And the
intensity of sympathy with which this crowning creation of the poet's
severe and fiery genius is steadily developed and displayed should make
any critic of reasonable modesty think more than twice or thrice before
he assumes or admits the likelihood or the possibility of so gross an
error or so grave a defect in the conception of so great an artist. For
if the claim to such a title might be disputed in the case of a claimant
who could show no better credentials than his authorship of "The
Atheist's Tragedy"--and even in that far from faultless work of genius
there are manifest and manifold signs, not merely of excellence, but of
greatness--the claim of the man who could write "The Revenger's Tragedy"
is questionable by no one who has any glimmering of insight or
perception as to what qualities they are which confer upon a writer the
indisputable title to a seat in the upper house of poets.
This master work of Cyril Tourneur, the most perfect and most terrible
incarnation of the idea of retribution impersonate and concentrated
revenge that ever haunted the dreams of a tragic poet or the vigils of a
future tyrannicide, is resumed and embodied in a figure as original and
as impossible to forget, for any one who has ever felt the savage
fascination of its presence, as any of the humaner figures evoked and
immortalized by Shakespeare.
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