It is a certainty indisputable
except by the blatant audacity of immedicable ignorance that the only
poet to whose manner and style the style and manner of Cyril Tourneur
can reasonably be said to bear any considerable resemblance is William
Shakespeare. The more curt and abrupt style of Webster is equally unlike
the general style of either. And if, as his first editor observes, "the
parallel" between Tourneur and Marston, "as far as it goes, is so
obvious that it is not worth drawing," it is no less certain that the
diverence between the genius which created Andrugio and the genius which
created Vindice is at least as wide as the points of resemblance or
affinity between them are vivid and distinct. While Marston's
imaginative and tragic power was at its highest, his style was crude
and quaint, turgid and eccentric; when he had cured and purified
it--perhaps, as Gifford suggests, in consequence of Ben Jonson's
unmerciful but salutary ridicule--he approved himself a far abler
writer of comedy or tragicomedy than before, but his right hand had
forgotten its cunning as the hand of "a tragic penman." Now the
improvement of Tourneur's style, an improvement amounting to little less
than transfiguration, keeps time with his advance as a student of
character and a tragic dramatist as distinguished from a tragic poet.
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