CHAPTER II CHAPMAN, MARSTON, DEKKER AMBITIONS are naturally fired in an age of unusual achievement in any field of human activity, and men of every variety of genius or talent, however unfitted to command success in it, are drawn to the glittering arena. Many men were dramatists in 1600 whose gifts were not conspicuously dramatic, and whose instincts in another epoch would hardly have driven them to the service of the stage. Of these, George Chapman was an example. He was a poet; but his muse did not point him towards the theatre, and, had she designed him for drama, she would have delayed his birth. For, in 1600, when Jonson was about twenty-seven and Dekker thirty, Chapman was already forty years old. He was twenty-eight when Marlowe's Tamburlaine was produced, and thus did not in early youth, nor until his mind had already taken its mould, come under the dramatic influences or inspiration which formed Shakespeare and the greater playwrights. Nor is it even certain that he was greatly interested in drama till within five years of the close of the century. He did not serve a youthful apprenticeship to the theatrical art, and he never learnt to think in any character but his own. We gather from one of his early poems (Euthymiae Raptus) that Chapman was born in or near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, and, from the title-page of his Homer, that his birth year was 1559. It is frequently said that he studied at both universities, but there is no certain evidence that he was at either. Wood asserts that he spent some time at Oxford, in 1574 or thereabouts, 'where he was most excellent in the Latin and Greek tongues, but not in logic or philosophy,' and that he left without taking a degree. Of his personal affairs for the next twenty years, we know nothing. It is not improbable that he travelled, and a passage in one of his poems suggests that, like Jonson, he may have served in the Netherlands. As a man of letters, his first appearance, apparently, was made in a volume of poetry, The Shadow of Night, when he was thirty-five. From this time, he was busy as poet and dramatist until 1614, and seems to have achieved reputation and gained distinguished friends, though he gathered little wealth. Meres speaks of him in 1598 as a renowned scholar, tragedian and comedian. We know that he found a patron in the earl of Essex, and that, after the earl's execution in 1601, he was befriended by prince Henry, to whom he was appointed 'server in ordinary.' The prince encouraged him in his work of translating Homer, and appears to have promised him a pension; but he died in 1612, and Chapman received no further royal favours. To all times future this time's mark extend, In 1605, he had shared with Marston and Jonson the displeasure of the authorities for the satire in Eastward Hoe on the Scottish king's needy followers, and had suffered imprisonment. Again, in 1608, he narrowly escaped punishment for an unhappy reference to the French queen in The Conspiracie, And Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, which roused the indignation of the French ambassador. From 1614, Chapman appeared less frequently as an author, and he died in no very prosperous circumstances in 1634. He was buried in St Giles's in the Fields (Habington, in his Castara, speaks of his tomb as without the church), and a monument by his friend Inigo Jones, to whom he had dedicated his translation of Musaeus, was then erected to his memory, as 'a Christian Philosopher and Homericall Poett.' It is difficult to escape the conviction that Minto was correct in his identification of Chapman with the 'rival poet' of Shakespeare's Sonnets; and it has been argued with great force and ingenuity1 that the rivalry here indicated may be traced elsewhere in the work of both authors, and that the note of anger in the strain of invective which frequently appears in Chapman's poems and prefaces, hitherto interpreted in his favour as the natural scorn of a great artist for inferior work, was the outcome of bitter personal resentment at the success of the unlettered Shakespeare and was directly aimed at him. According to this view, The Amorous Zodiac, in the 1595 volume of poems, is the poem indicated by Shakespeare in his twenty-first sonnet; Holofernes, in Love's Labour's Lost, is a satirical portrait of Chapman in reply to his malevolent attacks, and Troilus and Cressida an elaborate castigation of 1 Shakespeare and the Rival Poet, by Arthur Acheson, 1903. Quality of Chapman's Poetry 31 Chapman's extravagant laudation of Homer, his praise of Greek ideals and his contempt of all poets who were not his equals in scholarship. Though not proven, the thesis cannot be lightly dismissed. We are told that Chapman was a student of the classics who made little progress in philosophy; but his earliest works exhibit him rather as a metaphysician in verse than as a disciple of the canons of ancient art. Passages in The Shadow of Night (1594) and in Ovid's Banquet of Sauce, containing A coronet for his Mistress Philosophy, The amorous Zodiac and other poems (1595), may be praised with justice; but they will never be widely read. In the dedication of the second volume, he disclaims all ambition to please the vulgar-"The profane multitude I hate, and only consecrate my strange poems to those searching spirits, whom learning hath made noble and nobility sacred.' Yet, even among 'searching spirits,' some reluctance to return to poems in the main so warped and obscure as these may well be found. Better work was to come. In his continuation of Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1598), Chapman not unworthily completed an incomparable fragment, and, in The Tears of Peace (1609), dedicated to his young patron, prince Henry, he reaches his happiest moods as an original poet. By Andromache Liberata (1614), he added nothing to his reputation. The subject was an unfortunate one-the marriage of the earl of Somerset and Frances Howard, the divorced lady Essex-and was treated in so enigmatic a manner as to make necessary a subsequent prose justification of its aims and intentions. Distinction of mind and intellectual vigour are apparent in all Chapman's work; but, though he may occasionally soar, he never sings, and his finest verses possess gnomic and didactic, rather than lyric, quality. When it emerges from the entanglements amid which the current of his reflections is usually split, his poetry can be as limpid as it is stately. But not often do we hear such music as when he tells us that Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse Renews the golden world and holds through all The holy laws of homely Pastoral, Where flowers and founts and nymphs and semi-gods Though Chapman was well known as a dramatist in 1598, only two plays by his hand are extant which were produced before that date-The Blinde begger of Alexandria (printed 1598) and An Humerous dayes Myrth (printed 1599), probably the play mentioned by Henslowe as The comodey of Umers in 1597. Both are comedies; but neither deserves any particular notice, though the first appears to have been successful on the stage, and the second contains one or two characters drawn with some cleverness and spirit. Al Fooles (printed 1605), another comedy, was first produced under the title The World runs on Wheels, and displays a surprising advance in dramatic technique. The plot, partly borrowed from Terence, is ingenious and excellent, and makes a good framework for a satirical sketch of humours developed through amusing situations in the manner of Jonson. As a writer of comedy, here, and in Eastward Hoe (to be noticed later), where, however, he had collaborators, Chapman appears to the greatest advantage. When dealing with lighter themes, he condescended, though with apologies, to write an uninflated style; and, however he may himself have preferred the heightened and fantastic rhetoric of his tragedies, they are indisputably inferior in construction and far less natural in tone than the dramas he affected to despise. For four or five years after the opening of the seventeenth century, Chapman, doubtless because he was occupied with the continuation of his translation of Homer, contributed nothing to dramatic literature. By 1605, he had, evidently, resumed his connection with the theatre; for two plays were printed in the following year-The Gentleman Usher and Monsieur D'Olive. In the first of these, Chapman threw his chief strength into a romantic love episode introduced into the comic scheme of the play, and succeeded in imparting to it an intensity and sweetness foreign to his character and talent. Monsieur D'Olive opens strongly; but the main plot is subsequently obscured by the shifting of the centre of interest to the character who gives his name to the piece. This cleverly conceived and diverting town gull, whose wit and coolness in a trying situation are pleasantly rendered, at once spoils the play as a work of art and keeps it alive as an entertainment. Later in his career, Chapman wrote two more comedies-May-Day (printed 1611), shown by Stiefel to be an adaptation of the Allesandro of Allesandro Piccolomini, and The Widdowes Teares (printed 1612)-and took part with Shirley in a third, The Ball (printed 1639). The last named owes little to Chapman', and neither of the others rises to anything approaching excellence. The Widdowes Teares, the idea of which is borrowed from Petronius, is not altogether wanting in power and 1 Cf. post, chap. VIII. Chapman's Historic Tragedies 33 has some characteristic passages, but entirely fails to arouse interest in its characters or admiration for the contrivance of the action. His translations apart, Chapman's fame rests upon his tragedies founded on French history, of which Bussy D'Ambois (printed 1607) and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (printed 1613) have always and rightly received most attention. The subjects here chosen were singularly adapted to display the qualities of his genius, never impressive save on an elevated stage. Bussy D'Ambois was by far the most successful of his dramas, its popularity being due, in part, to its revival of recent history, in part to the character and career of the chief figure, formed by nature for an invincible hero of romance, and in part to the glowing rhetoric which certainly rises in places to pure and impassioned poetry. Some entries in Henslowe suggest that Bussy D'Ambois, and not Marlowe's Massacre of Paris, as Collier thought, may have been the play for which payments were made in 15981; but, if we assign to it so early a date as this, we must allow a revision after the death of Elizabeth, who is spoken of as the 'old Queene.' The sources of this drama have not been precisely determined-De Thou's Historiae sui temporis and Rosset's Histoires Tragiques, from which it was supposed that the author derived his incidents, were not published in 1607-and Chapman, therefore, must have had recourse to contemporary accounts. The part of Bussy was acted by Nathaniel Field. A revised version of the play by Thomas D'Urfey was produced on the stage of the Theatre Royal in 1691. For The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois and the tragedies The Conspiracie, And Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron (printed 1608), he drew directly from a translation of Serres's Inventaire Général de l'Histoire de France by Edward Grimeston, published in 16072. Grimeston supplemented Serres, whose narrative ends in 1598, from Matthieu's Histoire de France and other contemporary writers. In his first tragedy, the court of Henry III is employed as a frame for the full length portrait of the brilliant adventurer, Bussy, whose love affair with Tamyra, countess of Montsorry, betrayal to her husband and last stand when encircled by his enemies, make an admirable drama of the heroic and melodramatic type. It is successful in a style thoroughly Elizabethan (the antithesis of the classic), in which violent scenes and extravagant rhetoric note. 1 Cf. Greg's Henslowe's Diary, part 11, pp. 198, 199, and Henslowe Papers, p. 120, ? Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, ed. by Boas, F. S., 1905. E. L. VI. CH. II. 3 |