“I think h’as knocked his brains out”: Unhealthy Imagination in The Atheist’s Tragedy

The notorious scene in which Cyril Tourneur’s titular villain D’Amville accidentally knocks his brains out with an ax has been frequently remarked upon for its providential nature, but it has not been discussed in relation to cognition. Given that D’Amville then delivers a lucid account of his schemes and the closest approximation to repentance in the play, it is important to examine what Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy has to say about the imagination relative to the brain and the soul, especially as D’Amville’s brother is previously murdered by the same means. Tourneur contrasts the diabolical D’Amville, who is obsessed with Nature and his own ambitions, with the skeptical and virtuous Charlemont, his nephew, who initially distrusts his imagination when he encounters his father’s ghost. However, the reliance upon this faculty to ascertain the Ghost’s heavenly origin and intention indicates that the imagination can be a force that serves to access the divine as much as it can also deter people away from this apotheosis and direct them toward sinful delights. The anatomical and spiritual dimensions of the play as well as the inclusion of a Doctor highlight Tourneur’s preoccupation with matters of health in The Atheist’s Tragedy, and these center upon the imagination. The play builds upon the poetics of Sidney and Puttenham that distinguish between poets’ healthy imagination that emulates the divine and authors’ unhealthy imagination that wallows in worldly wickedness. Tourneur translates this poetics into the Calvinistic universe of his play-world—inspired by Perkins’s sermon on the imagination—to guide audiences to exercise their imaginations like Charlemont and avoid the predetermined fate of D’Amville, if they are elected to do so. Hence, he does not anatomize the imagination, which mediates between brain and soul, but rather privileges higher cognition over the fleshy brain. Tourneur stresses that the imagination must be guided by the intellectual soul. What might appear to be a pre-Cartesian model of cognition, then, is more accurately an anatomical means to distinguish divine truth from human ambition, both of which are dependent upon the faculty of the imagination.