Cyril Tourneur

The Revengers Tragedy, 1607. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Cyril Tourneur, also Tournour or Turner (?1575 - 28 February 1626), was an English poet and playwright. His best-known work is The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), a play which has also been attributed to Thomas Middleton.

Life

Overview

Tourneur (perhaps son of Richard Tourneur, lieutenant of the Brill) served in the Low Countries, and was secretary to Sir Edward Cecil in his unsuccessful expedition to Cadiz, returning from which he was disembarked with the sick at Kinsale, where he died He wrote 2 dramas, The Revenger's Tragedy (printed 1607), and The Atheist's Tragedy (1611), in both of which, especially the former, every kind of guilt and horror is piled up, the author displaying, however, great intensity of tragic page 384power. Of The Revenger Lamb said that it made his ears tingle. Another play of his, Transformed Metamorphosis, was discovered in 1872.

Family

Tourneur, born about 1575, was probably a near relative and possibly the son of Captain Richard Turnor or Turner. Richard Turnor had been in the service of the Cecils, and when, in compliance with Queen Elizabeth's agreement with the Dutch, Brill and Flushing were taken over by the English as "cautionary towns" in 1585, Turnor was made water bailiff of Brill, a post of considerable responsibility, under the governor, Sir Thomas Cecil (afterwards first Earl of Exeter), eldest son of the great Lord Burghley. His salary was 8s. a day, and he is spoken of from time to time in the Cecil correspondence as a trustworthy man. In addition to the Cecils he cultivated the patronage of Essex, and there is extant an interesting letter from him to Essex, written in 1595, and expressing a wish that Essex were with the English troops, who only needed a dashing leader. By July 1596 Richard Turnor had risen to be lieutenant-governor, and in the following August he is mentioned as ‘Turnor, lieutenant of Brill.’ The post of acting-governor was given in September 1598 to Sir Francis Vere, who had been a captain of horse at Brill at the commencement of the English occupation. Turnor is not mentioned in the list of Vere's officers or lieutenants, and, as his claims can hardly have been overlooked, it is plausible to assume that he either died or was superannuated between 1596 and 1598.

Career

Cyril Tourneur's literary work shows him to have possessed practical information about soldiering in the Low Countries, and to have counted upon some interest with Essex, with the Vere family, and with the Cecils. Subsequently he obtained employment in the Low Countries. All this confirms the conjecture that he was nearly akin to Richard Turnor, lieutenant of the Brill.

Tourneur's early life was mainly spent in literary work, but it was only as a dramatist that he showed distinct fitness for the literary vocation. In 1600 appeared The Transformed Metamorphosis (printed by Valentine Sims, at the White Swan, London, 4to); it is dedicated to Sir Christopher Heydon, a soldier who had served under Essex and in company with Sir Francis Vere at the sacking of Cadiz in 1596.

Tourneur's next non-dramatic work (licensed on 14 October 1609) was A Funerall Poeme. Vpon the Death of the Most Worthie and True Sovldier Sir Francis Vere Knight, Captain of Portsmouth and Lt. Governour of his Majesties Cautionarie Towne of Briell in Holland (for Eleazar Edgar, London, 4to).

About the same time there is good reason to believe that Tourneur was responsible for another panegyric, which, if brought home to him, would serve to confirm the theory of his connection with the Cecil family. In a catalogue of Lord Mostyn's manuscripts at Mostyn Hall (No. 262 folio, 2nd treatise), appears The Character of Robert, Earle of Salisburye, Lord High Treasurer of England … written by Mr. Sevill Turneur and dedicated to the most understandinge and most worthie Ladie, the Ladie Theodosia Cecill … [wife of her first cousin, Sir Edward Cecil] (Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Rep. App. p. 361). This treatise, probably written on Lord Salisbury's death in 1612, has not hitherto been ascribed to the dramatist; but as the 3 letters Cir and Sev are almost indistinguishable in the script of the period, the presumption that the (most uncommon) name ‘Sevill’ is a misreading for Cirill is exceptionally strong.

Less distinctive than his previous efforts of like kind is A Griefe on the Death of Prince Henrie. Expressed in a Broken Elegie, according to the nature of such a sorrow. By Cyril Tourneur (London, printed for William Welbie, 1613). Tourneur's is the 1st of 3 elegies, the other 2 being by John Webster and Thomas Heywood (cf. Nichols, Progresses of James I, ii. 507; Brydges, Restituta, iv. 173).

But Tourneur is only really memorable on account of 2 plays. The earliest to be published (in 1607) was The Revenger's Tragædie. As it hath been sundry times acted by the King's Majesties Servants.’ 4 years later followed 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.

Meanwhile Tourneur obtained employment in the Low Countries. On 23 December 1613 he was granted 41 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.

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). 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 December 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 February 1625-6, leaving his widow Mary destitute (see Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1631-3, 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. Cecil, Edward, Viscount Wimbledon).

Writing

Verse

In 1600 appeared his obscure satirical allegory, The Transformed Metamorphosis. The only plausible explanation of its enigmatic drift (the grotesque style of which seems to be alluded to in John Taylor's ‘Mad Fashions, Odd Fashions, All Out of Fashions, or the Emblems of these distracted Times,’ 1642, line 4) is that "Mavortio" is intended for Essex, whose Irish exploits are indicated by the hero's achievements on behalf of "Delta."

His Funerall Poem to Vere, which shows an accomplished literary hand, consists of 22 pages, signed at the end ‘Cyril Tourneur.’ He emphasises Vere's exploits at Nieuport and Ostend (some details of the famous siege of 1601-1604 are given in The Atheist's Tragedie, act ii. sc. i.), quotes from Roger Williams's Briefe Discourse of Warre (p. 58), and refers to Vere's manuscript Commentaries (not published until 1657). It of no great merit as poetry, but of some value as conveying in a straightforward and masculine style the poet's ideal conception of a perfect knight or "happy warrior," comparable by those who may think fit to compare it with the more nobly realized ideals of Chaucer and of Wordsworth.

Less distinctive than his previous efforts of like kind is A Griefe on the Death of Prince Henrie. Expressed in a Broken Elegie, according to the nature of such a sorrow. By Cyril Tourneur (1613). .

Revenger's Tragedy

About Shakespeare
William Shakespeare Shakespeare's life Religion • Sexuality Bibliography Collaborations • Attribution Criticism Reputation • Influence World Bibliography Folger Shakespeare Library Books on Shakespeare
Poems
Shakespeare's Sonnets Shakespearean sonnet Petrach vs. Shakespeare "A Lover's Complaint" "Venus and Adonis" "The Rape of Lucrece" "The Phoenix and the Turtle"
Plays
Chronology • Early texts First Folio • Second Folio False Folio • Style
Comedies
The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Merry Wives of Windsor Measure for Measure The Comedy of Errors Much Ado About Nothing Love's Labour's Lost A Midsummer Night's Dream The Merchant of Venice As You Like It The Taming of the Shrew All's Well That Ends Well Twelfth Night
Histories
King John • Richard II Henry IV, Part 1 • Part 2 Henry V • Henry VI, Part 1 Henry VI, Part 2 • Part 3 Richard III • Henry VIII
Tragedies
Troilus and Cressida Coriolanus • Titus Andronicus Romeo and Juliet'' Timon of Athens Julius Caesar Macbeth • Hamlet King Lear • Othello Anthony and Cleopatra
Romances
Pericles, Prince of Tyre Cymbeline • The Winter's Tale The Tempest The Two Noble Kinsmen
Editors
Rowe • Pope • Theobald Johnson • Steevens • Malone Chalmers
Contemporaries
Elizabeth I • James I Richard Barnfield Beaumont and Fletcher Geo. Chapman • Henry Chettle Robert Davenport Tho. Dekker • Michael Drayton Thomas Freeman • John Ford Tho. Heywood • Hugh Holland Ben Jonson • Thomas Kyd John Lyly • Richard Linche Gervase Markham Christopher Marlowe John Marston • Tho. Middleton Anthony Munday • Tho. Nashe George Peele • William Percy Walter Raleigh • William Rowley Cyril Tourneur • John Webster Geo. Whetstone • Mary Wroth Elizabethan miscellanies
In performance
Shakespeare's Globe Royal Shakespeare Theatre Stratford Shakespeare Festival Theatre companies Film and TV adaptations BBC Television Shakespeare
Miscellaneous
Shakespeare Apocrypha Authorship question • History Jubilee • Bardolatry Shakespeare's Birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare garden

Tourneur's reputation mainly rests on his Revenger's Tragædie. The Revenger’s Tragedie had appeared anonymously in 1607. In 1656 the bookseller Edward Archer entered it as by Tourneur on his list, but recent scholarship attributes it to Thomas Middleton. The plays differ in their attitude toward private revenge; and The Revenger’s Tragedie, although earlier, is more mature in its structure and sombre brilliance.

The Revenger's Tragædie displays a lurid tragic power that Hazlitt was the 1st to compare with that of Webster. "I never read it," wrote Lamb, "but my ears tingle."

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." 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.).

In the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannia, Swinburne calls the blank verse of the play) "so magnificent, so simple, impeccable, and sublime that the finest passages of this play can be compared only with the noblest examples of tragic dialogue or monologue now extant in English or in Greek. There is no trace of imitation or derivation from an alien source in the genius of this poet." He goes on to say:

But the resemblance between the tragic verse of Tourneur and the tragic verse of Shakespeare is simply such as proves the natural affinity between two great dramatic poets, whose inspiration partakes now and then of the quality more proper to epic or to lyric poetry. The fiery impulse, the rolling music, the vivid illustration of thought by jets of insuppressible passion, the perpetual sustenance of passion by the implacable persistency of thought, which we recognise as the dominant and distinctive qualities of such poetry as finds vent in the utterances of Hamlet or of Timon, we recognise also in the scarcely less magnificent poetry, the scarcely less fiery sarcasm, with which Tourneur has informed the part of Vindice — a harder-headed Hamlet, a saner and more practically savage and serious Timon.

He was a satirist as passionate as Juvenal or Swift, but with a finer faith in goodness, a purer hope in its ultimate security of triumph. This fervent constancy of spirit relieves the lurid gloom and widens the limited range of a tragic imagination which otherwise might be felt as oppressive rather than inspiriting. His grim and trenchant humour is as peculiar in its sardonic passion as his eloquence is original in the strenuous music of its cadences, in the roll of its rhythmic thunder. As a playwright, his method was almost crude and rude in the headlong straightforwardness of its energetic simplicity; as an artist in character, his interest was intense but narrow, his power magnificent but confined; as a dramatic poet, the force of his genius is great enough to ensure him an enduring place among the foremost of the followers of Shakespeare.

In the Dictionary of National Biography, Thomas Seccombe rebuts that "Swinburne's estimate of Tourneur's genius is unduly enthusiastic. Great as is his tragic intensity, Tourneur luxuriates in hideous forms of vice to an extent which almost suggests moral aberration, and sets his work in a category of dramatic art far below the highest." He adds: "Whether his choice of topics was due to a morbid mental development, or merely to a spirit of literary emulation in the genre of Ford and Webster, a more extended knowledge of Tourneur's life might possibly enable us to ascertain."

The Revengers Tragædie originally appeared in quarto, London, 1607 (licensed to Geo. Eld on 7 Oct. 1607; the British Museum has 3 copies, 1 containing some 17th century emendations); some remainder copies are dated 1608.

It has not been reprinted separately, but appears in Dodsley's Old Plays, 1744, 1780, and 1825, vol. iv., and 1874, vol. x., and in the Ancient British Drama, 1810, vol. ii.

Atheist's Tragedy

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.

Swinburne believed that that the "singular power, the singular originality and the singular limitation" of Tourneur's "genius are all equally obvious in The Atheist's Tragedy, a dramatic poem no less crude and puerile and violent in action and evolution than simple and noble and natural in expression and in style. However, he criticized Tourneure's blank verse in this tragedy, calling it "so imperfect as to suggest either incompetence or perversity in the workman".

Seccombe calls the Atheists Tragedie, of which the crude plot owes something to the Decameron (vii. 6), "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, ...so markedly inferior to The Revenger's Tragædie as to have given rise to some fanciful doubts as to a common authorship."

The Atheists Tragedie (licensed to John Stepneth on 14 September) appeared in quarto, London, 1611; some unsold copies were dated 1612. It was reprinted 1792, 8vo, and 1794, 8vo (Brit. Mus. Cat.)

Miscellaneous

A 3rd drama by Tourneur, The Nobleman, licensed to Edward Blount on 15 February 1612, and acted at the court by the king's men on 23 February 1611-12, is said to have been destroyed by Warburton's cook (see, however, Hazlitt's Collections, i. 424; cf. Fleay; and Gentleman's Magazine 1815, ii. 220).

On 5 June 1613 Robert Daborne 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 Robert Boyle would assign to Tourneur most of the last 3 acts of The Second Maiden's Tragedy, 1611 [attributed to Fletcher and Massinger, and some part in The Knight of Malta (1617?).

An edition of the Plays and Poems of Cyril Tourneur, edited, with Critical Introduction and Notes, by John Churton Collins,’ appeared in 1878 (London, 2 volumes. 8vo). The 2 plays were edited along with The White Devil and the Duchess of Malfi of John Webster, and an introduction by John Addington Symonds in 1888 (London, 8vo, the Mermaid Series).

Critical reputation

Until a relatively recent period, many stage directors considered The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy as oddities whose Gothic horrors made completely alien from modern taste. Things have changed for The Revenger's Tragedy, which has been performed with increasing frequency and success since the 1980s, both in Britain and elsewhere. In 2003, this play even inspired a movie called Revengers Tragedy. However, stagings of The Atheist's Tragedy remain few and far between. If, as seems likely, it is his only surviving play, he can no longer be ranked among the greatest playwrights.

Publications

Poetry

• The Transformed Metamorphosis. London: Valntine Sims, 1600.
• A Funerall Poeme: Upon the death of the most worthie and true soldier, Sir Francis Vere, knight. London: John Windet, for Eleazar Edgar, 1609.
• "A Griefe on the Death of Prince Henrie, Expressed in a Broken Elegie ...," in Three Elegies on the most lamented Death of Prince Henry (with John Webster and Thomas Heywood). London: Nicholas Okes & Felix Kingston, for William Welbie, 1613.
• The Character of Robert, earl of Salisburye, Lord High Treasurer of England, "by Mr Sevill Tumour" in Works

Plays

• The Revengers Tragaedie. London: G. Eld, 1607
  • (edited by Lawrence J. Ross). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966
  • facsimile edition (with introduction by MacDonald P Jackson). Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983.
• The Atheists Tragedie; or, The honest mans revenge. London: Thomas Snodham, for Iohn Stepneth / Richard Redmer, 1611; London: T. Wilkins, 1794
  • (edited by Brian Morris & Roma Gill). London: Benn / New York: Norton, 1976.
• Webster and Tourneur (edited by Ashley Horace Thorndike). New York: American Book, 1912.
• Four Plays (with John Webster; edited by John Addington Symonds). New York: Hill & Wang, 1956.
• Plays (edited by George Parfitt). Cambridge, UK, & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Collected editions

• Plays and Poems (edited by John Churton Collins). (2 volumes), London, Chatto & Windus, 1878; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972. Volume I, Volume II
• Works (edited by Allarcyce Nicoll). London: Fanfrolico Press, 1930; New York: Russell & Russell, 1963.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets
• List of English-language playwrights

References

• Higgins, Michael H. 'The Influence of Calvinistic Thought in Tourneur's 'Atheist's Tragedy', Review of English Studies XIX.75 (Jul 1943), 255-262.
• Neill, Michael. 'Bastardy, Counterfeiting and Misogyny in The Revenger's Tragedy', Studies in English Literature 36:2 (Spring 1996), 397-416.
•  Seccombe, Thomas (1899) "Tourneur, Cyril" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 57 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 87-89 . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 14, 2018.
•  Bryant, Margaret & Algernon Charles Swinburne (1911). "Tourneur, Cyril". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 27 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 106. . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 14, 2018.

External links

Poems

• Cyril Tourneur at My Poetic Side

Books

• Cyril Tourneur at Amazon.com

About

• Cyril Tourneur in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Tourneur, Cyril at Encyclopedia.com
• Cyril Tourneur (1575 ca.-1626) at English Poetry, 1579-1830

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Tourneur, Cyril
 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.. Original article is at: Tourneur, Cyril