Jacobean Tragedy by Ribner Irving;

Author:Ribner, Irving;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 1962-04-25T05:00:00+00:00

III

There are two parallel movements in The Atheist’s Tragedy, the one devoted to a systematic refutation of the reason of D’Amville which has led him to atheism, and the other designed to demonstrate the power of the true believer to overcome evil by Christian patience and, with the help of God, to triumph over the forces which oppress him. These two movements are skilfully united in the opposition between D’Amville and Charlemont, the evil persecutor and his seemingly helpless victim, and both of Tourneur’s main points are made by the final axe stroke which knocks out D’Amville’s brains, not to be regarded as a ludicrous accident by which a child-like dramatist resolves his plot, but rather as a miracle, deliberately chosen for its apparent impossibility, by which Tourneur emphasizes the intervention of God to destroy the wicked and protect the innocent.

D’Amville is not merely a disbeliever in God. Atheism in the Renaissance had a positive as well as a negative aspect. He is a worshipper of nature, which he considers as a self-sufficient entity, governed by laws which man can understand by the power of reason, and subject to no supernatural control. He believes that by his own human will and the power of his mind he can manipulate the world and other men to his own advantage. He stands, like Shakespeare’s Edmund, for Renaissance scepticism, and his creation reflects the fear and horror with which conservative minds viewed the growth of a new empirical science and the challenging of traditional values of order and degree. It has been shown that D’Amville is a perfect example of what the Renaissance called atheism, that he was systematically created from notions about atheism which appeared in contemporary writings, and that a cardinal feature of such atheistic belief was to regard nature’s laws as running contrary to the laws of God.1

Since he recognizes no supernatural power in the universe, the atheist can know none of those feelings of love, loyalty, kindness, gratitude and the like which Renaissance moralists held to be emanations on the human plane of the love of God which rules the universe. The atheist must by virtual definition be an absolute villain, knowing no restrictions to the gratification of his own sensual appetite. The goal of man he sees not as salvation, but only as pleasure, profit, and power. D’Amville’s philosophy is made clear in the opening scene of the play in his conversation with Borachio. It begins with an equation of man and beast, for to deny the presence of heaven is implicitly to deny also that spiritual quality which man derives from heaven and which separates him from the beast:

1 Robert Ornstein, ‘“The Atheist’s Tragedy” and Renaissance Naturalism,’ SP, LI (1954), 194–207. Ornstein holds that D’Amville’s view of nature is never refuted in the play, and that Tourneur therefore accepts a dichotomy between natural law and moral law. But the point of the entire play is to refute D’Amville’s position. See also The Moral Vision, pp. 118–27.

D’Am. Borachio, thou art read

In nature and her large philosophy.

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