristic of medieval morality plays and of Elizabethan memento mori emblems. It uses these conventions in the context of Calvin's Protestant theology. This and Tourneur's other uncontested works, show him to be "a traditional Christian moralist, with a consistent didactic bent." The play recalls Jonson's The Alchemist and Volpone in the character of Languebeau Snuffe, and may also be a response to The Revenge of Bussy D'Amboise. As regards The Revenger's Tragedy, the play was published anonymously, and was first attributed to Cyril Tourneur by Edward Archer in 1656. The attribution was also made by Francis Kirkman in lists of 1661 and 1671. Critics supporting Tourneur's authorship attribution argued that the tragedy is unlike Middleton's other early dramatic work, and that internal evidence, including some idiosyncrasies of spelling, points to Tourneur. However, the consensus of modern scholarship attributes the play to Middleton, citing stylistic similarities to Middleton's other work and contextual evidence. Modern stagings of The Atheist's Tragedy remain few and far between.

Charles Lamb writes of The Atheist's Tragedy: “The reality and life of the dialogue, in which Vindici and Hippolito first tempt their mother, and then threaten her with death for consenting to the dishonor of their sister, passes any scenical illusion I ever felt. I never read it but my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush overspread my cheeks, as if I were presently about to proclaim such malefactions of myself, as the brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more keen and dagger-like than those which Hamlet speaks to his mother. Such power has the passion of shame truly personated, not only to strike guilty creatures unto the soul, but to 'appall' even those that are 'free.'" In From Shakespeare to Pope (1885), Edmund Gosse writes: "Fifteen years ago it used to be all the fashion among young men of poetic aspirations to affect the tragedies of Cyril Tourneur. The name was an agreeable one, the plays were very rare and difficult to meet with, and accordingly Cyril Tourneur became a kind of watchword of the higher culture, like Botticelli. Now Cyril Tourneur has been reprinted, with admirable care, by a very distinguished scholar, and I notice that his name becomes rarer and rarer on the lips and pens of the enthusiastic. Without expressing the least disrespect towards a writer in whom a variety of critics have found much to praise, I am bound to say that the existence of Cyril Tourneur. appears to me to be one little reason more, by the way, why the classical reaction should be regarded as absolutely inevitable. Cyril Tourneur is a regular raw-head and bloody-bones, a vampire of literature, a purveyor of yells and dead-men's bodies and churchyard curses. The passages which attracted the admiration of Charles Lamb are sudden felicities, such as I have just said can be discovered, though, I allow, in fewer numbers and in less sustained brilliance, in a vast number of examples. 'But the general tenour of his writings is so monstrous, so confused, so obscure, that there are whole pages which might have been written by a Dyak of Borneo who had strayed into the school of Lycophron. I would desire to recommend to anyone who holds that English poetry, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was in a quiet, healthy condition, and needed merely to be allowed to go on its course, a chef d'œuvre of Cyril Tourneur's called The Transformed Metamorphosis. I remember the shouts of joy among the elect when this masterpiece was first discovered in a unique copy some twelve years ago. Well, the editor and fondest admirer of Cyril Tourneur admits that the excessive obscurity of the Transformed Metamorphosis 'arises as much from the abnormal and grotesque mould in which the whole poem is cast as from the hideous jargon in which it is written.' These are the words of a leading admirer of the school of James and Charles, and I seize them as a text for my parable. I am asked why the literature of the seventeenth century shut itself up in bondage, why it subjected itself to stiff and artificial rules, why it confined itself to dry and obvious themes; my answer is, because of the abnormal and grotesque mould in which all but the best passages of poetry had come to be cast, and because of the hideous jargon in which verse was written."