SOURCE: “The Atheist's Tragedy,” in The Idea of Conscience in Renaissance Tragedy, Routledge, 1990, pp. 170-93.

In the following excerpt, Wilks argues that The Atheist's Tragedy is one of several Jacobean dramas that reveals a changing view of the notion of conscience, and that Tourneur's play explores the atheistic and Christian accounts of humans' moral nature and metaphysical destiny in order to refute the heresy of naturalist thinkers.

Superficially, at least, The Atheist's Tragedy invites comparison with Doctor Faustus as a moral treatise directed, once again, at the presumption of those ‘forward wits’ who would exalt a puny rationalism over the mysteries of grace and faith, and whose addiction to a blasphemous and imponderable ‘deepness’ epitomized for the Renaissance a dangerous tendency to unsatiable speculation in nature and the world. Like Marlowe's, Tourneur's play is a tragedy of knowledge, a similarly graphic depiction, as Ornstein puts it, of yet...