TOURNEUR, CYRIL (c. 1575-1626), English dramatist, was perhaps the son of Captain Richard Turnor, water-bailiff and subsequently lieutenant-governor of Brill in the Netherlands. Cyril Tourneur also served in the Low Countries, for in 1613 there is a record made of payment to him for carrying letters to Brussels. He enjoyed a pension from the government of the United Provinces, possibly by way of compensation for a post held before Brill was handed over to the Dutch in 1616. In 1625 he was appointed by Sir Edward Cecil, whose father had been a former governor of Brill, to be secretary to the council of war. This appointment was cancelled by Buckingham, but Tourneur sailed in Cecil's company to Cadiz. On the return voyage from the disastrous expedition he was put ashore at Kinsale with other sick men, and died in Ireland on Feb. 28, 1626.
Tourneur's fame rests on two plays, The Revenger's Tragedy (pr. 1607) and The Atheist's Tragedy (pr. 1611). Of these Swinburne, in an article contributed to the 9th ed. of the Ency clopcedia Britannica, wrote as follows: "The singular power, the singular originality and the singular limitation of his genius are all equally obvious in The Atheist's Tragedy, a dramatic poem no less crude and puerile and violent in action and evolution than simple and noble and natural in ex pression and in style. The executive faculty of the author is in the metrical parts of his first play so imperfect as to suggest either incompetence or perversity in the workman; in The Revenger's Tragedy it is so magnificent, so simple, impeccable and sublime that the finest passages of this play can be compared only with the noblest examples of tragic dialogue or monologue now extant in English or in Greek. There is no trace of imitation or deriva• tion from an alien source in the genius of this poet. . . . As a playwright, his method was almost crude and rude in the headlong straightforwardness of its energetic simplicity; as an artist in character, his interest was intense but narrow, his power magnifi cent but confined; as a dramatic poet, the force of his genius is great enough to ensure him an enduring place among the fore most of the followers of Shakespeare."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The complete list of his extant works runs: The Atheists Tragedie; or, The Honest Man's Revenge (Ail) ; A Funerall Poeme Upon the Death of the Most Worthie and True Soldier, Sir Francis Vere, Knight . . . (1609) ; "A Griefe on the Death of Prince Henrie, Expressed in a Broken Elegie . . .," printed with two other poems by John Webster and Thomas Heywood as Three Elegies on the most lamented Death of Prince Henry (1613) ; The Revengers Tragaedie (1607 and 1608) ; and an obscure satire, The Transformed Metamorphosis (16o0).
The Revenger's Tragedy was printed in Dodsley's Old Plays (vol. iv., 1744, 178o and 1825), and in Ancient British Drama (181o, vol. ii.). The best edition of Tourneur's works is The Plays and Poems of Cyril Tourneur, edited with Critical Introduction and Notes, by J. Churton Collins (1878). See also the two plays printed with the masterpieces of Webster, with an introduction by J. A. Symonds, in the "Mermaid Series" (1888 and 1903). No particulars of Tourneur's life were available until the facts given above were abstracted by Mr. Gordon Goodwin from the Calendar of State Papers ("Domestic Series," 1628-1629, 1629-1631, 1631-1633) and printed in the Academy (May 9, 1891). A critical study of the relation of The Atheist's Tragedy to Hamlet and other revenge-plays is given in Professor A. H. Thorndike's "Hamlet and Contemporary Revenge Plays" (Publ. of the Mod. Lang. Assoc., Baltimore, 1902) For the influence of Marston on Tourneur see E. E. Stoll, John Webster . . . (1905, Boston, Massa chusetts), pp. 105-116.