Tourneur, CYRIL, a dramatist, who flourished at the close of the reign of Elizabeth and the beginning of that of James I., but of whose history absolutely nothing is known beyond the fact (Acad. May 9, 1891) that he had seen service in the Low Countries, and died in Ireland, leaving his widow destitute, February 28, 1626. In 1600 he published his Transformed Metamorphosis (discovered in 1872), a satirical poem, obscure in expression, and marred, moreover, by pedantic affectations of style; in 1609 he issued a Funeral Poem on Sir Francis Vere, in 1613 an Elegy on Prince Henry. But his fame rests alone on two plays, the Revenger's Tragedy, licensed and printed in 1607, and the Atheist's Tragedy, printed in 1611, but undoubtedly written the earlier of the two. The plot of the latter is poor, though the versification is free and flowing; but when we turn to the Revenger's Tragedy we are at once arrested by its tragic intensity, the condensed power of passion, the fiery strength of phrase, the cynical and bitter mockery. The plot is an entangled web of lust and blood in which the dramatist moves with a mastery of the elements of tragic passion that brings him abreast of Webster, the closest of the followers of Shakespeare in one—but that not the greatest—of his moods. Tourneur's power has not escaped the unerring insight of Lamb and Hazlitt. Mr Fleay (Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1559-1642) thinks the Revenger's Tragedy the work of the author of the White Devil.
The only complete edition is that of J. Churton Collins (2 vols. 1878), with a good critical introduction; the two plays are printed, together with Webster's White Devil and Duchess of Malfi, in the 'Mermaid' series, with an introduction by J. A. Symonds (1888).