The Age of Shakespeare Part 8

In the next line, "whom" for "who" is probably the poet's own license or oversight.]

What follows is no whit less n.o.ble: but as much may be said of the whole part--and indeed of the whole play. Violent and extravagant as the mere action or circ.u.mstance may be or may appear, there is a trenchant straightforwardness of appeal in the simple and spontaneous magnificence of the language, a depth of insuppressible sincerity in the fervent and and restless vibration of the thought, by which the hand and the brain and the heart of the workman are equally recognizable. But the crowning example of Cyril Tourneur's unique and incomparable genius is of course to be found in the scene which would a.s.suredly be remembered, though every other line of the poet's writing were forgotten, by the influence of its pa.s.sionate inspiration on the more tender but not less n.o.ble sympathies of Charles Lamb. Even the splendid exuberance of eulogy which attributes to the verse of Tourneur a more fiery quality, a more thrilling and piercing note of sublime and agonizing indignation, than that which animates and inflames the address of Hamlet to a mother less impudent in infamy than Vindice's cannot be considered excessive by any capable reader who will candidly and carefully compare the two scenes which suggested this comparison. To attempt the praise or the description of anything that has been praised or described by Lamb would usually be the veriest fatuity of presumption; and yet it is impossible to write of a poet whose greatness was first revealed to his countrymen by the greatest gritic of dramatic poetry who ever lived and wrote, and not to echo his words of righteous judgement and inspired applause with more or less feebleness of reiteration. The startling and magical power of single verses, ineffaceable and ineradicable from the memory on which they have once impressed themselves, the consciousness in which they have once struck root, which distinguishes and denotes the peculiar style of Cyril Tourneur's tragic poetry, rises to its highest tidemark in this part of the play. Every other line, one might almost say, is an instance of it; and yet not a single lineis undramatic, or deficient in the strictest and plainest dramatic propriety. It may be objected that men and women possessed by the excitement of emotions so desparate and so dreadful do not express them with such pa.s.sionate precision of utterance: but, to borrow the saying of a later and bearer of the name which Cyril sometimes spelled as Turner, "don't they wish they could?"

or rather, ought they not to wish it? What is said by the speakers is exactly what they might be expected to think, to feel, and to express with less incisive power and less impressive accuracy of ardent epigram or of strenuous appeal.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is, to say the least, singular to find in the most famous scene of a play, so often reprinted and re-edited a word which certainly requires explanation pa.s.sed over without remark from any one of the successive editors. When Gratiana, threatened by the daggers of her sons, exclaims:

Are you so barbarous to set iron nipples Upon the breast that gave you suck?

Vindice retorts, in reply to her appeal:

That breast Is turned to quarled poison.

This last epithet is surely unusual enough to call for some attempt at interpretation. But none whatever has. .h.i.therto been offered. In the seventh line following from this one there is another textual difficulty. The edition now before me, Eld's of 1608, reads literally thus:

_Vind._ Ah ist possible, _Thou onely_, you powers on hie, That women should dissemble when they die.

Lamb was content to read,

Ah, is it possible, you powers on high,

and so forth. Perhaps the two obviously corrupt words in italics may contain a clew to the right reading, and this may be it:

Ah!

Is't possible, you heavenly powers on high, That women should dissemble when they die?

Or may not this be yet another instance of the Jew-Puritan abhorrence of the word G.o.d as an obscene or blasphemous term when uttered outside the synagogue or the conventicle? If so, we might read--and believe that the poet wrote--

Is't possible, thou only G.o.d on high,

and a.s.sume that the licenser struck out the indecent monosyllable and left the mutilated text for actors and printers to patch or pad at their discretion.]

There are among poets, as there are among prose writers, some whose peculiar power finds vent only in a broad and rus.h.i.+ng stream of speech or song, triumphant by the general force and fulness of its volume, in which we no more think of looking for single lines or phrases that may be detached from the context and quoted for their separate effect than of selecting for peculiar admiration some special wave or individual ripple from the mult.i.tudinous magnificence of the torrent or the tide.

There are others whose power is shown mainly in single strokes or flashes as of lightning or of swords. There are few indeed outside the pale of the very greatest who can display at will their natural genius in the keenest concentration or the fullest effusion of its powers. But among these fewer than few stands the author of "The Revenger's Tragedy." The great scene of the temptation and the triumph of Castiza would alone be enough to give evidence, not adequate merely but ample, that such praise as this is no hyperbole of sympathetic enthusiasm, but simply the accurate expression of an indisputable fact. No lyrist, no satirist, could have excelled in fiery flow of rhetoric the copious and impetuous eloquence of the lines, at once luxurious and sardonic, cynical and seductive, in which Vindice pours forth the arguments and rolls out the promises of a professional pleader on behalf of aspiring self-interest and sensual self-indulgence: no dramatist that ever lived could have put more vital emotion into fewer words, more pa.s.sionate reality into more perfect utterance, than Tourneur in the dialogue that follows them:

_Mother_. Troth, he says true.

_Castiza_. False: I defy you both: I have endured you with an ear of fire: Your tongues have struck hot irons on my face.

Mother, come from that poisonous woman there.

_Mother_. Where?

_Castiza_. Do you not see her? she's too inward then.

I could not count the lines which on reperusal of this great tragic poem I find apt for ill.u.s.trative quotation, or suggestive of a tributary comment: but enough has already been cited to prove beyond all chance of cavil from any student worthy of the name that the place of Cyril Tourneur is not among minor poets, nor his genius of such a temper as naturally to attract the sympathy or arouse the enthusiasm of their admirers; that among the comrades or the disciples who to us may appear but as retainers or satellites of Shakespeare his rank is high and his credentials to that rank are clear. That an edition more carefully revised and annotated, with a text reduced to something more of coherence and intelligible arrangement, than has yet been vouchsafed to us, would suffice to place his name among theirs of whose eminence the very humblest of their educated countrymen are ashamed to seem ignorant, it would probably be presumptuous to a.s.sert. But if the n.o.blest ardor of moral emotion, the most fervent pa.s.sion of eager and indignant sympathy with all that is best and abhorrence of all that is worst in women or in men--if the most absolute and imperial command of all resources and conquest of all difficulties inherent in the most effective and the most various instrument ever yet devised for the poetry of the tragic drama--if the keenest insight and the sublimest impulse that can guide the perception and animate the expression of a poet whose line of work is naturally confined to the limits of moral or ethical tragedy--if all these qualities may be admitted to confer a right to remembrance and a claim to regard, there can be no fear and no danger of forgetfulness for the name of Cyril Tourneur.

THE END