Bussy D'Ambois

“ The one play of Chapman's whose popularity on the stage survived the Restoration is 'Bussy d'Ambois' (d'Amboise) —a tragedy not lacking in violence of action or emotion, and abounding even more in sublime or beautiful interludes than in crabbed and bombastic passages. His rarest jewels of thought and verse detachable from the context lie embedded in the tragedy of 'Cæsar and Pompey,' whence the finest of them were first extracted by the unerring and unequalled critical genius of Charles Lamb. ”

“ The tragic close of Bussy's life has given his career an interest disproportionate to his historical importance. But the drama of La Coutancière was only the final episode in a career crowded with romantic incidents. The annalists and memoir-writers of the period prove that Bussy's exploits as a duellist and a gallant had impressed vividly the imagination of his contemporaries. Margaret of Valois, the wife of Henry IV, Brantôme, who was a relative and friend of D'Ambois, and L'Estoile, the chronicler and journalist, are amongst those who have left us their impressions of this beau sabreur. ”

“ Article on Chapman's Plays. This Article deals with the Tragedies and gives long extracts from Bussy D'Ambois and the two "Byron" plays. It concludes: "The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois we regret to say [Pg 326] we have never seen. The rarity of the old plays is such, that they are only to be found in some public libraries, and in the extensive hoards of private collectors; and in such applications as we have reluctantly caused to be made, we confess, we have rather found the exclusive spirit of the monopolist, than the liberality of the enlightened lover of literature." ”

“ But neither D'Urfey nor Langbaine could secure for Bussy D'Ambois a renewal of its earlier popularity. During the eighteenth century it fell into complete oblivion, and though (as the Bibliography testifies) nineteenth-century critics and commentators have sought to atone for the neglect of their predecessors, the faults of the play, obvious at a glance, have hitherto impaired the full recognition of its distinctive merits of design and thought. ”

“ In reading Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois, with its strange commingling of real figures and ghosts, we today draw back disappointed because we feel that what has seemed real becomes with the entrance of the ghost only melodrama sublimated by some excellent characterization and fine poetry. ”

“ Departing from historical truth, he represents Bussy as a poor adventurer at Court, whose fortunes are entirely made by the patronage of Monsieur. His sudden elevation turns his head, and he insults the Duke of Guise by courting his wife before his face, thus earning his enmity, and exciting at the same time [Pg xx] the ridicule of the other courtiers. Hence springs the encounter with Barrisor and his companions, and this is made to serve as an introduction to the amour between Bussy and Tamyra, as Chapman chooses to call the Countess of Montsurry. ”

“ The tragedies of Chapman are written in a grave and eloquent diction, and abound with fine passages, but you feel at once that they are not calculated, like Shakespeare's, for acting. They want the inimitable life, ease, and beauty of the great dramatist. Perhaps his tragedy of Bussy D'Ambois is his best, and next to that his Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron. ”

“ The first two Acts of the play are chiefly occupied [Pg xv] with Bussy's arrival at court, his entry into the service of Monsieur, his quarrel with Guise, and the duel between himself and Barrisor, with two supporters on either side. Brantôme, in his Discours sur les Duels, relates from personal knowledge an incident between Guise and Bussy, which took place shortly after the accession of Henry III. The Duke took occasion of a royal hunting party to draw Bussy alone into the forest, and to demand certain explanations of him. ”

“ In these plays there is no dramatic movement, nothing worthy to be called a plot, no attempt at development of character. The figure of Byron, as of Bussy d'Ambois, is drawn with epic grandeur. In describing the 'wild enormities' of boundless vainglory, Chapman, however undramatic he may be, is assuredly impressive. ”

“ Bussy is a typically Renaissance hero and appealed to the sympathies of an age which set store above all things on exuberant vitality and prowess, and was readier than our own to allow them full rein. The King seems to be giving voice to Chapman's conception of Bussy's character, when he describes him in iii, ii, 90 ff. as
"A man so good that only would uphold
Man in his native noblesse, from whose fall
All our dissentions arise," &c. ”

“ Thus Chapman aimed throughout at energy of expression at all costs. To this he sacrificed beauty of phrase and rhythm, even lucidity. He pushed it often to exaggerated extremes of coarseness and riotous fancy. He laid on "glaring colours" till eye and brain are fatigued. To this opening phrase of Dryden no exception can be taken. But can his further charges stand? Is it true to say of Bussy D'Ambois that it is characterised by "dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words," that it is "a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense"? ”

“ On the advice of a Friar named Comolet, to whom Chapman strangely enough assigns the repulsive rôle of go-between, Bussy wins his way at night into Tamyra's chamber on the plea that he has come to reassure her that she is in no way guilty of Barrisor's blood. Thus the main theme of the play is linked with the opening incidents, and the action from first to last is laid in Paris, whither the closing scenes of Bussy's career are shifted. By another ingenious departure from historical truth the Duke of Anjou, to whom Bussy owes his rise, is represented as the main agent in his fall. ”

“ But Chapman, in whom the barbarian and the pedant were so strongly commingled, [Pg xxvi] was a type that fell outside the wide range of Dryden's appreciation. The Restoration writer fails, in the first place, to recognize that Bussy D'Ambois is pitched advisedly from first to last in a high key. Throughout the drama men and women are playing for great stakes. No one is ever at rest. Action and passion are both at fever heat. We move in an atmosphere of duels and state intrigues by day, of assignations and murders by night. ”

“ And when he does finally nerve himself to the encounter, and dies with words of forgiveness for Clermont and Tamyra on his lips, the episode of reconciliation, though evidently intended to be edifying, is so huddled and inconsecutive as to be well-nigh ridiculous.
Equally ineffective and incongruous are the moralising discourses of which Bussy's ghost is made the spokesman. It does not seem to have occurred to Chapman that vindications of divine justice, suitable on the lips of the elder Hamlet, fell with singular infelicity from one who had met his doom in the course of a midnight intrigue. ”

“ Bussy's career was so romantic that it was impossible for even the most inventive dramatist to embellish it. This was especially true of its closing episode, which occupies the later acts of Chapman's drama—the intrigue with the Countess of Montsoreau and the tragic fate which it involved. It is somewhat singular that the earliest narratives of the event which have come down to us were published subsequently to the play. The statement, accepted for a long time, that De Thou's Historiæ sui Temporis was the basis of Chapman's tragedy, has been completely disproved. ”

“ D'Urfey's main alteration was to represent Bussy and Tamyra as having been betrothed before the play opens, and the latter [Pg xxix] forced against her will into a marriage with the wealthy Count Montsurry. This, he maintained, palliated the heroine's surrender to passion and made her "distress in the last Act . . . much more liable to pity." ”

“ It must, I think, have been by a slip that Cuthbert Burbadge, in the Sharers Papers of 1635, spoke of him as joining the King’s with Ostler and Underwood in 1608 or 1609. It seems probable that Field brought with him to the King’s a share of the plays which had formed the repertory of the joint Lady Elizabeth’s and Queen’s Revels, including Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, in which a King’s prologue vaunts his success as Bussy. ”

“ Beaumont and Fletcher, one cannot help feeling, would have invested him with more refinement and grace, and would have given a tenderer note to the love-scenes between him and Tamyra. Bussy takes the Countess's affections so completely by storm, and he ignores so entirely the rights of her husband, that it is difficult to accord him the measure of sympathy in his fall, which the fate of a tragic hero should evoke.
Tamyra appeals more to us, because we see in her more of the conflict between passion and moral obligation, which is the essence of drama. ”

“ The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois is reprinted from the 1613 Quarto, in the original spelling, and with a faulty reproduction of the title-page. The explanatory notes to both plays are very slight, but there is a valuable introductory memoir to vol. i, giving extracts from previous criticisms of Chapman.]
1874-5, 8o. The Works of George Chapman: edited with notes, by Richard Herne Shepherd. [Vol. i, Plays, vol. ii, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, vol. iii, Poems and Minor Translations, Chatto and Windus. An edition in modernised spelling, and with merely [Pg 325] a sprinkling of notes. To vol. ”

“ The Quartos contain no list of Dramatis Personæ. One is however prefixed to D'Urfey's version (1691) , with the names of the performers added. C. W. Dilke prefixed a somewhat imperfect one to his edition in vol. iii of Old English Plays (1814) . W. L. Phelps, who did not know of Dilke's list, supplied a more correct one in his edition in the Mermaid Series (1895) . The subjoined list adds some fresh details, especially concerning the subordinate characters.
[4:2] Many episodes in Bussy D'Ambois's career, which took place in the Province of Anjou, are transferred in the play to Paris. ”

“ Enter Bussy D'Ambois poore.
[Bussy.] Fortune, not Reason, rules the state of things,
Reward goes backwards, Honor on his head,
Who is not poore is monstrous; only Need
Gives forme and worth to every humane seed.
As cedars beaten with continuall stormes,5
So great men flourish ”

“ If the union of active interest with superb declamation may suffice to explain the prolonged good fortune of Chapman's first tragedy on the boards, we can discover no such pretext to account for the apparent favour shown to his next venture in the same field, It has no passage comparable for force and vehemence of imagination to the highest moods of the author of Bussy d'Ambois ”

“ And it is doubtful whether Chapman has hitherto received due credit for the ingenuity and skill with which he has woven into the texture of his drama a number of varied threads. Bussy's life was, as has been shown, crowded with incidents, and the final catastrophe at La Coutancière had no direct relation with the duels and intrigues of his younger days at Court. Chapman, however, has connected the earlier and the later episodes with much ingenuity. ”

“ Il en vouloit souvant par trop à plusieurs, sans aucun respect; je luy ay dict cent fois; mais il se fioit tant en sa valeur qu'il mesprisoit tous les conseils de ses amis . . . Dieu ayt son âme! Mais il mourut (quand il trespassa) un preux trés vaillant et généreux."
It is plain, therefore, that Chapman in his picture of Bussy's quarrels and encounters-at-arms was deviating little, except in details of names and dates, from [Pg xvii] the actual facts of history. ”

“ But the plot and portraiture in Bussy D'Ambois are both less distinctive than the "full and heightened" style, to which was largely due its popularity with readers and theatre-goers of its period, but which was afterwards to bring upon it such severe censure, when taste had changed. Dryden's onslaught in his Dedication to the Spanish Friar (1681) marks the full turn of the tide. The passage is familiar, but it must be reproduced here:
"I have sometimes wondered, in the reading, what has become of those glaring colours which annoyed me in Bussy D'Ambois upon the theatre ”

“ Old English Plays; being a selection from the early dramatic writers. [Volume iii contains Bussy D'Ambois, together with Monsieur D'Olive, and Dekker's The Wonder of a Kingdom and Old Fortunatus. A short life of Chapman is prefixed to Bussy D'Ambois. The text is that of the edition of 1641, in modernised spelling. The notes contain some of the variants in the Q of 1607, and explanations of many difficult phrases. The editor, though his name does not appear, was C. W. Dilke, afterwards editor of the Athenæum, and grandfather of the present Sir C. W. Dilke.] ”

“ Montsurry first tells her of the suspicions which Monsieur has excited in him, she protests with artfully calculated indignation against the charge of wrong-doing with this "serpent." But the brutal and deliberate violence of her husband when he knows the truth, and the perfidious meanness with which he makes her the reluctant instrument of her lover's ruin, win back for her much of our alienated sympathy. Yet at the close her position is curiously equivocal. It is at her prayer that Bussy has spared Montsurry when "he hath him down" in the final struggle ”

“ Better . . . thrive: it were better for a man to be buried alive than exist as a mere property for a despoliating government to grow rich upon.
265, 98-102. the late . . . on him. It is singular that Bussy D'Ambois contains no such "dying prophesie" as is here alluded to, unless the reference is to v, iv, 76-78. Bussy, as he dies, forgives his murderers (v, iv, 112) .
267, 37-9. Hast thou . . . Reimes. Cf. Appendix B. "At the Barricades this voice was heard: 'It is no longer time to dally, let us lead my lord to Reimes.'"
268, 53. The cause alike doth. The same cause doth. ”