Chapman: Bussy d’Ambois

Bussy d’Ambois
George Chapman
(D.C. Heath, 1933) [c.1604]
36 p.

Chapman is best known today because Keats once looked into his Homer; fewer readers will have looked into his Homer themselves, and fewer still, I imagine, will have read this, or any other, of his plays for the Jacobean stage. Yet he once enjoyed a high, or reasonably high, reputation, and this play, in particular, has been remembered as a good example of his art.

The play is a “contemporary drama”, being based on true and timely events –in this case, on the life and death of Louis de Bussy d’Amboise, a Frenchman who had risen high in the French court in the 1570s before carrying on an affair with the wife of a Count, for which transgression he was slain. Chapman takes the tale, amps it up with some lurid supernatural elements, complete with Latin spells and ghostly friars, and fashions from it a quite entertaining tale. (Chapman was not the only author who found in Bussy’s life a worthy subject: Dumas also wrote a novel about him.)

As a dramatist I didn’t find Chapman particularly adroit though. The mechanics of the plot moved along briskly enough, but his characters did not emerge very clearly for me as individuals. When, in the third Act, I came across this description of Bussy, I felt I was getting to know him for the first time:

MONS. I think thee, then, a man
That dares as much as a wild horse or tiger,
As headstrong and as bloody; and to feed
The ravenous wolf of thy most cannibal valour
(Rather than not employ it) thou would’st turn
Hackster to any whore, slave to a Jew,
Or English usurer, to force possessions
(And cut men’s throats) of mortgaged estates;
Or thou would’st tire thee like a tinker’s strumpet,
And murther market folks; quarrel with sheep,
And run as mad as Ajax; serve a butcher;
Do any thing but killing of the King.
(III, ii)

And it is true, on reflection; he is a social climber, and not scrupulous about how he gets to the top.

The introductory notes to the play in my anthology express Chapman’s distinctive strengths well:

Chapman was not dowered with the penetrating imagination that reveals as by a lightning flash unsuspected depths of human character or of moral law. But he has the gnomic faculty that can convey truths of general experience in aphoristic form, and he can wind into a debatable moral issue with adroit casuistry. This gnomic faculty is active throughout this play. There are, for instance, these lines in which a character gives a back-handed compliment to the righteousness of princes:

That Prince doth high in virtue’s reckoning stand
That will entreat a vice, and not command.

(II, ii)

Or consider this brief passage in which one nobleman criticizes another for promoting Bussy to a position of influence, which ends neatly on an aphoristic note:

GUISE.Y’ave stuck us up a very worthy flag,
That takes more wind than we with all our sails.
MONS. O, so he spreads and flourishes.
GUISE. He must down;
Upstarts should never perch too near a crown.
(III, ii)

He experiments with longer set-pieces too, as in this passage about envy. (Whether this is an example of adroit moral casuistry or a example of failed moral illumination, I leave as an exercise.)

HENRY. This desperate quarrel sprung out of their envies
To D’Ambois sudden bravery, and great spirit.
GUISE. Neither is worth their envy.
HENRY. Less than either
Will make the gall of envy overflow;
She feeds on outcast entrails like a kite:
In which foul heap, if any ill lies hid,
She sticks her beak into it, shakes it up,
And hurls it all abroad, that all may view it.
Corruption is her nutriment; but touch her
With any precious ointment, and you kill her.
Where she finds any filth in men, she feasts,
And with her black throat bruits it through the world
Being sound and healthfull; but if she but taste
The slenderest pittance of commended virtue,
She surfeits of it, and is like a fly
That passes all the body’s soundest parts,
And dwells upon the sores; or if her squint eye
Have power to find none there, she forges some:
She makes that crooked ever which is straight;
Calls valour giddiness, justice tyranny:
A wise man may shun her, she not herself;
Whithersoever she flies from her harms,
She bears her foe still claspt in her own arms.
(II, i)

Actually, I think that’s rather good — I think. There is a density of thought and a readiness of expression that appeals to me. But I’ve read it a few times over, and typed it out, and there are still portions of it that I can’t quite follow. By the end I’m no longer sure what is being said.  This illustrates a general problem I had while reading the play: I found it hard to follow the development of the story. I was glad to find a decent scene-by-scene synopsis, which I fell to reading before tackling the same scene in Chapman. It helped me keep my bearings, and improved my appreciation of what I was reading. That said, I can’t say that I will be in a hurry to re-visit this play, or Chapman’s plays more generally. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll look into his Homer.