Date
No firm data on the play's date of authorship has survived. Scholars have conjectured a date of authorship sometime in the first decade of the 17th century — either early in the decade, based on allusions to contemporary events like the Siege of Ostend (1601–04), or later in the decade, based on perceived links with literary works like King Lear and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois.
Those scholars who have considered Tourneur the author of both The Atheist's Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy (published in 1607) have assumed that The Atheist's Tragedy must have been written first, because it seems less developed and more crude. For those who attribute The Revenger's Tragedy to Thomas Middleton, such considerations are irrelevant.
Read more about this topic: The Atheist's Tragedy
Famous quotes containing the word date:
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to- date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)