Revenger's Tragedy" stands alone in the next rank to
Shakespeare. Many if not most of their contemporaries could compose a
better play than he probably could conceive--a play with finer variation
of incidents and daintier diversity of characters: not one of them, not
even Webster himself, could pour forth poetry of such continuous force
and flow. The fiery jet of his molten verse, the rush of its radiant and
rhythmic lava, seems alone as inexhaustible as that of Shakespeare's. As
a dramatist, his faults are doubtless as flagrant as his merits are
manifest: as a writer, he is one of the very few poets who in their
happiest moments are equally faultless and sublime. The tone of thought
or of feeling which gives form and color to this splendid poetic style
is so essentially what modern criticism would define as that of a
natural Hebraist, and so far from that of a Hellenist or Latinist of the
Renascence, that we recognize in this great poet one more of those
Englishmen of genius on whom the direct or indirect influence of the
Hebrew Bible has been actually as great as the influences of the country
and the century in which they happened to be born. The single-hearted
fury of unselfish and devoted indignation which animates every line of
his satire is more akin to the spirit of Ezekiel or Isaiah than to the
spirit of Juvenal or Persius: though the fierce literality of occasional
detail, the prosaic accuracy of implacable and introspective abhorrence,
may seem liker the hard Roman style of impeachment by photography than
the great Hebrew method of denunciation by appeal. But the fusion of
sarcastic realism with imaginative passion produces a compound of such
peculiar and fiery flavor as we taste only from the tragic chalice of
Tourneur or of Shakespeare. The bitterness which serves but as a sauce
or spice to the meditative rhapsodies of Marston's heroes or of
Webster's villains is the dominant quality of the meats and wines served
up on the stage which echoes to the cry of Vindice or of Timon. But the
figure of Tourneur's typic hero is as distinct in its difference from
the Shakespearean figure which may possibly have suggested it as in its
difference from the Shakespearean figure which it may not impossibly
have suggested. There is perhaps too much play made with skulls and
cross-bones on the stage of Cyril Tourneur: he cannot apparently realize
the fact that they are properties of which a thoughtful poet's use
should be as te