Cyril Tour neur If aught of these strains fill this consort up, TRAGEDIES AND COMEDIES COLLECTED INTΤΟ Viz. 1. Antonio and Mellida. 2. Antonio's Revenge. 3. The Tragedie of Sophonisba. 4. What you will. 5. The Fawne. 6. The Dutch Conrtezan. LONDON, Ben. Jonso Printed by A.M for William Sheares, Title page of Marston's "Tragedies From Ben Jonson's copy, with his autograph THE SCHOLAR AND HIS DOG, from I was a scholar seven useful springs Of cross'd opinions 'bout the soul of man ; Delight, my spaniel, slept, whilst I baused (kissed) leaves, Toss'd o'er the dunces, pored on the old Of titled words and still my spaniel slept. And still I held converse with Zabarell that They're at brain-buffets, fell by the ears Pell-mell together: still my spaniel slept. Stood banding factions, all so strongly I stagger'd, knew not which was firmer part, But thought, quoted, read, observed, and pryed, Stuff'd noting-books and still my spaniel At length he waked, and yawn'd; and by yon sky, It is believed that Cyril Tourneur (1575 ?-1626) was the son of Richard Tourneur, Governor of the Brill in Holland. Much of his life was probably spent in service in the Netherlands. In 1600 was published his outrageously metaphysical and obscure poem, The Transform'd Metamorphosis. His earliest play, The Revenger's Tragedy, was printed in 1607, and The Atheist's Tragedy in 1611. A third, The Nobleman, was licensed in 1612, but has been lost. Cyril Tourneur acted as the secretary of Sir Edward Cecil in the Cadiz expedition of 1625, and was among those disbanded soldiers who were put ashore at Kinsale on the return of the fleet. He was already ill, and he died in Ireland, in utter destitution, on February 28, 1626. Able to tempt a great man—to serve God ; A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble. A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo 'em, To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em. Here's a cheek keeps her colour let the wind go whistle; Does the silkworm expend her yellow For thee? for thee does she undo herself? Why does yon fellow falsify highways, To beat their valours for her? Surely we're all mad people, and they Does every proud and self-affecting dame In sinful baths of milk, when many an in- For her superfluous outside, for all this?" Who now bids twenty pound a night? prepares Music, perfumes, and sweetmeats? all are hush'd. Thou mayst lie chaste now! it were fine, To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts, the sinner, And make him a good coward: put a reveller Out of his antick amble, And cloy an epicure with empty dishes. THE 339 REVENGERS TRAGEDIE. As it hath beene fundry times Acled, by the Kings Maiesties Seruants. AT LONDON Printed by G. EL D, and are to be fold at his houfe in Fleere-lane at the figne of the Printers-Preffe. 1607. Title-page of Cyril Tourneur's "The Here might a scornful and ambitious woman Look through and through herself. See, ladies, with false forms From "THE ATHEIST'S TRAGEDY ' Walking upon the fatal shore, Among the slaughter'd bodies of their men, 341 The one fact about THOMAS HEYWOOD which is universally known is that Charles Lamb called him "a sort of prose Shakespeare." This genial expression, divorced from its context, has been a stumbling-block to many readers who have turned to A Challenge for Beauty or to The Fair Maid of the Exchange, and have been disappointed to meet there with some beauty, indeed, but with slovenly qualities the reverse of Shakespearean. But Lamb's too-telling phrase should not be quoted alone; it is true that he was carried away by the enthusiasm of the discoverer so far as to say that Heywood's "scenes are to the full as natural and affecting" as Shakespeare's; yet he immediately qualified this excess of praise by adding, "but we miss the Poet, that which in Shakespeare always appears out of and above the surface of the nature. Heywood's characters, his country gentlemen, and so on, are exactly what we see, but of the best kind of what we see, in life." These words excellently indicate the tendency of this dramatist, whose merit lies not in the intensity and splendour of his fancy, or in his power over terror and pain, but in his 9 Glover Soulpt Allegorical plate from the "Hierarchy of the Blessed Thomas humane simplicity. Nowhere in the Jacobean age do we seem to come so close to the ordinary conversation of the day, unrevised and unadorned. What Heywood lacks is distinction; he is content to be an indefatigable hackney writer, incessantly and without ambition engaged in amusing and awakening his contemporaries. The people whom Heywood collects before us in such plays as A Woman Killed with Kindness and The English Traveller are natural and, even in their errors, amiable. He does not deal in heroes and monsters, like so many of his fellow playwrights. In them a violence is notable, an uplifting of the whole soul in arms to resist fate and to perish, if necessary, in the struggle. But Heywood's gentle talent does not strive or cry; he loves to depict submission, reconciliations, facile intrigues which are " very delectable and full of mirth." Besides the domestic plays by which this poet is best known, he wrote a considerable number of classical entertainments, half serious dramas, half burlesques, ingenious and extraordinary, of which The Rape of Lucrece is the type, and a mass of pseudophilosophical verse, garrulous and prosy, the most curious specimen of, which is The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, a sort of analysis of the universe, visible and invisible. It is probable that Thomas Heywood was born about 1575 in Lincolnshire. He was educated at Cambridge, and became a fellow of Peterhouse. During his residence at the University he became deeply interested in the stage, and doubtless contributed to the "tragedies, comedies, histories, pastorals, and shows " which he tells us were acted in his time by "graduates of good place." In 1596 he came to London and wrote a play for the Lord Admiral's Company, to which in 1598 we find him regularly attached as an actor. Of the dramas which he composed at this time, The Four Prentices of London is probably the only one which survives. We have, however, a series of tame chronicle-plays which seem to date from 1600. Heywood's masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness, was produced in 1602 (printed in 1607). In the very interesting preface to The English Traveller, which was not published until 1633, Heywood tells us that this tragicomedy is but "one reserved amongst two hundred and twenty, in which I have had either an entire hand or at the least a main finger." Even at that date, many of these plays had "been negligently lost," and Heywood adds that "it never was any great ambition in me to be in this kind voluminously read." Of his vast body of dramatic writing, therefore, we may be surprised that so many as twenty-four complete plays have come down to us. Of his more ambitious, but less successful, non-dramatic works, Troja Britannica was published in 1609, Gunaikeion, or, Nine Books Concerning Women in 1624, and The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels in 1635. He disappears after 1641. |