Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/94

 acted by the King's Majesties Servants.’ Four years later was published ‘The Atheists Tragedie: or the Honest Mans Revenge. As in diuers places it hath often beene Acted, Written by Cyril Tourneur.’ The order of publication is probably the inverse of that in which the plays were composed. The ‘Atheists Tragedie’ must have been written after 1600, as there is a reference to Dekker's ‘Fortune's Tennis’ of that date, but not much later than 1603–4, while the siege of Ostend was still in men's minds.

A third drama by Tourneur, ‘The Nobleman,’ licensed to Edward Blount [q. v.] on 15 Feb. 1612, and acted at the court by the king's men on 23 Feb. 1611–12, is said to have been destroyed by Warburton's cook (see, however, Collections, i. 424; cf. ; and Gent. Mag. 1815, ii. 220).

On 5 June 1613 Robert Daborne [q. v.] wrote to Henslowe that he had given Tourneur a commission to write an act of an unpublished play, ‘The Arraignement of London,’ a performance of which had been promised by ‘La. Eliz. men.’ Positive evidence there is none, but upon internal grounds Mr. Robert Boyle would assign to Tourneur most of the last three acts of ‘The Second Maiden's Tragedy,’ 1611 [see under, and ], and some part in ‘The Knight of Malta’ (1617?).

Meanwhile Tourneur obtained employment in the Low Countries. On 23 Dec. 1613 he was granted forty-one shillings upon a warrant signed by the lord chamberlain at Whitehall ‘for his charges and paines in carrying letters for his Majestie's service to Brussells.’ He probably remained in the Low Countries for many years after this. Sir Horace Vere had succeeded his brother, Sir Francis Vere, as governor of Brill, and it is likely that Tourneur made some interest with him. He seems at any rate to have obtained an annuity of 60l. from the government of the United Provinces, and it is most probable that he was granted this allowance in compensation for some post vacated when Brill was handed over to the States in May 1616. In whatever manner Tourneur came by his pension from the States, his hopes of preferment must have been greatly stimulated in the summer of 1624 by the arrival in Holland with his regiment of Sir Edward Cecil, the son of Sir Thomas Cecil, the former governor of Brill. Sir Edward Cecil had served at Ostend and elsewhere under Sir Francis Vere, whom Tourneur had panegyrised, and doubtless he had known Tourneur's kinsman, Captain Richard Turnor. When Buckingham wrote to Cecil at the Hague in May 1625, and asked him to undertake the command of a projected expedition to Cadiz, Cecil provisionally appointed Tourneur secretary to the council of war with a good salary. The nomination was subsequently cancelled by Buckingham, as the post was required for Sir John Glanville (1586–1661) [q. v.] Tourneur nevertheless accompanied the Cadiz expedition as ‘secretary to the lord marshall’ (i.e. to Cecil himself), a nominal post at a nominal salary. He sailed for Cadiz in Cecil's flagship, the Royal Anne, and when, after the miserable failure of the expedition, the Royal Anne put into Kinsale on 11 Dec 1625, Tourneur was put on land among the 160 sick who were disembarked before the vessel proceeded to England. He died in Ireland on 28 Feb. 1625–6, leaving his widow Mary destitute (see Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1631–3, pp. 309 and 430, containing Mary Turnour's petition to the council of war, to which is appended Cecil's certificate ‘that Cyril Turnour served as secretary to the council of war until Mr. Glanville was sent down to execute that place;’ and cf. art. ).

Tourneur's reputation mainly rests on his ‘Revenger's Tragædie.’ The ‘Atheists Tragedie,’ of which the crude plot owes something to the ‘Decameron’ (vii. 6), is childishly grotesque, and, in spite of some descriptive passages of a certain grandeur, notably the picture of the hungry sea lapping at the body of a drowned soldier, is so markedly inferior to ‘The Revenger's Tragædie’ as to have given rise to some fanciful doubts as to a common authorship. ‘The Revenger's Tragædie’ displays a lurid tragic power that Hazlitt was the first to compare with that of Webster. ‘I never read it,’ wrote Lamb, ‘but my ears tingle.’ Mr. Swinburne, in an unmeasured eulogy on the play, pronounces Tourneur to be as ‘passionate in his satire as Juvenal or Swift, but with a finer faith in goodness.’ In his character of Vendice Tourneur, according to the same critic, expresses ‘such poetry as finds vent in the utterances of Hamlet or Timon;’ while as to the workmanship it is ‘so magnificent, so simple, impeccable, and sublime, that the finest passages can be compared only with the noblest examples of tragic dialogue or monologue now extant in English or in Greek.’ Finally, Mr. Swinburne insists ‘that the only poet to whose manner and style the style and manner of Cyril Tourneur can reasonably be said to bear any considerable resemblance is William Shakespeare’ (Nineteenth Century, March 1887; cf. Mr. Swinburne's art. in Encycl. Britannica, 9th edit.). Mr. Swinburne's estimate of Tourneur's