The Atheist's Tragedy was entered into the Stationers' Register on 14 September 1611, and published in quarto later that year by the booksellers John Stepneth and Richard Redner.
The title page of the quarto states that the play "hath often been Acted" in "divers places", though no specific productions or performances are known.
D'Amville is a wealthy French nobleman and a cynical, ruthless, Machiavellian atheist, who exchanges metaphysical and theological eternity and everlasting life for biological heredity, replaces divine providence by providence alone, financial precautions and provisions for one's earthly future, and acts on his immoralistic maxim, which ends his memorable monologue in the poetic form of a rhyming couplet (shown in italics): Here are my sons.
When Charlemont (the "honest man" of the subtitle) returns home, he finds that he has been declared dead, and his fiancée Castabella has been married to D'Amville's son Rousard.
But the aristocrat's machinations begin to sour; Sebastian is killed in a duel with his lover's husband, Baron Belforest, and the sickly Rousard dies as well.
In the play's climactic scene, Charlemont and Castabella are on the scaffold, facing their death sentences; but D'Amville smashes his own skull with the axe intended for them.
Levidulchia and Castabella represent the alternative negative and positive responses to similar situations: both have unwanted and unloved husbands, and both are attracted to other men.
A tertiary comic subplot features the clownish Languebeau Snuffe, who attempts to seduce Soquette, Castabella's servant.
Snuffe is Baron Belforest's chaplain; he is a Puritan, and also a hypocrite who is tangentially involved in both the superior plots as a willing stooge for both D'Amville and Levidulchia.