What do you think?
Rate this book
The Atheist's Tragedy
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.Western literary study flows out of eighteenth-century works by Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Denis Diderot, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. Experience the birth of the modern novel, or compare the development of language using dictionaries and grammar discourses.++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition ++++Source British Library T057697 Pp.33-40 occupying E5-8 in the 1792 issue, which is otherwise gathered in 4's seem to have been omitted in this issue. On p. 32 the second "t" of "atheists" in the headline is above the first "m" of "committed" in the first line of text and there is a qu London : printed 1611, re-printed 1794, by T. Wilkins, [1794]. 32,41-72p. ; 8°
103 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1976
108 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
Read
October 13, 2024It's one thing knowing in theory that Hamlet by William Shakespeare isn't incredibly original and rather is very aligned with the early modern trends of revenge tragedy, and it's another thing to read one of those revenge tragedies and say "wow this is just like Hamlet but if it was less gay, kinder to its female characters, EXTREMELY horny, and if Claudius was an atheist used by the narrative to push anti-atheist agendas."
February 2, 2016
*Review to be posted*
November 15, 2012
This is nothing like as good as The Revenger's Tragedy and a question which occupies me here is to what extent the humour is intentional. "I think in raising the axe above his head he has struck his own brains out." The atheist is called D'Amville (get it?) who worships Nature rather like Edmund in King Lear. Nature is the world of human phenomena plus human reason. His own intelligence enables him to manipulate his brother (again a parallel with King Lear). There is a constant connection between speech and action achieved more intensely in The Revenger's Tragedy, which many also consider to be by Tourneur. This is supposedly a prpaganda play in which Charlemont's belief in a supreme being is opposed to the "naturalism" of the atheist but it can almost be understood as a persiflage of Christian dogma and warning. The demonstration of God's intervention whereby the atheist knocks his own brains out by accident flies in the face of everyone's lived experience. It is slapstick and surely undermines faith more than it supports it, or am I just seeing that as a modern does and would Elizabethans been suitably awed and impressed?
Nature is a fool. There is a power
Above her that hath overthrown the pride
Of all my projects and posterity
Well I am not convinced. How differenmt is the revelation of the power which conquers the atheist/blasphemer in Marlowe's Tamburlaine: Death.
The play is unusual among Renaissance plays Jacobean or Elizabethan in that, dogmatic or propaganda as it may be, it nevertheless presents Christian faith against atheism in terms of argument, even rational argument, and I can think of no other play of the period which does that. In that sense the play is unique.
Nature is a fool. There is a power
Above her that hath overthrown the pride
Of all my projects and posterity
Well I am not convinced. How differenmt is the revelation of the power which conquers the atheist/blasphemer in Marlowe's Tamburlaine: Death.
The play is unusual among Renaissance plays Jacobean or Elizabethan in that, dogmatic or propaganda as it may be, it nevertheless presents Christian faith against atheism in terms of argument, even rational argument, and I can think of no other play of the period which does that. In that sense the play is unique.
May 31, 2025
Iconic for many reasons. Including, but not limited to:
Is it the best play ever written? Absolutely not. Is it an absolute blast? Hell yeahhhhhh.
I really must see this performed!!
'For want is like the rack; it draws a man to endanger himself to the gallows rather than endure it.' (3.2.16-17)
rating as of 21/02/2025: 4 stars
1. D'Amville and Borachio were gayer than Disney villains (the dramatis personae literally describes Borachio as 'D'Amville's instrument', lmao).
2. Everyone is so horny. This is the most explicitly sexual early-modern drama I've ever read. The innuendos are so creative.
3. The disguises. Hilarious.
4. D'Amville literally kills himself by accident by knocking his brains out whilst lifting an axe to chop off his nephew's head. And it's an act of god. Can we just take a second to appreciate the level of unhinged cuntery going on here. It's so brilliant.
Is it the best play ever written? Absolutely not. Is it an absolute blast? Hell yeahhhhhh.
I really must see this performed!!
'For want is like the rack; it draws a man to endanger himself to the gallows rather than endure it.' (3.2.16-17)
rating as of 21/02/2025: 4 stars
March 30, 2025
This is the most erotic Jacobean play I think I've ever read. Its language is sex. Tourneur wants to make a moral-intellectual argument against atheistic naturalism. (By the way he basically fails to do this, because he implicitly accepts the distinction between Nature and Divine Providence). But the vehicle for this lesson is a medieval morality play about lust. So everything Tourneur wants to say is said through sex: the titular atheist (think: morality-play Vice) begins by orchestrating a forced marriage (explicitly called a rape), does a couple murders, and peaks in an attempted (incestuous) rape. His first son (and this is a play where the sins/virtues of the father are those of the son) suffers from impotence, and so his unwilling bride's maidenhead is providentially preserved. His second son is obsessed with sex, which gets him killed, and this son's paramour is a (married) nymphomaniac more viscerally sensual than even The Insatiate Countess's insatiate countess. Their affair is effected materially by a bawd, and causally by a Puritan, who -- you guessed it -- is secretly a lecher, and in the end attempts to sleep with one of the bawd's servants in a graveyard. I really want to stress the fact that a huge amount of this play relies on the reader's awareness of the sexual (not gender-political, but actually erotic) elements of the scene, and that a good many scenes -- not all of them in the subplot -- are... affective.
The "protagonists" are completely passive figures, which is bizarre because this play is structured like a revenge tragedy and we have a revenger being told by the ghost not to take revenge!. They are chaste as snow -- except that they're madly in love with each other and with their Duty. But essentially they're Christian Stoics, or natural theologians. One cannot imagine the Trinity figuring in any way in this play. In the end they triumph through an absurd contrivance by Tourneur; a completely ridiculous ending but I guess in one way or another given the character dynamics the Atheist has to defeat himself.
I think Revels chose the wrong man to edit their edition. The text is solid and the glosses are there when you need them, but it happens that the quartos are unusually good, so the job of an editor is relatively easy, textually. Ribner's introduction is bad. The essay is structured like a defense of the play against the traditional critical consensus which condemns The Atheist's Tragedy, which means that Ribner is forced to take on a kind of moralizing critical approach which is totally obsolete and dead. Maybe worse is that the play is totally indefensible within this framework, so the whole enterprise is kind of sad and Ribner keeps having to make these sad concessions like "[the play, which] otherwise might appear as a play about mechanical, lifeless characters involved in absurd situations comes to have some artistic merit in terms of its own dramatic medium." His analysis of the influence of Shakespeare on Tourneur is unconvincing; of Chapman, even less convincing. This seems to have induced him to clutter up the footnotes with Chapman and Shakespeare quotes to try to make his case, which I enjoyed while reading but now seem kind of sad. Last but not least the whole thing is obsoleted by the fact that Ribner thinks Tourneur wrote The Revenger's Tragedy, a fact on which almost his entire analysis of the play and its poetry rests. (Middleton wrote it).
The only good book I ever bought in Warwick. Fun and interesting, and there's more to be said about the play proper (gothic elements, etc.,) 3.75*
The "protagonists" are completely passive figures, which is bizarre because this play is structured like a revenge tragedy and we have a revenger being told by the ghost not to take revenge!. They are chaste as snow -- except that they're madly in love with each other and with their Duty. But essentially they're Christian Stoics, or natural theologians. One cannot imagine the Trinity figuring in any way in this play. In the end they triumph through an absurd contrivance by Tourneur; a completely ridiculous ending but I guess in one way or another given the character dynamics the Atheist has to defeat himself.
I think Revels chose the wrong man to edit their edition. The text is solid and the glosses are there when you need them, but it happens that the quartos are unusually good, so the job of an editor is relatively easy, textually. Ribner's introduction is bad. The essay is structured like a defense of the play against the traditional critical consensus which condemns The Atheist's Tragedy, which means that Ribner is forced to take on a kind of moralizing critical approach which is totally obsolete and dead. Maybe worse is that the play is totally indefensible within this framework, so the whole enterprise is kind of sad and Ribner keeps having to make these sad concessions like "[the play, which] otherwise might appear as a play about mechanical, lifeless characters involved in absurd situations comes to have some artistic merit in terms of its own dramatic medium." His analysis of the influence of Shakespeare on Tourneur is unconvincing; of Chapman, even less convincing. This seems to have induced him to clutter up the footnotes with Chapman and Shakespeare quotes to try to make his case, which I enjoyed while reading but now seem kind of sad. Last but not least the whole thing is obsoleted by the fact that Ribner thinks Tourneur wrote The Revenger's Tragedy, a fact on which almost his entire analysis of the play and its poetry rests. (Middleton wrote it).
The only good book I ever bought in Warwick. Fun and interesting, and there's more to be said about the play proper (gothic elements, etc.,) 3.75*
November 26, 2024
A production this week by Streetlight Shakespeare, the 3rd-year MFA company of Mary Baldwin's Shakespeare and Performance program, led me to this amazing play. I had a copy on my shelves but had never read it, much less seen it - since it seems never to have been performed in the US and only twice each in the 20th and 21st centuries in the UK. In March 2025, audiences at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Boston will get to see this same production, and soon many of them will be turning to the text as I did.
"Here's a sweet comedy. 'T begins with O dolentis and concludes with ha, ha, he!"
Brilliant student director Austen Bell and her chameleon cast of four actors brought this Jacobean tragedy vividly to life as the blackest of comedies. Seeing it reminded me of the farcical version of Marston's two Antonio plays that I saw in Nottingham in 1979 with Alan Rickman in the lead. After their over-the-top performances, I cannot see the text any other way.
As the director points out, this is a revenge tragedy with no revenge (though with deaths aplenty), a play built on sexual seduction without any successfully consummated sex. Echoes of Shakespeare abound, chiefly to Hamlet but also Macbeth, Othello, Richard II, Merchant of Venice. The titular atheist, like Richard III, removes every relative between him and the twin rewards of position and wealth: "Let all men lose, so I increase my gain,/ I have no feeling of another's gain." His first victim becomes almost a male version of Patient Griselda - losing his inheritance, his wife, his freedom, and very nearly his life. But at the last it is the villainous atheist D'Amville who loses his sons, his murdering minion, his sacrilegious faithlessness, and his life, leaving the honorable Charlemont redeemed, restored, and rewarded for having done nothing.
In effect, the play is Tourneur's rewriting of the most famous revenge tragedy ever. Where the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to demand that his son "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther," the ghost of Charlemont's father commands that his son, like Hamlet "by murder disinherited, . . . leave revenge unto the King of Kings." The Danish ghost returns to "whet [Hamlet's] almost blunted purpose;" the French ghost reappears to halt his son's attack on the murderous D'Amville and his son. While Hamlet berates himself for being a coward and doing nothing, Charlemont bemoans the fact that in self-defense he kills D'Amville's hired assassin. Hamlet's actions lead to the deaths of Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia, Rosencranz, Guildenstern and Claudius, as well as his own; Charlemont's patience is rewarded with the lives of himself and his beloved, as well as the deaths of his enemy D'Amville and both his sons.
"Here's a sweet comedy. 'T begins with O dolentis and concludes with ha, ha, he!"
Brilliant student director Austen Bell and her chameleon cast of four actors brought this Jacobean tragedy vividly to life as the blackest of comedies. Seeing it reminded me of the farcical version of Marston's two Antonio plays that I saw in Nottingham in 1979 with Alan Rickman in the lead. After their over-the-top performances, I cannot see the text any other way.
As the director points out, this is a revenge tragedy with no revenge (though with deaths aplenty), a play built on sexual seduction without any successfully consummated sex. Echoes of Shakespeare abound, chiefly to Hamlet but also Macbeth, Othello, Richard II, Merchant of Venice. The titular atheist, like Richard III, removes every relative between him and the twin rewards of position and wealth: "Let all men lose, so I increase my gain,/ I have no feeling of another's gain." His first victim becomes almost a male version of Patient Griselda - losing his inheritance, his wife, his freedom, and very nearly his life. But at the last it is the villainous atheist D'Amville who loses his sons, his murdering minion, his sacrilegious faithlessness, and his life, leaving the honorable Charlemont redeemed, restored, and rewarded for having done nothing.
In effect, the play is Tourneur's rewriting of the most famous revenge tragedy ever. Where the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to demand that his son "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther," the ghost of Charlemont's father commands that his son, like Hamlet "by murder disinherited, . . . leave revenge unto the King of Kings." The Danish ghost returns to "whet [Hamlet's] almost blunted purpose;" the French ghost reappears to halt his son's attack on the murderous D'Amville and his son. While Hamlet berates himself for being a coward and doing nothing, Charlemont bemoans the fact that in self-defense he kills D'Amville's hired assassin. Hamlet's actions lead to the deaths of Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia, Rosencranz, Guildenstern and Claudius, as well as his own; Charlemont's patience is rewarded with the lives of himself and his beloved, as well as the deaths of his enemy D'Amville and both his sons.
December 28, 2019
Definitely not the most enthralling revenge tragedy I have encountered on my degree syllabus. Although I enjoyed studying this text, by virtue of the fact that it covers a contemporarily taboo subject, and manages to unearth some of the idiosyncracies underpinning the era's understanding of atheism, it was not necessarily a text that I enjoyed reading, and was certainly not a match for Hamlet, the text that Tourneur unabashedly imitates.
March 21, 2023
Uuummm… okay? First off, was this really a tragedy? It ended well for the only people who seemed to be in love. I honestly can’t even tell anymore between everybody wanting to sleep with everybody and the eunuch …(?)… thrown in for good measure. I mean, at least I wasn’t bored.
Read
October 17, 2025This was fun
October 12, 2015
An absolutely bonkers Jacobean play that slips into farcical moments of theatrical brilliance. I would love to see this performed, if only for the scene in which Languebeau brings out the 'ghost disguise' whilst trying to seduce Soquette! This is a different treatment of ghosts, but an interesting one with respect to the ghost as a traditional, Senecan device within revenge tragedies, especially when compared to, of course, Shakespeare's Hamlet.
This ghost, and indeed the play, seems to advocate patience as the best form of revenge because all that are meant for bad ends will ultimately come to the bad ends they deserve, a suggestion of divine providence which maybe Hamlet himself might have considered.
This ghost, and indeed the play, seems to advocate patience as the best form of revenge because all that are meant for bad ends will ultimately come to the bad ends they deserve, a suggestion of divine providence which maybe Hamlet himself might have considered.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 13, 2016
I can't decide if this is worst tragedy or the best farce ever written but I loved every minute of it. What a magnificent disaster of a play.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews