The old English dramatists

by James Russell Lowell

After the Chancellor’s sentence, his secretary says:—

“I could have wished him fall on softer ground

For his good parts.”

Bacon’s monument, in St. Michael’s Church at St. Alban’s, was erected by his secretary, Sir Thomas Meautys. Bacon did not appear at his trial; but there are several striking parallels between his letters of confession and the speech you have just heard.

Another posthumously published tragedy of Chapman’s, the “Revenge for Honor,” is, in conception, the most original of them all, and the plot seems to be of his own invention. It has great improbabilities, but as the story is Oriental, we find it easier to forgive them. It is, on the whole, a very striking play, and with more variety of character in it than is common with Chapman.

In general he seems to have been led to the choice of his heroes (and these sustain nearly the whole weight of the play in which they figure) by some half-conscious sympathy of temperament. They are impetuous, have an overweening self-confidence, and an orotund way of expressing it that fitted them perfectly to be the mouth-pieces for an eloquence always vehement and impassioned, sometimes rising to a sublimity of self-assertion. Where it is fine, it is nobly fine, but too often it raves itself into a kind of fury recalling Hamlet’s word “robustious,” and seems to be shouted through a speaking-trumpet in a gale of wind. He is especially fond of describing battles, and the rush of his narration is then like a charge of cavalry. Of his first tragedy, “Bussy d’Ambois,” Dryden says, with that mixture of sure instinct and hasty judgment which makes his prose so refreshing: “I have sometimes wondered in the reading what has become of those glaring colors which amazed me in ‘Bussy d’Ambois’ upon the theatre; but when I had taken up what I supposed a falling star, I found I had been cozened with a jelly, nothing but a cold dull mass, which glittered no longer than it was shooting; a dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperbole; the sense of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and, to sum up all, incorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense; or, at best, a scantling of wit which lay gasping for life and groaning beneath a heap of rubbish.”

There is hyperbole in Chapman, and perhaps Dryden saw it the more readily and disliked it the more that his own tragedies are full of it. But Dryden was always hasty, not for the first time in speaking of Chapman. I am pretty safe in saying that he had probably only run his eye over “Bussy d’Ambois,” and that it did not happen to fall on any of those finely inspired passages which are not only more frequent in it than in any other of Chapman’s plays, but of a more purely poetical quality. Dryden was irritated by a consciousness of his own former barbarity of taste, which had led him to prefer Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas. What he says as to the success of “Bussy d’Ambois” on the stage is interesting.

In saying that the sense of “one line is prodigiously expanded into ten,” Dryden certainly puts his finger on one of Chapman’s faults. He never knew when to stop. But it is not true that the sense is expanded, if by that we are to understand that Chapman watered his thought to make it fill up. There is abundance of thought in him, and of very suggestive thought too, but it is not always in the right place. He is the most sententious of our poets—sententious to a fault, as we feel in his continuation of “Hero and Leander.” In his annotations to the sixteenth book of his translation of the Iliad, he seems to have been thinking of himself in speaking of Homer. He says: “And here have we ruled a case against our plain and smug writers, that, because their own unwieldiness will not let them rise themselves, would have every man grovel like them.... But herein this case is ruled against such men that they affirm these hyperthetical or superlative sort of expressions and illustrations are too bold and bumbasted, and out of that word is spun that which they call our fustian, their plain writing being stuff nothing so substantial, but such gross sowtege or hairpatch as every goose may eat oats through.... But the chief end why I extend this annotation is only to entreat your note here of Homer’s manner of writing, which, to utter his after-store of matter and variety, is so presse and puts on with so strong a current that it far overruns the most laborious pursuer if he have not a poetical foot and Poesy’s quick eye to guide it.”

Chapman has indeed a “great after-store of matter” which encumbers him, and does sometimes “far overrun the most laborious pursuer,” but many a poetical foot, with Poesy’s quick eye to guide it, has loved to follow. He has kindled an enthusiasm of admiration such as no other poet of his day except Shakespeare has been able to kindle. In this very play of “Bussy d’Ambois” there is a single line of which Charles Lamb says that “in all poetry I know nothing like it.” When Chapman is fine, it is in a way all his own. There is then an incomparable amplitude in his style, as when, to quote a phrase from his translation of Homer, the Lightener Zeus “lets down a great sky out of heaven.” There is a quality of northwestern wind in it, which, if sometimes too blusterous, is yet taken into the lungs with an exhilarating expansion. Hyperbole is overshooting the mark. No doubt Chapman sometimes did this, but this excess is less depressing than its opposite, and at least proves vigor in the bowman. His bow was like that of Ulysses, which none could bend but he, and even where the arrow went astray, it sings as it flies, and one feels, to use his own words, as if it were

“the shaft