Speaking broadly, the two best tragedies of Webster and the two surviving tragedies of Tourneur constitute a distinct species of the genus which has been termed Tragedy of Blood.[1] It was Kyd, in his double drama called _The Spanish Tragedy_, who first gave definite form to this type. Those two plays exhibit the main ingredients of the Tragedy of Blood--a romantic story of crime and suffering, a violent oppressor, a wronged man bent upon the execution of some subtle vengeance, a ghost or two, a notorious villain working as the tyrant's instrument, and a whole crop of murders, deaths, and suicides to end the action. What use Shakespeare made of the type, and how he glorified it in _Hamlet_, is well known. Both Tourneur and Webster, writing after Shakespeare, had of necessity felt his influence, and their handling of the species was modified by that of their great master. Yet they reverted in many important particulars from the Shakespearean method to Kyd's. The use they both made of the villain, a personage which Shakespeare discarded, might be cited as distinctive. Kyd described the villain in the character of his Lazarrotto thus:-- I have a lad in pickle of this stamp, A melancholy, discontented courtier, Whose famished jaws look like the chap of death; Upon whose eyebrow hangs damnation; Whose hands are washed in rape and murders bold; Him with a golden bait will I allure, For courtiers will do anything for gold. The outlines sketched by Kyd were filled in with touches of diseased perversity and crippled nobleness by Tourneur in his Vendice, and were converted into full-length portraits of impressive sombreness by Webster in his Flamineo and Bosola. When we compare Tourneur with Webster as artists in the Tragedy of Blood, the former is seen at once to stand upon a lower level. His workmanship was rougher and less equal; his insight into nature less humane, though hardly less incisive; his moral tone muddier and more venomous; his draughtsmanship spasmodic and uncertain. Tourneur seems to have invented his own plots; they have the air of being fabricated after a recipe. This flaw--an apparent insincerity in the choice of motives--corresponds to the more painful moral flaw which makes his occasional good work like that of a remorseful and regretful fallen angel. While we read his plays, the line of Persius rises to our lips:-- Virtutem videant intabescantque relictâ.