in The Atheist's Tragedy, or The Honest Man's Revenge — Tourneur, Cyril
Metadata
Play
The Atheist's Tragedy, or The Honest Man's Revenge
Author
Tourneur, Cyril
Year (catalogued)
1611
First performance
1611
Decade
1610s
Genre
Tragedy
Play type
Adult Professional
Company
Unknown
Speech prefix(es)
2. Iudg. | 2. Iud.
Words
189
Characters
1068
Typicality
0.34 (cosine to cluster centroid)
TCP id
A13840
BritDrama no.
1625
Cluster
Cluster 15 — Devils, vices & grotesques
Important excerpts
Passages from this character's speech that contain the most distinguishing words for Cluster 15 (ang, hunc, fleire, shillings, chil, sblood…). Matches are highlighted.
fit for a repentant end. Now Monsieur Snuff! A man of your profession, found in a place of such impiety? How comes your habit to be altered thus? Grief for his children's death distempers him. Now Monsieur Charlemont. You are accused Of having murdered one Borachio, that Was servant to my Lord D'amville. How can You clear your
Full speech
Tush we know your birth. So. Receive your sentence. Your goods (since they were got by that means, Which brings diseases;) shall beturn'd to th'vse Of Hospitals. You carted through the Streets; According to the common shame of Strumpets, Your bodies whipped till with the lose of blood, You faint under the hand of punishment. Then that the necessary force of want, May not provoke you to your former life; You shall be set to painful labour; whose Penurious gains shall only give you food To hold up Nature; mortify your flesh; And make you fit for a repentant end. Now Monsieur Snuff! A man of your profession, found in a place of such impiety? How comes your habit to be altered thus? Grief for his children's death distempers him. Now Monsieur Charlemont. You are accused Of having murdered one Borachio, that Was servant to my Lord D'amville. How can You clear your self? guilty? or not guilty? Your Lordship interrupts the course of law. Judgement my Lord? in what? For what my Lord? My Lord; the office will impress a mark Of scandal and dishonour on your name.
Plot summary
Plot — The Atheist's Tragedy, or The Honest Man's Revenge
Montferrers has forbidden his son Charlemont from going to war and refused him the money necessary to equip himself. Charlemont gets a subvention from his uncle, D’Amville, and this persuades Montferrers to change his mind. But D’Amville is an atheist who believes that he must make his happiness in this world rather than wait for reward or punishment in the next, and he has an ulterior motive for wanting his nephew out of the way. Castabella loves Charlemont, and has privately agreed to marry him when he returns. They entrust their secret only to the Puritan Languebeau Snuffe. D’Amville bribes Snuffe to betray them and persuade Belleforest, her father, to make her marry Rousard, his son. Castabella is pressured into the match, despite the protestations of Sebastian, Rousard’s younger brother. As soon as he is married, Rousard falls ill with symptoms which include impotence. On the wedding day, D’Amville’s accomplice Borachio brings false news that Charlemont has been killed in battle. Montferrers makes a new will in D’Amville’s favour. D’Amville gets Montferrers’s torchbearers drunk at the wedding celebrations, and tricks them into quarrelling with one another when lighting their master home; the torches go out in the fight, allowing Borachio to murder Montferrers under cover of darkness. Montferrers’s ghost appears to Charlemont, tells him of the murder, and enjoins him not to take revenge. Charlemont returns to France to find himself presumed dead and his fiancée unhappily married. He confronts D’Amville and has an altercation with Sebastian, but another appearance by the ghost prevents him from getting carried away. D’Amville fabricates an unpaid debt in order to have Charlemont imprisoned, but Sebastian, who has been slightly injured, asks for money to pay a surgeon and uses it to pay the supposed debt and get Charlemont released. D’Amville takes steps to secure the future of his estate. Reasoning that Rousard will beget no son and that Sebastian, a libertine, will never marry, he decides that he will have to produce a bastard to be his heir, and selects Castabella as the mother. He commissions Borachio to murder Charlemont in the churchyard, but Charlemont kills Borachio instead. Snuffe uses the same churchyard for an assignation, intending to scare off any unwanted attention by disguising himself as the ghost of Montferrers, but he is himself frightened by Charlemont and runs away leaving the disguise behind. Charlemont hides in the charnel house.…