United States or Ukraine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Where, then, in the midst of these spotless virgins, these noble saints, these brilliant pseudo-chivalric joustings and revels, these sweet and sonneteering pastorals, these scurrilous adventures and loose buffooneries; where in this Italian Renaissance are the horrors which fascinated so strangely our English playwrights: the fratricides and incests, the frightful crimes of lust and blood which haunted and half crazed the genius of Tourneur and Marston?
Lee concludes his most interesting note by suggesting that the present play may be the one to which Peele alludes; but he will at once perceive from my extracts that the date 1589 is much too early. Here is a passage that might have been written by Cyril Tourneur: The concentrated bitterness of those lines is surpassed by nothing in the Revenger's Tragedy.
M. Le- tourneur almost had a smile upon his lips, as he drew forth the last paper but one, and with a firm, unfaltering voice, marvelous for his age, unfolded it slowly, and read the name of Dowlas. The carpenter gave a yell of relief as he heard the word. M. Letourneur took the last bit of paper from the hat, and, without looking at it, tore it to pieces.
But Tourneur and Marston have neither the constant sympathy with oppressed virtue of the author of the "Duchess of Malfy," nor the blind fury of passion of the poet of "Giovanni and Annabella;" they look on grim and hopeless spectators at the world of fatalistic and insane wickedness which they have created, in which their heroes and heroines and villains are slowly entangled in inextricable evil.
To this group of Moseley's authors Cowley and Cartwright were soon added; and it was not long before he snapped out of the hands of duller men Denham's Poems, Carew's Poems, various things of Sir Kenelm Digby, and every obtainable copyright in any of the plays of Shakespeare, Massinger, Ford, Rowley, Middleton, Tourneur, or any other of the Elizabethan and Jacoban dramatists.
The tragic sense, the sense of utter blank evil, is stronger in all these Elizabethan painters of Italian crime than perhaps in any other tragic writers. There is, in the great and sinister pictures of Webster, of Ford, of Tourneur, and of Marston, no spot of light, no distant bright horizon.
I anticipated a sore task, in conveying to her the news of his glorious fate: but this trial was spared me, in a manner as strange as anything that had happened to me in Fairy Land. "No one has my form but the I." Schoppe, in JEAN PAUL'S Titan. "Joy's a subtil elf. I think man's happiest when he forgets himself." CYRIL TOURNEUR, The Revenger's Tragedy.
Indeed, I am inclined to believe that the whole play, which is very unskilfully constructed, is by Tourneur, or perhaps by the author of the Second Maiden's Tragedy. All the figures are shrouded in a blank starless gloom; to read the play is to watch the riot of devils.
Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and Marston, who have all been more or less wrongfully though more or less plausibly attacked on the score of excess in horror, have none of them left us anything so nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this. Passion is here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped to the bones. I cannot tell who could and I cannot guess who would have written it.
And this somewhat, thus pilfered from what was to make, or was making, or had made, the works of Shakespeare; this base and noble, still unfused or already exhausted alloy, became the strange heterogeneous works of the Elizabethan dramatists: of Webster, of Ford, of Tourneur, of Ben Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of their minor brethren; from the splendid ore of Marlowe, only half molten and half freed from dross, down to the shining metal, smooth and silvery as only tinsel can be, of Massinger.
Word Of The Day