SOURCE: “Cyril Tourneur,” in The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, Greenwood Press, 1975, pp. 105-27.

In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1960, Ornstein argues that The Revenger's Tragedy was in fact written by Tourneur; points out the playwright's fascination with the exotic and the erotic; and considers The Atheist's Tragedy a failure because the complexity of the subject matter was beyond Tourneur's artistic capabilities.

Studied individually The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy seem curious monuments to the diversity of Jacobean tastes. Studied together as works attributed in the seventeenth century to a single author, they pose a unique critical problem because they seem to express totally opposite moral viewpoints and artistic talents. The problem vanishes, of course, if we agree with eminent scholars that The Revenger's Tragedy was written by Middleton. But this solution leads in turn to an equally vexing question of interpretation, for...