Cyril Tourneur Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kenneth N. Cameron

Critical Essay by Kenneth N. Cameron

SOURCE: “Cyril Tourneur and The Transformed Metamorphosis,” in The Review of English Studies, Vol. 16, No. 61, January, 1940, pp. 18-24.

In the following essay, Cameron claims that earlier critics' dismissals of Tourneur's early poem The Transformed Metamorphosis are too harsh, and that the poem about the exploits of a gallant English knight reveals considerable learning and poetic feeling.

Cyril Tourneur's first attempt to achieve literary fame—The Transformed Metamorphosis (1600)—has long been the subject of abuse. It has been described and dismissed as “an involved allegory,” “written in uncouth jargon,”¹ and as “absurd verbiage,” “composed on the principle that to be intelligible is to be found out.”² But while every reader of the poem will agree that it is both obscure and affected, these judgments are too harsh. The Transformed Metamorphosis is clearly the work of a very young man, and a young man of wide, though desultory, reading, who...
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