International audience ; The presentation is about a short excerpt from Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy. It is situated in the opening scene of act IV. It is an inset within the dramatic tableau which consists in the depiction of a piece of embroidery. It represents a natural landscape with well-known plants, fruit-trees and snails such as the medlar, plum and pear trees, bachelor’s button…. It is an ornamental framed veduta on Nature, thus reified and encoded through the embroiderer’s subjective and arty needle-work. In the sequence, it is jokingly, but precisely, deciphered by three characters who happen to be two prostitutes and a libertine free-thinker. The study first deals with the aesthetic Flemish-like picturing of the landscape turned into a still-life, with the deciphering of the symbols attached to the vegetation and snails embedded in the artificial representation of nature read as a didactic instructive book, and finally with the double reflexive effects of the mirror-like tapestry on the characters, the double reflection addressing the inner and outer natures of Man, and the concepts of disegno interno and disegno esterno.Further analysis incites to get deeper into the hidden subtexts revealed by socio-religious motifs correlated to the emblem-like, anti-papist (anti-catholic) tapestry, topics such as procreation, immaculate conception, Christ incarnate and the saviour’s love for Mankind, posterity as life after death and so on and so forth. The playwright wanted to communicate his philosophical reflections on Man’s transient life on earth and on after-death mysteries; he wished to denounce and point at some of the ideologies of his time. Investigating from intra-contextual diegesis to extra contextual fable, the Marian Hanging(s) and some political episodes of Mary Stewart Queen of Scots’ life can be correlated to the needle-work embedded in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy. This paper is about Tourneur’s distortion of the eco-centric and multi-centric concepts through his satiric ...