A Torch Borne in the Wind

George Chapman reveals, once again, that magnificent speeches alone cannot make a magnificent play.

After my second reading of his most famous work, The Tragedy of Bussy d'Ambois, I would never deny that he could write brilliantly:

Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream
But of a shadow, summed with all his substance;
And as great seamen, using all their powers
And skills in Neptune's deep invisible paths,
In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass,
To put a girdle round about the world;
When they have done it, coming near their haven,
Are glad to give a warning-piece, and call
A poor staid fisherman, that never passed
His country's sight, to waft and guide them in;
So when we wander furthest through the waves
Of glassy Glory and the gulfs of State,
Topt with all titles, spreading all our reaches,
As if each private arm would sphere the world,
We must to Virtue for her guide resort,
Or we shall shipwrack in our safest port.

Yet Chapman, for all of his verbal energy, seemed unable to bring his people to life.

In Specimens Of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time Of Shakespeare, Charles Lamb wrote of Chapman, "Dramatic imitation was not his talent. He could not go out of himself, as Shakespeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate other existences."

I can see this at work in the play, where every character sounds exactly the same, where people step onstage to speak one line in one scene, and are then killed offstage in the next, and where the motivations that become clear in the characters of Shakespeare, Webster, and Ford, can be difficult to find in the disembodied voices here. These characters are not even the colourful puppets of The Revenger's Tragedy; they are words on a page that burst off in unison like one authorial storm.

The storm can be lively and vivid:

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:
When she finds any filth in men, she feasts,
And with her black throat bruits it through the world
Being sound and healthful; 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 strait;
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 clasped in her own arms;
And therefore, Cousin Guise, let us avoid her.

These passages of lightning are often followed by a rain of mud, in lines uttered by characters whose shifts in personality and purpose make no sense to me. As a result, I wobble between staring-eyed respect and baffled frustration. I want to enjoy this play, but the mud is thick.

[The lines of the play are from Bussy d'Ambois, A Mermaid Dramabook, Hill and Wang, New York, 1966.]