SOURCE: “Cyril Tourneur,” in The Jacobean Drama, Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1961, pp. 153-69.

In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1936, Ellis-Fermor characterizes Tourneur as a moralist and a man who viewed the world as irredeemably evil, and she views his plays as showing a great deal of craftsmanship in their concern with meter, imagery, philosophical reflection, and theatrical effect.

I

The work of Cyril Tourneur presents one extreme of early Jacobean tragic thought and presents it with a completeness and single-mindedness else only to be found in the deliberate self-absorption of much of the comedy in the evidence of the world about it. Like the middle comedy of Middleton and much of Ben Jonson, Tourneur excludes in his first play specific or implicit reference to that universe of the spirit to which Chapman and Webster in their different ways give positive or negative testimony, and...