office of ambassador-of course only in order to furnish sport for the Court; and the sublime self-consciousness 1 with which he accepts the post, and, by way of showing forth his powers as an 'orator,' repeats the famous speech which he made at a kind of Discussion Forum in praise of Tobacco, is in the richest vein of fun. He hires a retinue of followers, of whom he has a most diverting account to give; but when he is ready to start, it suddenly appears that the object of his mission has been already accomplished, and that he has in short been 'gulled.' He goes off however in imperturbable good-humour; and his tormentors are left lamenting that 'here we may strike the Plaudite to our Play, my Lord fool's gone: all our audience will forsake us.' They contrive however to bring him back for some more merriment by writing him a feigned love-letter as from a lady of the Court; and he is thus enabled to wind up the comedy with a witty speech about 'raising fortunes,' the point of which was not likely to be lost by an audience in those days of knights adventurers and humbler species of speculators such as Monsieur d'Olive enumerates. 'An a man,' he observes, 'will play the fool and be a Lord, or be a fool and play the Lord, he shall be sure to want no followers, so there be hope to raise their fortunes.' Monsieur d'Olive, of whose drolleries I regret to be unable to give more abundant specimens, therefore deservedly gives his name to this excellent comedy. tleman In The Gentleman Usher (printed 1606) Chapman has The Genattempted more than his genius, perhaps too hastily called Usher (pr. on to perform the task, seems to have been equal to accom- 1606).` plishing. This play begins as a light comedy of intrigue. The aged Duke Alphonso is bent upon marrying the fair Margaret, of whom his son is deeply enamoured. While his son's wishes are seconded by a lord of the name of Strozza, the Duke's confidant is a counsellor who calls him Above all sins,' he superfluously prays, 'heaven shield me from the sin of blushing.' Preceded by the speech against Tobacco made by the weaver, who held it at hot enmity, being unfitted for its enjoyment by his nose, which (according to the Puritanic cut)' had a narrow bridge.' self Medice, an ungentle, malignant fellow 1. The first two acts pass in entertainments at the house of Margaret's father, in the arrangement of which his busy and conceited Gentleman Usher takes a prominent part. With the third act the real action of the play-both comic and serious—begins. The former may be dismissed at once; it is chiefly concerned with the humours of the personage who gives his name to the play. (There is however another diverting character, that of the foolish youth Pogio, who thinks 'gentility must be fantastical,' and disports himself throughout the piece, which commences with his telling his dreams.) But the Gentleman Usher, a silly busybody whom the Prince gains over by flattery, without using him to much purpose, is not drawn with any striking success, and cannot rank high as a comic creation. The serious interest lies in two episodes. Strozza having been dangerously wounded with an arrow by a huntsman suborned by Medice, breaks out into raving despair over his pain and peril; but the solemn counsel of his wife brings him to a better frame of mind; and he thereupon dilates -in a passage not however to be numbered among Chapman's finer efforts on the blessings of conjugal fidelity. His now pious frame of mind enables him, as by divine inspiration, to see into the future; he knows that on the seventh day the arrow now rankling in his breast will leave it, and he foresees the terrible danger to which his friend the Prince is exposed. For meanwhile Prince Vincentio has bound himself to Margaret by a vow to which the lovers have resolved to attach all the significance of marriage itself. The finely-written scene where they exchange oaths over this strange ceremony is one 2 1 Nobody besides the Duke has a good word for him, except the old hag Corteza, who is pleased with his failure as an orator: Me thought I likde his manly being out; It becomes Noblemen to doe nothing well.' His hatred of learning resembles that of the Fox in Spenser's Mother Hubbard's Tale. Act iv. The passage is too long for quotation. I wonder Charles Lamb should not have extracted it. of the most peculiar passages in the Elisabethan drama; full of deep passion, it at the same time reveals on the part of the poet a strange recklessness of feeling with regard to the institution of marriage, which he makes his lovers set at defiance. Their secret love is discovered by the Duke; Vincentio is mortally wounded by the eager Medice; and Margaret, to escape from a hateful doom, disfigures her beauty. This painful situation, the last element in which must surely have seemed hideous on the stage, is finally solved by a deus ex machiná in the shape of a skilful physician who cures the Prince's wound and restores the beauty of Margaret. The villainous devices of Medice having been revealed and his dark antecedents disclosed by himself (his name was originally Mendice, and he was of no country, never christened, and brought up among the gipsies), he is ignominiously dismissed; and all ends happily. It will be seen that this comedy is full of ambitious elements; but having indicated these, I need dwell on it no longer, for it seems to me in execution by no means one of Chapman's happiest plays. The daring inventiveness which he here exhibits in the devising of original situations required to be seconded by unusual labour in composition; and this, strange to say, he seems on the present occasion to have spared. Strozza's speeches-with one notable exception-rise little above a merely rhetorical level; and though there is a startling passionateness in the principal I refer to the remarkable passage in which he gives vent to a political philosophy which must have sounded strange in the ears of any courtier of King James who heard it: And what's a Prince? Had all been virtuous men, And so no subject; all men had been Princes: But to his soul and honour; which are laws, Never corrupted, never out of rule; What is there in a Prince? That his least lusts Are valued at the lives of other men, When common faults in him should prodigies be, And his gross dotage rather loath'd than sooth'd.' (Act v.) May-day scene between Vincentio and Margaret, it remains an isolated passage in a love-intrigue otherwise carried out. without much force of writing. And the chief comic character is as far removed from the grave irony which envelopes that of Malvolio as from the vivacious humour pervading that of Chapman's own Monsieur d'Olive. May-Day (printed 1611) is a 'witty Comedie' of no (pr. 1611). elevated type,—a farrago in short of vulgar plots and counterplots, with no special humour in any of the characters to make it worthy of notice, though in the liveliness of its diction it bespeaks its authorship1. Among the more prominent characters are an amorous old dotard, who in the pursuit of his unseasonable ambition assumes the disguise of a chimney-sweep; a waiting-woman called Temperance, an amusing specimen of the Dame Quickly class; and a captain called Quintiliano, who thinks war 'exceeding naught,' carries on his campaigns with 'munition of manchet, napery, plates, spoons, glasses, and so forth,' and has for 'Lieutenant' a promising youth of the name of Innocentio. The Widow's Tears (pr. 1612). The Widdowes Teares (printed 1612) is a comedy sufficiently disagreeable in subject, but not ineffective in execution. It exemplifies in the persons of the real widow Eudora and the self-supposed widow Cynthia the hollowness of female declarations of fidelity. The tempter in the former case is 'Tharsalio the wooer,' an energetic personage whose manner of achieving his object humorously illustrates the truth of Thackeray's axiom that an infallible method for making any body give way is to tread on his toes. Cynthia is deceived into a belief in her husband's death by her husband himself, who afterwards, disguised as a soldier, visits her in the tomb where she is lamenting his loss. This uncomfortable mixture of a ghastly situation with a comic action is certainly not pleasant to read. The story was borrowed by Chapman from that of the Matron of Ephesus in the Satyricon of Petronius. 1 Besides a passage in ridicule of the inevitable Spanish Tragedy, the quotation of phrases from Hamlet, Marston's Antonio and Mellida, and Marlowe's Dido, with a bombastic line from which the comedy closes, may be noticed. The character of the feeble Spartan suitor of Eudora, Rebus, who persistently declines to resent an injury because of the respect due to 'the place,' as well as those of Eudora's soi-disant 'reformed Tenant,' the disreputable Arsace, and of the imbecile Governor, the very incarnation of an incompetent magistrate' ('the perfect draught of a most brainless, imperious upstart"), are fairly amusing. The above exhaust the list of the extant dramatic works of Chapman written entirely by himself. On his Maske of the Middle Temple and Lyncolns Inne, performed at the celebration of the nuptials of the Princess Elisabeth and the Elector Palatine in February 1613, it is needless to dwell. It formed one of a series of masks contributed by Campion, Chapman, and Beaumont (who wrote that of The Inner Temple and Gray's Inn) on this occasion; but though there was never a finer subject for a composition of the kind, it cannot be said that Chapman's effort is in any way remarkable; the lyrics are indeed poor. The Mask dle Temple coln's Inn written by Chapman with other authors: But, like most of his contemporaries, he was associated Plays with other dramatists in the production of plays. Of the comedy of Eastward Hoe incidental mention has conjointly already been made, and as I should judge this exceedingly well-written piece to owe more to Chapman than to Marston, while Jonson probably only contributed some touches, this may be the most appropriate place in which to speak of it. Eastward Hoe (printed 1605) may be unhesitatingly Chapman, described as one of the liveliest and healthiest, as it is one of the best-constructed, comedies of its age. Unlike the plays of Westward Hoe and Northward Hoe1, with 'Peace varlet; dost chop with me? I say it is imagined thou hast murdered Lysander. How it will be proved I know not. Thou shalt therefore presently be had to execution, as justice in such cases requireth. Soldiers take him away. The Governor's justice has the advantage of logical sequence over Dogberry's, which it resembles in phraseology (Much Ado, iv. 2). 2 They are all given in Nichols, Progresses &c. of James I, vol. iii. Jonson was at this time absent abroad. John Taylor, the Water-Poet, contributed an account of the Sea-Fights and Fire-Workes' (accompanied by verses) entitled Heaven's Blessing and Earth's Joy. Vol. i. p. 525. * Vide infra, under Dekker. Marston, ward Ho |