Cyril Tourneur and his plays. The Revenger’s Tragedy

Cyril Tourneur’s has much in common with Webster but his world is even darker. Pity which is an essential component in Webster’s total impression is absent here: the pervading atmosphere is that of horror. We move in a universe that is inherently evil. Tourneur first appears as a satirist in 1600. His fame rests on two plays: The Atheist’s Tragedy (1607-11) and The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607). Touneur’s characters are humorous, created after Jonson’s fashion. The generic Italian names indicate, as in Volpone, that the characters are deliberately dehumanized: we have to do here with abstract characters representing a type, in the morality tradition. In this respect Tourneur’s method differs from Webster’s whose figures are more human and more complex. The Revenger’s Tragedy is the greater play but it should be mentioned that it is of doubtful authorship.

The Revenger’s Tragedy

The play opens with an abrupt, explosive force as the central figure Vindice, enters clasping the skull of his dead mistress, the victim of the old duke’s lust. Vindice indicts not only the Duke but his heir, Lussurioso, his bastard son, Spurio, and the Duchess, his second wife. The central character of the play is Vindice who, as his name suggests, is the spirit of revenge, and the play itself is almost the archetypal revenge tragedy. The society it depicts is almost fully corrupt, and where goodness does appear it is either ineffective or unattractive. The revenger becomes as evil as those upon whom he seeks revenge, and the character are largely one-dimensional, and summed up by names such as Lussurioso, Ambitioso, Supervacuo.

The plays of Tourneur and Webster reveal a Satanic universe in which the forces of evil have unimpeded sway. They reflect the crisis of humanist ideology, a despair in the triumph of humanist principles. A characteristic mark of their plays is a painful intensity – a dark landscape is occasionally lit up.