¹ All citations from The Revenger's Tragedy are from R. A. Foakes, ed., Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1966). I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the fellowship awarded me in 1973–74; this essay represents part of the work accomplished during that year. I also wish to thank my colleague Edward B. Partridge for his generous assistance.

² The identification of this Christian humanist remains, of course, vexingly inconclusive. See Samuel Schoenbaum, Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 200–17. I think that no significant evidence has been added to the case for either Cyril Tourneur or Thomas Middleton since Schoenbaum's skeptical review of the contending scholarship. We are left with Schoenbaum's revised entry in Harbage's Annals oj English Drama: Anonymous (Tourneur, C.? Middleton, T.?). For convenience I refer to the author as Tourneur throughout this essay.

³ See John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon. 1956), pp. 255–73: Alvin Kernan. The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 221–32; and L. G. Salingar, “The Revenger's Tragedy and the Morality Tradition,” Scrutiny, 6 (1937-38), 402–24. For Marston's previous and influential modification of the Kydian revenge play, see G. K. Hunter, “English Folly and Italian Vice,” in Jacobean Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London : Arnold, 1960), pp. 85–111. Most critics have at least to some extent viewed The Revenger's Tragedy within the tradition of its form. The standard work in this regard is still that of Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1940); see also L. G. Salingar, “Tourneur and the Tragedy of Revenge,” in The Age of Shakespeare, ed. Boris Ford (Baltimore: Penguin, 1955), pp. 334–54.

⁴ The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1959).

⁵ Antonio's Revenge, ed. G. K. Hunter, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965).

⁶ See Alan Sommers, “ ‘Wilderness of Tigers’: Structure and Symbolism in Titus Andronicus,” Essays in Criticism, 10 (1960). 275–89.

⁷ The Institutio Oratorio of Quintilian, trans. H. E. Butler (London: Heinemann, 1922), iv, 289.

⁸ Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1560). ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), p. 218. First published in 1553, this work was significantly revised in 1560 and frequently reprinted during the period.

⁹ Sophonisba (1606), from The Plays of John Marston, ed. H. Harvey Wood (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1938), ii, 22. Marston is echoing Cicero's De Officiis i.xvi.

¹⁰ See Hanna H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” in Renaissance Essays, ed. Paul O. Kristeller and Philip P. Wiener (New York: Harper, 1968), pp. 199–216.

¹¹ Cited from William Shakespeare : The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (New York: Random, 1952).

¹² See Eugene M. Waith, “The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey, 10 (1957), 39–49.

¹³ Aristotle, The Politics, trans. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1932), p. 11.

¹⁴ See Salingar, “Tourneur and the Tragedy of Revenge,” p. 343 : “From one aspect, the play is a nightmare of the Calvinist sense of sin.” And see George C. Herndl, The High Design: English Renaissance Tragedy and the Natural Law (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1970), pp. 218–23, et passim.

¹⁵ For these images see Salingar's “The Revenger's Tragedy and the Morality Tradition,” influenced by the work of L. C. Knights in Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937). Brian Gibbons, in his Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton (London: Hart-Davis, 1968), qualifies Knights's argument that this period saw, historically, an abrupt transition from a feudal, agrarian world to a capitalistic urban society : “I would emphasise rather that the playwrights contrasted the idealised Tudor philosophy of the state, which owed much to Christian doctrine, with a stylised. Complaint-derived account of the lamentable evils of ‘nowadays’ ” (p. 29).

¹⁶ “Of Education,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), ii, 366–67.

¹⁷ The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), ed. Francis R. Johnson (New York: Scholars' Facsimile & Reprints, 1945), fol. iv.

¹⁸ Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc, ed. Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970).

¹⁹ De Inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell (London: Heinemann, 1949), p. 3. This debate, ending on a positive note, runs to i.iv.

²⁰ De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1942), i, 59 (i.xviii); ii, 43–45 (iii.xiv).

²¹ For the anti-Ciceronian movement as it affected the style and dramatic world of Tourneur's great contemporary, see Jonas A. Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960); for the philosophical skepticism of the age, see Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Scribners, 1950), esp. Ch. ii, “The Counter-Renaissance and the Vanity of Learning.”

²² J. W. Lever, The Tragedy of State (London: Methuen, 1971).

²³ Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique, sig. A 7.

²⁴ Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, trans. James Sandford (London, 1569), fols. 17^v, 18^v, 19^v.

²⁵ “Of the Vanitie of Words,” in The Essays of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, The Tudor Translations (London: David Nutt, 1892), i, 352.

²⁶ Throughout this essay I cite The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969). See Inferno xxvi-xxvii; interestingly, at the beginning of Canto xxvii, Dante alludes to Phalaris' brazen bull in conjunction with the fiery tongues and the retribution exacted of evil counselors.

²⁷ An Exposition upon the Canonicall Epistle of St. James (London, 1606), fol. 161. Previous editions were published in 1591 and 1592. In addition to this contemporary exposition, my discussion of the biblical use of the tongue reflects the following: Thomas Manton, A Practical Commentary, or an Exposition with Notes upon the Epistle of James, 3rd ed. (London, 1657); Joseph B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James (London: Macmillan, 1913); H. Wheeler Robinson, “Tongue,” Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: Clark, 1921).

²⁸ See Salingar, “The Revenger's Tragedy and the Morality Tradition,” p. 410: “At first, Vindice is the honest malcontent… . The second disguise is a caricature of his original position.”

²⁹ John Rainolds, Th' Overthrow of Stage-Playes ([Middleburg], 1599), p. 19. See my “Volpone as Antinous: Jonson and Th' Overthrow of Stage-Playes,” Modern Language Review, 70 (1975), 13–19.

³⁰ Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique, p. 3; see also p. 218. Cf. De Oratore iii.lvii.

³¹ The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1964).

³² For this common pun see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1948), p. 200.

³³ Of Wisdome, trans. Samson Lennard (London, 1608?), p. 45. The work was published in French in 1601.

³⁴ Shakespeare's Bawdy, p. 106.

³⁵ Schoenbaum relates the play to the macabre tradition in “The Revenger's Tragedy: Jacobean Dance of Death,” Modern Language Quarterly, 15 (1954), 201–07.

³⁶ “Of Revenge,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al. (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1864), Xii, 92.

³⁷ For the tone of court life under James, see G. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), esp. Chs. xiv and xviii. Akrigg reprints a popular ballad of the time, contrasting “an old Courtier of the Queen's” with “a new Courtier of the King's” (pp. 174–76). See also D. Harris Willson, King James vi and i (London : Cape, 1956), esp. Ch. xi. Sir John Harington, Elizabeth's godson, has left a famous account of a masque given at Theobalds in the summer of 1606 for James's brother-in-law, Christian iv of Denmark : “Now did appear Hope, Faith and Charity. Hope did assay to speak but wine rendered her endeavours so feeble that she withdrew and hoped the King would excuse her brevity. Faith was then all alone for I am certain she was not joined with good works, but left the court in a staggering condition. Charity came to the King's feet and seemed to cover the multitude of sins her sisters had committed. In some sort she made obeisance and brought gifts, but said she would return home again as there was no gift which heaven had not already given his Majesty. She then returned to Hope and Faith who were both sick and spewing in the lower hall” (quoted in Willson, pp. 193–94). The perverted masques of many Jacobean tragedies were evidently not entirely without reference to reality.

³⁸ Joel Hurstfield has recently given a sensitive diagnosis, without overemphasizing James's presumed homosexuality. of “the known fact, repeatedly manifest, that James lacked judgment in his selection of advisers”—in striking contrast with Elizabeth (Times Literary Supplement, 23 May 1975, p. 567; 18 April 1975, pp. 420–21). Somerset and Buckingham had not, of course, yet appeared on the scene when Tourneur wrote his play ; but the Scottish knights and the debasement of chivalry and the peerage were immediately scandalous. Again and again England was confronted with the perversion of courtly ideals. For example, “His disorder in creating knights was notorious,” writes Willson, “and became the subject of many jests. On one occasion, in knighting a Scot, he did not catch the long Celtic name and exclaimed, ‘Prithee, rise up, and call thyself Sir What Thou Wilt’ ” (p. 195).