THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

passivity into striking action. Aspatia disguises herself as her brother and provokes Amintor to a duel in which he
fatally wounds her. Evadne kills the lecherous king by first tying him to his bed (‘What pretty new device is this,
Evadne? ... By, by love. | This is a quaint one’, he excitedly asks), and then stabbing him. The play ends with the
death of Aspatia, with Evadne’s suicide following her rejection by Amintor, and with Amintor killing himself beside
the corpse of his first love (‘Here’s to be with thee, love!’).
Lysippus, the successor to the throne at the sanguinary climax of The Maid’s Tragedy, draws a moral conclusion
from the events he has witnessed. ‘On lustful kings, | Unlook’d-for, sudden deaths from heaven are sent’, he
proclaims. He then adds a second warning: ‘Curst is he that is their instrument’. Lysippus’s words might act as motto
for any of the revenge plays that stemmed from Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and as a comment on the shady, sinister,
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libidinous worlds of those Jacobean dramas set in the palaces of Catholic Europe. George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois
(c. 1604, printed 1607), based on the dangerous career of a protégé of the brother of Henry III of France, offers a
highly unflattering picture of the nastiness of the later sixteenth-century French court. King Henry himself confesses
that his own circle is tawdry compared to that of Queen Elizabeth in England:
... as Courts should be th’abstracts of their kingdoms
In all the beauty, state and worth they hold,
So is hers, amply, and by her informed.
The world is not contracted to a man
With more proportion and expression
Than in her Court, her kingdom. Our French Court
Is a mere mirror of confusion to it.
Chapman (?1559-1634) is offering more than a golden retrospect on Elizabeth; he is outlining one of the many
juxtapositions on which his play is built. Bussy, like so many of the marginalized malcontents who will follow him in
the plays of the 1600s, is a misfit in the discordant and corrupt courtly world in which he moves. His opening
soliloquy shifts restlessly between images of uncertain Fortune and equally uncertain Virtue, images which echo
Plutarch’s Moralia rather than the Homer with whose name Chapman’s is most frequently associated (his translations
of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the work that he ‘was born to do’, appeared in 1616). Throughout the play Bussy stands
quarrelsomely alone, at times the cursed instrument of the mighty, at others the disinherited outsider who vindicates
no moral causes but his own. At the end, entrapped and mortally wounded by the chief of his many enemies, he props
himself up on his sword and proclaims himself a Roman statue, already a monument to his own future fame.
Chapman’s later tragedies, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (c. 1610, printed 1613) and the two parts of The
Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (c. 1607, printed 1608), return to the dark intrigues of the French
court and to historical characters flawed by the very grandeur of their ambitions. The ‘Senecal’ Clermont D’Ambois,
urged by Bussy’s angry ghost to avenge his brother, insists on an honourable course in gaining his ends but finally
finds himself unable to carry on living as ‘the slave of power’ amid ‘all the horrors of the vicious time’ and resolves to
kill himself. Bussy may be revenged, but the ultimate triumph belongs to a corrupt society. The central character of
The Conspiracy ... of Byron is, by contrast, supremely confident of his own independent distinction (‘... men in
themselves entire | March safe with naked feet on coals of fire: | I build not outward, nor depend on props’). When he
excitedly intrigues against the order imposed by Henry IV, as if he were testing his superior prowess, the King’s
justice catches him out and condemns him. Byron, faced with an imminent death-sentence, oscillates frenziedly
between defiance and acceptance, between an insistence on his justification and a terror of ultimate negation.
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The ambivalent gestures of Chapman’s plays are to some extent reflected in those of Jonson’s sometime bitter
enemy and later cordial friend, John Marston (1576-1634). When Jonson privately jested that ‘Marston wrott his
Father in Lawes preachings and his father in Law his Commedies’ he was not necessarily poking fun at Marston’s
vocation (he followed his father-in-law into the Anglican priesthood in 1609). Jonson was, perhaps, voicing his
unease at the moral censoriousness which, coupled with an indeterminacy of genre, marks much of Marston’s work.
This indeterminacy is particularly evident in the two-part play, Antonio and Mellida, written for a boys’ company in
c. 1599 and printed in 1602. The first part explores the ‘comic crosses of true love’ in upper-class Italy; the second
(sometimes known as Antonio’s Revenge) deals far more darkly, in the manner of Hamlet, with tragic crosses,
intrigues, ghosts, feigned madness and, above all, revenge. Marston’s discordant moral vision is reflected in his
equally discordant rhetoric. He echoes Senecan stoicism and Senecan bombast, but he adds to it his own distinct