Word: tourneur
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Eliot called him "the singular poet with the delightful name." Cyril Tourneur's name is one of the few things known about the Elizabethan dramatist. In an era of prolific playwriting, he produced only two plays that have survived, The Atheist's Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy, and even the dates of his birth and death are blanks. He attained no great popularity among his contemporaries. The sole allusion to Tourneur in an old chronicle sums him up this...
Since the play originally appeared around 1607, Tourneur had had plenty of time to be influenced by Shakespeare. The Revenger's Tragedy shows that genius is not catching. In the way that one speaks of situation comedies, Tourneur's play is a situation tragedy, with its repetitive horrors and villainies lurching unpredictably into farce. Its demonic hero, Vendice (Kenneth Haigh), is bent on revenge without a hindering trace of Hamlet's "pale cast of thought" or the Dane's meditative scruples. Vendice comes onstage fondling the skull of his poisoned mistress. He plays pander...
This is merely the cream of the evening's deadly jests. The play moves like a venomous centipede through rape, incest, fratricide, adultery and bloody multiple murder. Early on, Tourneur has Vendice say, "To be honest is not to be i' the world." It establishes the odor of a play that contains the stench of sin and a lung-blackening smog of corruption. Robert Brustein, who directs an able cast with a firm, brisk hand, doubtless sees The Revenger's Tragedy as a cautionary parable for a later age steeped in blood and death and degraded values...