Wanting the dramatic instinct to combine this philosophic temper with the bustle and bloodshed of the melodrama as it had been developed by Kyd, Chapman produced very strange effects in the structure of his plays. In Bussy d'Ambois, for example, the character of the hero is vigorously conceived after the manner of Marlowe. Bussy is introduced at the opening as a poor man, moralising contemptuously on the difference between those who are great by nature and those who are great only by position. He is interrupted by Monsieur, the king's brother, who carries him with him to court, where, by his vast energy, effrontery, and skill as a duellist, Bussy establishes himself in the king's favour. At the same time he incurs the enmity not only of the Duke of Guise, who resents his arrogance and upstart influence, but also that of the Sieur de Montsoreau (or Montsurry, as Chapman calls him), with whose wife he is in love; and the two (in company with Monsieur, who is also in love with Montsoreau's wife) contrive his murder. In order to work out the situation thus created, Chapman imagines that the love affairs of Bussy and Tamyra are carried on through the intermediation of a friar. The latter, being skilled in necromancy, in order to warn the lovers of their danger, calls up the fiend Behemoth, who discovers to them Guise and Montsoreau in secret council. It is characteristic of the want of dramatic sense in Chapman, that this incident has no effect upon the course of events; for we next see Montsoreau dragging Tamyra about the stage by her hair, and stabbing her for the purpose of making her write a letter of assignation to Bussy. In the midst of this barbarous scene, the friar enters with a drawn sword, and, without any apparent cause, falls down dead. Tamyra now consents to write to her lover, but she does so in her own blood, hoping that Bussy will understand she is acting under compulsion. A spirit appears to Bussy, to warn him against visiting Tamyra, but is interrupted by the appearance of Montsoreau, who, disguised in the friar's hood, brings to his enemy the treacherous letter of invitation. Bussy, concluding that the spirit has deceived him, and that Tamyra's letter is written with her blood to show the intensity of her affection, goes to the assignation, and is pistolled by the assassins, "bombasting" with his dying breath blank verse of the Tamburlaine type. A Kyd-like plot of this kind of course demands an equivalent violence of diction, and here Seneca in his Hercules Fureus furnished models that, in their own kind, could hardly be surpassed. Chapman, however, proves himself more than equal to his master, as may be inferred from the following extract from a dialogue between Bussy and Montsoreau : BUSSY. Were your king brother in you; all your powers (Stretched in the arms of great men and their bawds) Fed with base cocks-combs, and with crooked hams), Ram hardness in my lowness, and like death, For now it nothing fits my woes to speak, But thunder, or to take into my throat The trump of heaven: with whose determinate blasts The winds shall burst, and the devouring seas Be drunk up in his sounds; that my hot woes Shorten the world, preventing my last breath Tamyra, who seems to be a character modelled on Seneca's Phædra, thus describes the power of her passion:- 1 Bussy d'Ambois, Act iv. Sc. 1. I cannot cloak it: but, as when a fume, Hot, dry, and gross, within the womb of earth, When extreme cold hath stroke it to her heart, All bars made engines to his insolent fury: So of a sudden, my licentious fancy That will in parting break more strings in me Probably no The above passage is a good illustration of Chapman's use of the epic style in dramatic writing. dramatist approaches him in the number of similes he employs in his dialogue-a mannerism into which he fell from translating Homer. Where his subject permitted, his lofty and energetic spirit often carried him, like Marlowe, to heights of dramatic eloquence, as when, for example, he represents the rage of Byron against the astrologer whom that person has consulted about his destiny, and who has given him an unfavourable reply: Peace, dog of Pluto, peace! Thou knewest my end to come, not me here present : Pox of your halting human knowledges! O death! how far off hast thou killed? how soon A man may know too much, though never nothing? I will not lose my head: or, if I do, A hundred thousand heads shall off before. I am a nobler substance than the stars; And shall the baser over-rule the better? Or are they better since they are the bigger? I have a will and faculties of choice To do or not to do; and reason why I do or do not this: the stars have none. They know not why they shine more than this taper, 1 Bussy d Amois, Act ii. Sc. I. I'll piece-meal pull the frame of all my thoughts, Malignant in aspects? in bloody houses? O that mine arms were wings, that I might fly Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful He goes before them and commands them all 3. The most popular class of melodrama was that modelled on the lines of Marlowe's Jew of Malta, and representing a romantic action of crime or ruthless revenge. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy was the standard play in the class succeeding melodramatists could only rack their inventions for scenes and incidents of horror which should, if possible, surpass this tragedy in curdling the blood of the spectators. If the curious reader wishes to see this aim illustrated in its crudest and most elementary simplicity, I should advise him to read Henry Chettle's Hoffman, or Revenge for a Father, a play which probably shows us more accurately than any other "in what manner our ancestors felt when they placed themselves, by the power of imagination, in trying situations"; or which, in other 1 Byron's Conspiracy, Act iii. Sc. 1. words, gives us the exact level of the rudeness, the powerful fancy, the credulity, and the utter absence of all artistic sense, which characterised the civic portion of the audience in an Elizabethan theatre. But since the same qualities in a more pretentious form are to be found in the melodramas of two playwrights of some celebrity, John Marston and Cyril Tourneur, I will not weary the reader with an account of Chettle and his play. Of Marston I have already spoken in his capacity of satirist. I doubt not that Ben Jonson's reflections on him in The Poetaster were well deserved. Marston did not write tragedy, any more than satire, under the influence of real inspiration. Possessing considerable literary abilities, he knew how to pose as a poet, and how to carry affectation and obscurity to heights at which these qualities might be mistaken for genius. So emulously did he imitate in English the rugged style of Persius, that he appeared to be animated by the moral earnestness of that poet, while all the time, with the exception of a few strong lines in his Curió Inamorato, his satires are as pithless as those of Lodge.1 Aware of his own impotence, he affected to disparage work which he wished to be thought the fruit of genius, by invoking against it the spirit of oblivion. He played the same trick on the public in his capacity of dramatist. His melodrama called Antonio and Mellida was preceded by a dedication to Nobody, which ran as follows:— Since it hath flowed with the current of my humorous blood to affect (a little too much) to be seriously fantastical, here take (most respected Patron) the worthless present of my slighter idleness. If you vouchsafe not his protection, then, O thou sweetest perfection (Female Beauty), shield me from the stopping of vinegar bottles. Which most wished favour, if it fail me, then si nequeo flectere Superos Acheronta movebo. But yet, honour's redeemer, virtue's advancer, religion's shelterer, and piety's fosterer, yet I faint not in despair of thy gracious affection and protection; to which I only shall ever rest most serving-man-like, obsequiously making legs, and standing (after our freeborn English garb) bareheaded. Thy only affied slave and admirer, J. M. 1 For an account of Marston's Satires, see vol. iii. pp. 68-73. |