Blood for the Bony Lady

By T.E.K.

T.S. Eliot called him "the singular poet with the delightful name." Cyril Tourneur's name is one of the few things known about the Elizabethan dramatist. In an era of prolific playwriting, he produced only two plays that have survived, The Atheist's Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy, and even the dates of his birth and death are blanks. He attained no great popularity among his contemporaries. The sole allusion to Tourneur in an old chronicle sums him up this way:

His fame unto that pitch so only

raised

As not to be despised nor too much

praised.

'This is an apt criticism of his play The Revenger's Tragedy, which has been revived by the Yale Repertory Theatre. It qualifies as a zestful enterprise in theatrical archaeology but a somewhat more obscure service to drama.

Since the play originally appeared around 1607, Tourneur had had plenty of time to be influenced by Shakespeare. The Revenger's Tragedy shows that genius is not catching. In the way that one speaks of situation comedies, Tourneur's play is a situation tragedy, with its repetitive horrors and villainies lurching unpredictably into farce. Its demonic hero, Vendice (Kenneth Haigh), is bent on revenge without a hindering trace of Hamlet's "pale cast of thought" or the Dane's meditative scruples. Vendice comes onstage fondling the skull of his poisoned mistress. He plays pander in the court of the duke who killed her. Assembling the skeleton of his beloved (he calls her "the bony lady"), Vendice gowns and perfumes her, rouges the skull's lips with poison and tricks the duke into kissing her.

This is merely the cream of the evening's deadly jests. The play moves like a venomous centipede through rape, incest, fratricide, adultery and bloody multiple murder. Early on, Tourneur has Vendice say, "To be honest is not to be i' the world." It establishes the odor of a play that contains the stench of sin and a lung-blackening smog of corruption. Robert Brustein, who directs an able cast with a firm, brisk hand, doubtless sees The Revenger's Tragedy as a cautionary parable for a later age steeped in blood and death and degraded values. The trouble is that rubbing one's nose in a mess is not the best method of cleaning it up. Tourneur tends to prod rather than persuade, and he is too cynical for compassion, too much the devil's advocate to indict devilishness in others.

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