It is not impossible that the merit of pure and lucid style which distinguishes the best comedies of Chapman from the bulk of his other writings may in part be owing to the slighter value set by the author on the workmanship of these. By temperament and inclination he was rather an epic or tragic than a comic poet ; and in writing verse of a tragic or epic quality he evidently felt it incumbent on him to assert the dignity of his office, to inflate and exalt his style with all helps of metaphor and hyperbole, to stiffen the march of his metre and harden the structure of his language; and hence he is but too prone to rely at need on false props of adventitious and barbaric dignity, to strut on stilts or to swim on bladders: whereas in writing for the comic stage he was content to forget, or at least to forgo, this imaginary dignity and duty; he felt himself no longer bound to talk big or to stalk stiffly, and in consequence was not too high-minded to move easily and speak gracefully. It is clear that he set no great store by his comic talent as compared with the other gifts of his genius; of all his comedies two only, All Fools and The Widow’s Tears, have dedications prefixed to them, and in both cases the tone of the dedication is almost apologetic in its slighting reference to the slight worth of the work presented; a tone by no means to be ascribed in this case to a general and genuine humility, since the dedications prefixed to his various poems, and to two among his tragedies published under his own eye, are remarkable for their lofty and dignified self-assertion. The fact that of these two tragedies, one, The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, was apparently unsuccessful on the stage, and the other, Caesar and Pompey, seems never to have obtained a chance of appearing on the boards at all, may naturally have moved the author to assert their right to respect and acceptance with more studied emphasis than usual; in the earlier instance at least he is emphatic enough in his appeal from the verdict of the ‘maligners’ with whom he complains that it met ‘in the scenical representation,’ to the ‘approbation of more worthy judgments’ which ‘even therein’ it did not fail to obtain; and in the second case, though he appears to apologise for the lack of ‘novelty and fashion’ in a play ‘written so long since’ that it ‘had not the timely ripeness of that age’ (seventy-two) ‘that, I thank God, I yet find no fault withal for any such defects,’ yet he is apparently and reasonably confident that the offering of his ‘martial history’ is one honourable alike to poet and to patron. Both plays are rich in rhetorical passages of noble eloquence; but in all points of workmanlike construction and dramatic harmony they are incomparably inferior to the better sort of his comedies.
The year of the publication of All Fools was memorable to Chapman for a more hazardous misadventure on a more serious stage than the failure of a comedy on the boards, for which he had to thank the merited success of a play whose strange fortune it was to prove as tragical in its sequence as merry in itself, thus combining in a new fashion the two main qualities of Bottom’s immortal interlude. All readers will remember the base offence taken and the base revenge threatened by the son of Darnley or of Rizzio for a passing jest aimed at those among his countrymen who had anticipated Dr. Johnson’s discovery of the finest prospect ever seen by a native of Scotland; none can forget the gallantry with which Ben Jonson, a Scot by descent, of whom it might have been said as truly as of the greatest in the generation before him that he ‘never feared the face of man,’ approved himself the like-minded son of a Roman-spirited mother by coming forward to share the certainty of imprisonment and the probability of mutilation with the two comrades who without his knowledge had inserted such perilous matter into their common work; and many will wish with me that he had never borne a nearer and less honourable relation to a king who combined with the northern virulence and pedantry which he may have derived from his tutor Buchanan a savour of the worst qualities of the worst Italians of the worst period of Italian decadence. It was worthier of the great spirit and the masterful genius of Jonson to be the subject of his tyranny than the laureate of his court. Far more fitly, had such a one then been born, would that office have been filled by any scribbling Scot of the excremental school of letters who might have sought and found in his natural prince a congenial patron with whom to bathe his sympathetic spirit in the pure morality, while swimming with somewhat short strokes in ‘the deep delicious stream of the Latinity,’ of Petronius Arbiter. Such a Crispinulus or Crispinaccio would have found his proper element in an atmosphere whose fumes should never have been inhaled by the haughty and high-souled author of the Poetaster; and from behind his master’s chair, with no need to seek for fear if not for shame the dastardly and lying shelter of a pseudonym which might at a pinch have been abjured, and the responsibility for its use shifted from his own shoulders to those of a well-meaning but invisible friend, the laurelled lackey of King James might as securely have launched his libels against the highest heads of poets to whom in that age all eyes looked up which would have looked down on him, as ever did the illustrious Latinist Buchanan against the mother of the worthy patron whose countenance would probably have sufficed to protect the meanest and obscurest creature of his common and unclean favour against all recrimination on the part of Shakespeare or of Jonson, of Beaumont or of Webster, of Fletcher or of Chapman.
The comedy thus celebrated for the peril it brought upon the ears and noses of its authors has of itself merit enough to have won for writers of less previous note a sufficient share of more enviable celebrity. It is one of the most spirited and brilliant plays belonging to that class of which the two most famous examples are The Merry Wives of Windsor and Every Man in his Humour; and for life and movement, interest and gaiety, it may challenge a comparison even with these. All the actors in EastwardHo, down to the very slightest, such as the drawer, the butcher’s man, and the keeper of the prison, have some quality and character of their own which gives them a place in the comic action; and in no play of the time do we get such a true taste of the old city life so often turned to mere ridicule and caricature by playwrights of less good humour, or feel about us such a familiar air of ancient London as blows through every scene; the homely household of the rich tradesman, the shop with its stall in front, the usurer’s lodging, the waterside tavern, the Thames wharves, stand out as sharply as if etched by the pen of Dickens or the needle of Whistler. The London of Hogarth, as set before us in that immortal series of engravings for which he is said to have taken the hint from this comedy, does not seem nearer or more actual than this elder London of Jonson, Chapman, and Marston; and the more high-flying genius of Frank Quicksilver is as real and lifelike as the humbler debauchery and darker doom of Tom Idle. The parts of Mistress Touchstone and Gertrude are worthy of Moliere in his homelier mood; and but for one or two momentary indecencies dropped here and there to attest the passage of Marston, the scenes in which they figure would be as perfect and blameless examples of pure broad comedy as any stage can show. The fluttering and exuberant ambition of the would-be Caelimene or Millamant of the city is painted with such delightful force and freshness, her imperial volubility of contempt, the joyous and tremulous eagerness with which she obeys the precept of the Psalmist to ‘forget her own people and her father’s house,’ her alternate phases of gracious patronage and overflowing obloquy, are so charming in the buoyancy and fertility of their changes that we are rejoiced when after the term of adversity so differently put to use by the prodigal daughter and the profligate apprentice Frank and Gertrude are alike restored to the favour of the excellent old citizen by the kind offices of his worthy son-in-law. Not only have the poets given proof of a gentler morality and a juster sense of justice than the great painter who followed long after in the track of their invention, but they have contrived even to secure our cordial regard for the kindly virtues of the respectable and industrious characters whose aim it is to rise by thrift and honesty; and we salute the promotion of ‘Master Deputy’s worship’ to the proud office of substitute for the alderman of his ward with a satisfaction which no man surely ever felt in the exaltation of Hogarth’s Lord Mayor to sit in
judgment on his luckless fellow. The figures of Gertrude’s gallant knight and his crew of Virginian adventurers, whose expedition finally culminates in a drunken shipwreck on the Thames, are as vivid and as pleasant as any of these other studies; and the scenes in which the jealous usurer is induced by the devices of Quicksilver and Sir Petronel to bring his disguised wife into the company of her paramour and reassure her supposed scruples with his pithy arguments against conjugal fidelity, while he lets fly at her supposed husband the well-worn jests which recoil on his own head, have in them enough of wit and humorous invention to furnish forth the whole five acts of an ordinary comedy of intrigue. Even in these sketches from the prosaic life of their day the great and generous poets of that age were as prodigal of the riches of their genius as in the tragic and romantic work of their higher moods. The style of Chapman is perceptible in some of the best of these scenes in the third act as well as in the moral passage of metrical philosophy put into the lips of the half-drowned Quicksilver in the fourth, where only the last editor has taken note of his handiwork.
Two allusions in the mouth of the usurer, one to the ship of famous Draco, and one to the camel’s horns of which we hear something too often from this poet, are in the unmistakable manner of Chapman. Other such points might perhaps be discovered; but on the whole we may probably feel safe in assigning to each of the three associates as equal a share in the labour and the credit as they bore in the peril entailed on them by a comedy which, though disclaiming all unfriendly aim at rivalry with one of similar title already familiar to the stage, must probably and deservedly have eclipsed the success of two plays not published till two years later under cognate names by Decker and Webster; though the plot of Northward Ho is not wanting in humour and ingenuity, and in Westward Ho there is one scene of exquisite and incongruous beauty in which we recognise at once the tender and reckless hand which five years earlier had inserted into the yet more inappropriate framework of the Satiromastix as sweet an episode of seeming martyrdom and chastity secured under the shelter of a sleep like death.
In his next play Chapman reassumed the more poetical style of comedy which in Eastward Ho had been put off for the plainer garb of realism. The Gentleman Usher is distinguishable from all his other works by the serious grace and sweetness of the love-scenes, and the higher tone of feminine character and masculine regard which is sustained throughout the graver passages. Elsewhere it should seem that Chapman had scorned to attempt or failed to achieve the task of rousing and retaining the chief interest of his reader in the fortune of two young lovers; but in this play he has drawn such a passionate and innocent couple with singular tenderness and delicacy. The broader effects of humour are comic enough, though perhaps somewhat too much prolonged and too often repeated; but the charm of the play lies in the bright and pure quality of its romantic part. The scene in which the prince and Margaret, debarred by tyranny and intrigue from the right of public marriage, espouse each other in secret by a pretty ceremony devised on the spot, in a dialogue of the wounded Strozza with the wife who has restored him to spiritual strength by ‘the sweet food of her divine advice,’ are models of the simple, luminous, and fervent style of poetry proper to romantic comedy at its highest. A noble passage in the fifth act of this play contains, as far as I know, the first direct protest against the principle of monarchy to be found in our poetical or dramatic literature; his last year’s hazardous experience of royal susceptibilities may not improbably have given edge to the author’s pen as it set down these venturous lines in a time when as yet no king had been taught, in the phrase of old Lord Auchinleck, that he had a joint in his neck:-
And what’s a prince? Had all been virtuous men,
There never had been prince upon the earth,
And so no subject: all men had been princes.
A virtuous man is subject to no prince,
But to his soul and honour; which are laws
That carry fire and sword within themselves,
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 loathed than soothed?
I should be surprised to find in any poet of Chapman’s age an echo of such clear and daring words as these, which may suffice to show that the oligarchic habit of mind to which I have before referred in him was the fruit of no sycophantic temper, no pliant and prostitute spirit, the property of a courtier or a courtesan, but sprung rather from pure intellectual haughtiness and a contempt for the mob of minds. Nevertheless it is well worth remark that such a deliberate utterance of republican principle should then have been endured on the stage; that so loud a blast of direct challenge to the dominant superstition of the day should have been blown so near the court in the ears of a popular audience by a poet who, though at no time chargeable with any stain of venal or parasitic servility, was afterwards the habitual and grateful recipient of patronage from princes and favourites, and at all times, it must be confessed, in all his other works a strenuous and consistent supporter of the tradition of royalty against the conception of democracy.
The opening scene of Monsieur d’Olive, the next on the list of Chapman’s comedies, is one of the most admirable in any play. More than once indeed the author has managed his overture, or what in the classic dialect of the old French stage was called the exposition, with a skill and animation giving promise of better things to come than he has provided; as though he had spent the utmost art his genius could command in securing the interest of his audience at the first start, and then left it for chance to support, letting his work float at will on the lazy waters of caprice or negligence. No more impressive introduction to a play could have been devised than the arrival of the chief person, newly landed in high hopes and spirits from a long voyage, before the closed gates and curtained casements of an old friend’s house, within which tapers are burning at noon, and before which the master walks sadly up and down, and repels his proffered embrace; and the whole scene following which explains the trouble of one household and the mourning of another is a model of clear, natural, dignified dialogue, in which every word is harmonious, appropriate, and noble. The grace and interest of this exposition are more or less well sustained during the earlier part of the play; but as the underplot opens out at greater length, the main interest is more and more thrust aside, cramped as it were for space and squeezed out of shape, till at last it is fairly hustled into a corner of the action to make way for the overwrought fooleries of the gull d’Olive and the courtiers who play upon his vanity; and this underplot, diverting enough in a slight way for one or two scenes, is stretched out on the tenterhooks of farcical rhetoric and verbose dialogue till the reader finds himself defrauded of the higher interest which he was led to expect, and wearied of the empty substitute which the waywardness or indolence of the author has chosen to palm off on him in its stead. Towards the end indeed there is a profuse waste of good points and promising possibilities; the humorous ingenuity of the devices so well contrived to wind up together and in order the double thread of the main plot is stinted of room to work in and display its excellent quality of invention, and the final scene, which should have explained and reconciled all doubts and errors at large with no less force and fullness of careful dramatic capacity than was employed upon their exposition, is hastily patched up and slurred over to leave place for a last superfluous exhibition of such burlesque eloquence as had already been admitted to encumber the close of another comedy, more perfect than this in construction, but certainly not more interesting in conception. In spite, however, of this main blemish in the action, Monsieur d’Olive may properly be counted among the more notable and successful plays of Chapman.
Of his two remaining comedies I may as well say a word here as later. Mayday, which was printed five years after the two last we have examined, is full of the bustle and justle of intrigue which ma
y be expected in such comedies of incident as depend rather on close and crowded action than on fine or forcible character for whatever they may merit of success. There is no touch in it of romance or poetical interest, but several of the situations and dialogues may have credit for some share of vigour and humour. But of these qualities Chapman gave much fuller proof next year in the unchivalrous comedy of The Widow’s Tears. This discourteous drama is as rich in comic force as it is poor in amiable sentiment. There is a brutal exuberant fun throughout the whole action which finds its complete expression and consummation in the brawny gallantry and muscular merriment of Tharsalio. A speculative commentator might throw out some conjecture to the effect that the poet at fifty-three may have been bent on revenge for a slight offered to some unseasonable courtship of his own by a lady less amenable to the proffer of future fame than the ‘belle marquise’ who has the credit for all time to come of having lent a humble ear to the haughty suit and looked with a gracious eye on the grey hairs of the great Corneille. Bur whether this keen onslaught on the pretensions of the whole sex to continence or constancy were or were not instigated by any individual rancour, the comedy is written with no little power and constructed with no little ingenuity; the metrical scenes are pure and vigorous in style, and the difficulty of fitting such a story to the stage is surmounted with scarcely less of dexterity than of daring. The action of the last scene is again hampered by the intrusion of forced and misplaced humours, and while the superfluous underlings of the play are breaking and bandying their barren jests, the story is not so much wound up as huddled up in whispers and by-play; but it may certainly be pleaded in excuse of the poet that the reconciliation of the Ephesian matron to her husband was a somewhat difficult ceremony to exhibit at length and support with any plausible or effectual explanation.
The Complete Poetical Works of George Chapman Page 231