Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/139

Rh —what the Elizabethans were too sparing of—time and labour.

The two tragedies of Cyril Tourneur —of whose life we know but little—are of the same cast as Marston's and Webster's.  They are written to the same didactic receipt—


 * "When the bad bleeds then is the tragedy good;"

they reflect in like wise the attraction for the Elizabethan imagination of Italian crime; and they are full like them of echoes from Hamlet, to us a problem of character, to the Elizabethans a fascinating melodrama of crime and nemesis.

The Atheist's Tragedy (1611) is a crude picture of the subtle crimes of the "politician" and the nemesis which overtakes him. The Revenger's Tragedy (1607) is, despite the earlier date at which it was printed, a maturer play in structure and verse, but it cannot be said with justice that it rises to the level of tragedy. No character detaches himself or herself from the melodramatic and lurid phantasmagoria of lust, murder, and vengeance with the tragic distinctness and beauty of the intense Vittoria, or the nobly pathetic Duchess of Malfi. Yet Mr Courthope is too harsh a critic when he dubs Tourneur bluntly a poetaster. The scenes between Vendice and his mother and sister are not altogether undeserving of Lamb's eloquent eulogy; and through the play are scattered individual "strokes" of nature and poetry, of the kind that are the glory of the Elizabethan drama, which one would