CHAPMAN General Editor GEO.RBAKER (lass \ ^^ 'opwiglil N^ COIAKKUIT DKPOSIT. €8e S&dU$Mmtt0 ^ttitfi SECTION III THE ENGLISH DRAMA FROM ITS BEGINNING TO THE PRESENT DAY GENERAL EDITOR GEORGE PIERCE BAKER PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HASVABO UNIVKRSITY GEORGE CHAPMAN From the frontispiece of The Whole Worh of Horner^ 1 6 1 6 ALL FOOLES AND THE GENTLEMAN USHER By GEORGE CHAPMAN EDITED BY THOMAS MARC PARROTT, Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY BOSTON, U.S.A., AND LONDON D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS 1907 ] U^rtARY of COriGRESsj I wo Couies Received | SEP 6 »9or Cooyncht Bntry .A 3T"? j COPY a( ^^ COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY D. C. HEATH & CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED J pvtfatotv Bott "^ In this volume I have attempted to present the student of Elizabethan drama with a new and carefully edited text of two of Chapman's best comedies. I have in each case printed from transcripts made of copies in the Library of Edinburgh University and in the Bodleian, and I would offer my thanks in passing for the unfailing kind- ness and courtesy which attended my work in both places. The transcripts in the first place and the proof after- wards have been carefully collated with the original copies. The text of both the plays in this volume has ■ also been corrected in proof by copies of the Quartos in the Boston Public Library. For this final collation I am indebted to the General Editor of this Series. It is my hope that the text here presented is as nearly accurate as it can be made. In the brief Biography I have attempted to restate the few known facts of Chapman's life in such a way as to give what seems to me a more connected view of his work than is usually afforded. In the Introduction I have tried to trace the development of Chapman's art as a comic dramatist, and to fix his conception of comedy as com- pared with that of contemporary writers. The Notes are intended to show Chapman's occasional borrowings from older works, to explain obscure allusions, and when necessary to elucidate involved passages by the method of paraphrase. The interpretation of single words has been entrusted to the Glossary. In the preparation of this edition I have received as- sistance from many friends. I wish to express in partic- ular my thanks to Mr. C. W. Kennedy, of Princeton, vi JBrrtator^ il^ote who first called my attention to the dependence of All Fools upon the Adelphi of Terence ; to Dr. Henry Brad- ley for repeated assistance in the interpretation and emen- dation of the text 5 to Dr. Furnivall, Mr. P. A. Daniel, and Mr. T. J. Wise for valuable suggestions in regard to the plays in general and the question of the authen- ticity of the dedication of All Fools in particular^ and to Professor E. K. Rand for aid in tracing two of Chap- man' s Latin passages. Mr. V. L. Collins, of the Prince- ton University Library, enabled me to run down a specially puzzling allusion. Finally, my thanks are due to Mr. W. H. demons, of Princeton, for his careful reading of the proof-sheets, and to the General Editor of this Series for much salutary criticism as the book was passing through the press. T. M. P. 'BfOQtapl^t The little that we know of Chapman's life is derived mainly from Anthony a Wood. (^Athenae Oxonienses, 169 1.) The inscrip- tion ^ on his portrait prefixed to The Whole Works of Homer, 16 16, points to 1559 as the year of his birth. In his poem Euthymiae Raptus Chapman himself mentions Hitchin in Hertfordshire as his native place. About 1574, according to Wood, Chapman, ** being well grounded in school-learning, was sent to the University, but whether first to this of Oxon. or that of Cambridge is to me unknown. Sure I am that he spent some time in Oxon,^ where he was observed to be most excellent in the Latin and Greek tongues, but not in logic or philosophy, and therefore I presume that that was the reason why he took no degree here." From 1574 to 1594 we know nothing whatever of Chapman's life. Acheson ^ believes him to have been a schoolmaster at Hitchin, but this assumption rests mainly upon the identification of Chapman with Holofernes in Love's Labour 'sLost, an identification which is not likely to commend itself to most students of Chapman. It has also been assumed that the poet spent some part of this time upon the Continent. The evidence drawn for this opinion from Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, may be thrown aside, for it is most unlikely that Chapman had anything to do with the com- position of that play.* On the other hand, in the Second Hymn of Chapman's Shadoiv of Night, 1594, there is a vivid description 1 Georgius Chapmanus, Homeri Metaphrastes. jEta : lvii. mdcxvi. 2 Warton, History of English Poetry, IV, J2I, States that he spent two years at Trinity College, Oxford. 3 Shakespeare and the Rival Poet, Arthur Acheson. John Lane, 190J. 4 For a discussion of the authorship of this play see Ward, English Dramatic Literature, u,<^Z7 seq., Fleay, Chronicle of the English Drama, II, 156 seq., and Robertson, Did Shakespeare write Titus Andronicus? 12} seq. There is no reason, except a publisher's statement twenty years after the poet's death, for ascribing this play to Chapman. viii llBiograpl)^ of a skirmish between English and Spanish troops near Nimeguen in Holland. In this passage Chapman, in speaking of the English sol- diers, uses the pronoun " we," as if he had been one of them, and there is, after all, no reason why Chapman, like Ben Jonson, should not have seen service in the Low Countries. In 1594 we find Chapman in London engaged in '* virtuous and elaborate studies," ^ composing poetry, and apparently vieing with Shakespeare for the patronage of the liberal and art-loving South- ampton. The Shadoiv of Night appeared in 15945 in 1595 O'viJ's Banquet of Sense (not a translation from Ovid, as a German writer ^ has stated, but an original poem), A Coronet for his Mistresse Phil- osophies and The Amorous Zodiacke. ^ In 1596 Chapman wrote a vigorous bit of verse in praise of Eng- lish valour, entitled De Guiana, as a preface to an account of Eng- lish exploration in South America; and in 1598 he published a conclusion to Marlowe's unfinished Hero and Leander, dedicating the work to Lady Walsingham, the wife of his friend and patron, Sir Thomas Walsingham.^ In the same year he dedicated his first attempt at a translation of the Iliad, Se-ven Books of the Iliads of Homer, to the Earl of Essex, and a little later in the same year he published Achilles'' Shield, from the eighteenth book of the Iliad. By this time Chapman had already begun to write for the stage, for Meres in Wit'' s Treasury, 1598, mentions him as one of the best writers both for comedy and tragedy. Many of his early plays have no doubt perished ; the only two that we know to have been pro- duced before Meres wrote — The Blind Beggar of Alexandria and An Humorous Day'' s Mirth — are both comedies. The first of these plays was produced by the Admiral's Men at Henslowe's theatre, the Rose, on Feb. 12, 1595-6, with great success, and was performed some twenty times before May, 1597, when it yielded the stage to the Comedy of Humours, which we may safely identify with An Humorous Day"" s Mirth. During the following year Chapman con- tinued to work for Henslowe. He was engaged on a *' plotte of 1 Wood, At'hen. Oxon. 11, 576. 2 A. LohfF, George Chapman : Berliner Dissertation., 1905, p. 26. 3 Sidney Lee, Mo2«rn Philology., Oct. 1905, has shown that this poem is a translation from the French of Gilles Durant. 4 See /?/)/'c«^fx, p. I J9, note 2, for further information about Sir Thomas Walsingham. Biograpl)^ ix Bengemen's," possibly the tragedy of Mortimer ^^ of which Jonson's plot has come down to us. He received payments from Henslowe for several plays now lost : The iylle of a nvoman^ usually cited as The Will of a Woman^ but according to the latest editor of Henslowe' 8 Diary '^ more probably, The Isle {or III) of a Woman • The Fountain of Neiu Fashions^ and a Pastoral Tragedy. He also composed for Henslowe the first draft of his All Fools, called origin- ally The World Runs on Wheels, and later All Fools but the Fool.^ The Blind Beggar was published in 1598 and An Humorous Day'' s Mirth in 1599, both apparently without Chapman's consent or, at least, supervision. In the latter year he apparently severed his connection with Henslowe, as his name does not occur again in the Diary. It is commonly stated that about this time Chapman withdrew from the stage to devote himself to his translation of the Iliad. This, however, is far from probable. The first instalments of this work appeared in 1598 before Chapman broke with Henslowe, the next not before 1609, at which time Chapman was under the patron- age of Prince Henry. It is more likely that about the close of the sixteenth century Chapman simply transferred his services as a play- wright from Henslowe's company to the Chapel Boys, who were playing at the private theatre in Blackfriars from 1598 to 1603. For this company he seems to have written May-Day, probably acted about 1600 or 1601, although not printed till 16 1 1 ; Sir Giles Goosecap,* published anonymously in 1606, but in large part, if not wholly, the work of Chapman in 1601 or 1602 5 The Gentle- man Usher, ^ written possibly in 1602 ; and to have revised All Fools in the form in which it has come down to us, in 1602 or 1603. 1 The tragedy mentioned by Henslowe on Jan. 4 and Jan. 8, 1597/8 may be the same as this, or another tragedy, nameless and lost. 2 Henslowe's Diary., p. 226, W. W. Greg, 1904. Hazlitt {Manual for the Collector., etc., p. 94) states that an early MS. copy of The Gentleman Usher was sold among Heber's MSS. under the name of the The JVill of a Woman. I Henslowe's entry on July 2, 1599. 4 See The Authorship of Sir Gyles Goosecappe., Modern Philology, July, 1906. 5 The date of The Gentleman Usher is uncertain, but it falls between the performance of Sir Giles Goosecap, to which it alludes (see Note 171, 7-8, p. 284), and the entry by Valentine Syms in the Stationers'' Register, November 26, 1605. The latter play ^ was performed at court before King James on New Year's Night, 1604-5, ^^^ published in the same year. Monsieur D' Oli've was written probably in 1603 or 1604, since it was performed by Her Majesty's Children of the Revels, the com- pany which had succeeded the Chapel Children at the Blackfriars Theatre, in Jan., 1604. For the same company Chapman in 1605 joined with Jonson and Marston in the composition of Eastward Ho, a play whose satirical remarks on King James's countrymen brought down upon the authors the royal displeasure and led to the imprison- ment of both Jonson and Chapman. They were even threatened with mutilation, and Jonson' s old mother secretly conveyed to him a paper of *' lustie strong poison " that, if things came to the worst, he might save himself by a Roman death from torture and public shame. An interesting series of letters written by Chapman and Jonson on this occasion, entreating the pardon of the King and the favour of the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Salisbury, the Earl of Pembroke, and other courtly patrons of literature, was discovered by Mr. Dobell in 1901 and reprinted in Professor Schelling's Eastivard Hoe and The Alchemist.'^ Jonson and Chapman were soon released from prison, — Marston seems to have escaped altogether, — and the sensation caused by the affair undoubtedly served as an adver- tisement of Chapman's work as a dramatist and led to the speedy publication of a number of his comedies. Two editions of Eastivard Ho and one of All Fools appeared in 1605 ; and Sir Giles Goose- cap, Monsieur D^ Oli-ve, and The Gentleman Usher, in 1606. Mr. Fleay ^ believes that the governor whose foolish words and actions furnish the farcical close of the Widoiv'' s Tears is a satire on the judicial authorities with whom Chapman had come into contact at the time of his arrest. If this be so, we may date this play about 1606 — it was not published until 161 2 — and see in it the last of Chapman's comedies. As Meres tells us. Chapman had before 1598 obtained a high reputation for his tragedies, but the earliest play of this sort which 1 Cunningham, Revels Accounts^ published for Shakespeare Society^ p. 204. The entry is forged, but is supposed to be based upon genuine docu- ments. 2 Belles-Lettres Series, pp. 159-164. 3 Chronicle of the English Drama, l,6l. has been preserved, Bussy D' Ambois,^ cannot have been composed in its present form before the death of Elizabeth m 1603. This play is, then, the first of a group of dramas dealing with events in the contemporary history of France on which Chapman's fame as a tragic dramatist depends. Bussy was followed in the spring of 1608 — not 1605,^ as stated in the Dictionary of National Biography — by the double play, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron. The per- formance of these plays, in one of which the reigning queen of France was represented as boxing the ears of her royal husband's mistress, gave great offence to the French ambassador, who suc- ceeded in having the performance stopped, and endeavoured, though apparently in vain, to have the author punished. Chapman, how- ever, found great difficulty in securing a license for the publication of the plays and was finally obliged to issue them in a mangled form, with large omissions, among others of the offensive scene, and with considerable revision.^ The Re'venge of Bussy D^ Ambois, founded, as Professor Boas has shown, upon the same authority as the Byron plays (Grimeston's translation in 1607 of Jean de Serres' History^^ probably followed them shortly, and the noble play of Chabot^ pub- lished after Chapman's death (in 1639, in a form somewhat revised by Shirley),* closes the series of the French tragedies. With this play Chapman's activity as a dramatist ceases for an indefinite period, or possibly terminates altogether. He had, about 1604, or possibly after his release from prison in 1605, been ap- pointed "sewer in ordinary" to Prince Henry, and received from 1 Professor Boas {Bussy D' Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy., Belles- Lettres Series., p. xii, note) calls attention to certain bits of evidence which go to show the existence of a play on Bussy before the death of Elizabeth. If this play were Chapman's it must, as Professor Boas points out, have been considerably revised after the accession of James I, when it was acted by Paul's Boys. 2 The date 1605 is founded upon a misprint in the English translation of von Raumer's Briefeaus Paris xur Erlduterung., etc., pt. 2, pp. 276-277. In the German original the date is rightly given as April 5, 1608. J See Chapman's letter to the licenser printed in the Athenaeum., April 6, 1901. 4 Chabot is based upon the relation of Etienne Pasquier (Recherches de la France). The story of Chabot first appears in the 1607 edition of this work (Book v, chap. 12), and is repeated, with details which occur in the play, in the edition of 1611. xii Biograjpl)^ him a small annual pension together with the promise of a hand- some reward upon the completion of his Homeric translations. To this work Chapman on the conclusion of his activity as a dramatist devoted himself for a number of years. He published the first twelve books of the Iliad, ^ 1610 ca. , a complete translation in 161 1, a complete translation of the Odyssey^ in 16 14, and a folio enti- tled The Whole Works of Homer in 1 61 6. To this list we must add, for the sake of completeness, The Croivn of all Homer'' s Works, containing the Batrachomyomachia, and the Hymns and Epigrams, published in 1624. On the death of Prince Henry, Nov. 12, 16 12, Chapman lost his place as sewer to the Prince of Wales, and Prince Charles re- fused to redeem his brother's promise of a reward for the translation of the Iliad or to grant Chapman's petition for **some poor copy- hold of the Princes land of ;!^40 rent, if any such I find." In his verses to **the immortal memory of Henry, Prince of Wales," Chapman complains bitterly that '' Not thy thrice sacred will Signed with thy death mooves any to fulfil Thy just bequests to me." Yet in spite of Charles's harsh treatment Chapman does not seem to have lost favour at court. He composed an elaborate masque per- formed by the gentlemen of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn at the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the Palsgrave in 1 61 3, and in honour of the marriage of the king's favourite, Somerset, to the divorced Countess of Essex, he wrote an epithalamium entitled Andromeda Liberata, which seems to have given rise to some scandal. 3 Somerset's fell in 161 6, however, put an end to Chapman's hopes of "future advance," for there seems to be no ground for Wood's hesitating statement that he was "a sworn servant either to King James I or his royal consort." In fact it is evident from 1 A copy in the British Museum is assigned hesitatingly to 1610. See also Warton, History of English Poetry^ iv, 317. 2 The first 12 books of the Odyssey seem to have been published sep- arately. See article on Chapman in Dictionary of National Biography. J This seems clear from the title of a later work by Chapman, j4 . . . Justification of a . . . maliciously interpreted poem entitled., Andromeda liberata, 1614. llBiograpl)^ xiii the lately discovered Chapman letters ^ that much of the poet's later life was passed in poverty. Yet according to Oldys ^ he was " much resorted to by young persons of parts as a poetical chron- icle ; but was very choice who he admitted to him, and preserved in his own person the dignity of poetry." In his last years Chapman seems once more to have turned his attention to the drama. In 1631 he published Caesar and Pom- pey, a Roman Tragedy, written long before, and now given to the world, perhaps under stress of poverty, in haste and without revi- sion. He seems also to have entered into friendly relations with Shirley, the favourite playwright of the court, and the youngest, as Chapman was the oldest, of the dramatists of the great period. The Ball was licensed as a play by Shirley in 1632, but Chapman's name appears with Shirley's on the title-page of the first edition, 1639, and traces of Chapman's hand seem visible in the last act. Chabot,^ probably revised by Shirley for performance, was printed as the joint work of these poets in the same year. Chapman also made a thorough revision of Bussy D" Ambois, probably for a per- formance by the King's Servants, which served as the basis for the revised edition of that play in 1641. This revision Mr. Fleay takes to have been the poet's latest work.^ Chapman died May 12, 1634, and was buried in the church- yard of St. Giles in the Fields. His friend, Inigo Jones, erected a monument to his memory which is still standing. Wood speaks of Chapman, probably on the testimony of those who had known the poet in his later years, as " a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet." There is no proof of his acquaintance with Shakespeare, 1 See Athenaeum^ March 2j, and April ij, 1901. 2 MSS. notes in a copy of Langbaine's Dramatick Poets in the British Museum. I Licensed by Herbert, April 29, i6jy. 4 There is no reason except the publisher's statements for assigning to Chapman Revenge for Honour (published in 1654), and many reasons against his authorship of this play. The anonymous T'wo Wise Men and All the rest Fools^ i6ig,was first ascribed to Chapman by the bookseller, Francis Kirkman, 1671, a mistake probably caused by the similarity of the name to that of All Fools. It cannot possibly be Chapman's. Two further plays entered as Chapman's in the Stationers'" Register, in 1660, The Torkshire Gentlewoman and her Son, and Fatal Love, were never published, and were destroyed in manuscript by Warburton's cook. xiv llBiograpl)^ but he was loved by Jonson,' and was on terms of friendship with Marlowe, Fletcher, Field, whom he calls his "loved son," /. e.^ scholar, and Shirley. His life covers practically the whole period of the Elizabethan drama. I Thefragmentof an invective against Jonson preserved in the Ashmole MSS. in the Bodleian seems to show that Chapman, possibly on account of his friendship for Inigo Jones, took sides against Jonson in the conflicts that clouded Ben's last years. ginttotiuction After the great names of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe, that of Chapman is perhaps the best known among Elizabethan poets. But Chapman's fame to-day- depends almost entirely upon his translation of the Iliad and Odyssey. That noble work in which for the first time ** deep-browed Homer ' ' spoke in English accents, although temporarily superseded by Pope's version, has never quite lost its hold upon English readers. Chap- man's dramas, on the other hand, although repeatedly- praised by his contemporaries, seem even in his day to have been little read ; of all the plays pubHshed under his name only two, Bussy D* Ambois and The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Biron^ ever attained a sec- ond edition. Dry den's slashing attack on the style of Bussy is well known, and in the century that followed Dry den. Chapman's plays seem to have been almost entirely forgotten. With the dawn of romantic criti- cism in England attention was drawn to their merits by Lamb and Hazlitt, but it was not until 1873 that a collected edition of the plays appeared in the form of a so-called facsimile reprint. Up to that time Chap- man's dramas, with the exception of an occasional reprint in various collections of old plays, were prac- tically inaccessible to English readers.* Lowell, for ^ Eastivard Ho and The ff^idoiv's Tears were included in Dodsley's Old Plays in 1 744 ; A/I Fools was added in 1 780. Bussy y xvi 31ntrot)uctton example, when writing his interesting comment on Chapman in Conversations on Some of the Old English Poets (1845), had never seen a copy of The Con- spiracy and Tragedy of Biron. The reprint of 1873 ^^^ followed in 1874-5 by the first edition of the complete works of Chapman. It included three plays. Eastward Ho, Chabot, and The Bally which had been omitted in the reprint. The first two of these, though written in collaboration with other dramatists, have enough of Chapman to make them indispensable to any study of his work. With the appearance of these editions a systematic and critical study of Chapman's work was for the first time rendered possible, and Swinburne's admirable essay on the poetry and the dramas, which was prefixed to the third volume of the collected works, was the first fruit of such a study. Neither of these editions, how- ever, is satisfactory. The reprint is by no means a reli- able facsimile, especially in the matter of punctuation ; and the later edition, to which Mr. Shepherd put his name, modernises the spelling, leaves palpable errors of the old texts unaltered, and introduces needless changes into the text without the slightest notice of alteration. A critical edition of Chapman's plays in the light of modern scholarship still remains to be undertaken. Modern critics of Chapman have been inclined to pass over his comedies with but slight consideration, and to devote their main attention to his more serious plays. This is due, I fancy, to the old conception of Chapman as Monsieur D^ Oli-ve, and May Day were included in Dilke's Old Englnh Plays^ 18 14-15. 31ntroDuctton xvii a poet rather than a dramatist. And for lofty poetry we must, no doubt, turn rather to his tragedies than his comedies. But if the first essential of drama be action rather than poetry, there can be as little doubt that as a playwright Chapman obtains his highest success in com- edy. It would not indeed be unfair to call him a tragic poet and a comic dramatist. In his tragedies the epic element too often outweighs the dramatic. The two Biron plays, for example, are rather a continuous epic poem than a drama, and their temporary success upon the stage must have been due to the interest of the audience in the subject rather than to their dramatic effectiveness. Again, the didactic element in the tra- gedies constantly interferes with the dramatic. Noble passages of gnomic verse are inlaid in the play with little regard for dramatic propriety or the development of the action. Chapman himself regarded this predom- inance of the didactic element as a virtue rather than a vice; ** material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from her contrary '* are, he asserts in the dedication to The Revetige of Bussy, **the soule, lims, and limits of an autenticall tragedy." Strictly interpreted this dogma would turn every tragedy into an essay on ethics, and Chapman's practice was fortunately more liberal than his theory. But it is plain to the student of his work that Chap- man's tragedies are marked by a constant struggle be- tween the author's theory and the demands of the contemporary stage, a conflict in which, as may be seen in The Revenge of Bussy, theory finally triumphed. It is not likely that in the composition of comedy Chap- xviii 31ntroUuction man took himself or his work so seriously. Yet even in his comedies it may be noted that whenever the action grows serious and approaches the bounds of tragedy, as in the last act of The Gentleman Usher y the gnomic element rises again into prominence and long passages of didactic and reflective verse retard the action of the play. In pure comedy, however. Chapman, unlike his friend and occasional collaborator Jonson, had no the- ories to realise, and free from the trammels of drama- tic dogma he was able in such work to develop fully his undoubted dramatic qualities. What these were a survey of his comedies will, perhaps, make clear. The Blind Beggar of Alexandria y Chapman's first extant play, is, as it stands, almost outside the pale of criticism. This, however, may not be altogether the au- thor's fault. There is reason to believe that its present form represents a stage version in which the original play has been cut, altered, and, possibly, in parts enlarged. In no other way can we account for the amazing fashion in which serious and even tragic motives appear only to disappear. I take it that The Blind Beggar was orig- inally a romantic drama, containing, along with a good deal of crude and rather boisterous farce, such tragic elements as the adulterous passion of the queen for Cleanthes, her murder of his wife, her implied murder of her own husband, the invasion of Egypt by the Asian kings, and their overthrow by the hero. In the present form of the play we catch only a fleeting glimpse of these motives ; but it is impossible, I think, that Chapman should have allowed the tragic figure of JIntroDuction xix the queen to drop out of the play altogether without giving us the slightest intimation of her fate. Such an omission savours rather of the recklessness of some stage manager than of the negligence even of a novice in the drama. It is probable that the play as first written w^as too long for convenient presentation, and that in adapting it for the stage the reviser had an eye rather upon contemporary taste than on the rules of dramatic construction. We know from Henslowe's Diary that The Blind Beggar ^ — presumably in its pre- sent form — was a very successful play, and its success was probably due to the comic element that still remains rather than to the tragic that has so ruthlessly been cut away. It is, perhaps, a little difficult for us to grasp the causes of the success of such a play. The story is absurd, the characterisation is practically nil, and the dialogue is rather coarse than witty. On the other hand, the action never flags, there is an abundance of comic and farcical incident, and the diction, passing easily from fluent verse to racy prose and back again, is quite free from Chapman's common faults of in- volved expression and obscurity. The part of the hero in his fourfold personaHty was no doubt a grateful role for some popular actor, and I am inclined to think that this part has been padded by some other hand than that of the author. I have dwelt at some length upon this first play of Chapman's, because I believe that we may discern in it, with all its imperfections and absurdities, the germ * For the dates of its performances see footnote to p. 1 1 7. XX 3ItttroDuction of Chapman's conception of comedy. This, as will be abundantly shown in the consideration of his later work, consists not so much in witty dialogue after the fashion of Lyly, or humorous characterisation in the manner of Shakespeare, as in action, particularly in the invention and elaboration of amusing situations. Chapman was not a master of construction, but in the execution of single scenes he is at times hardly sur- passed by Shakespeare himself. The text of Chapman's second comedy. An Hu- morous Day^ s Mirthy is so corrupt, and the stage-direc- tions are so infrequent and confusing, that it is ex- tremely difficult to follow the story. Here, too, we probably have to deal with a text that was altered and published without the author's supervision. None the less we can see in this play a distinct advance in Chapman's art. It is a pure comedy, unmixed with such tragic elements as appear in The Blind Beggar, The dialogue shows in its frequent puns and wit-com- bats the influence of Lyly, and there is an anticipa- tion of Jonson's work in the portrayal of various "humours," incarnate in the female puritan, the jeal- ous husband, the foolish courtier, and the melancholy gentleman. But none of these figures have the pre- cision of outline or dramatic effectiveness of Jonson's characters, and, on the whole, the play may be pro- nounced a comedy of intrigue revolving about one cen- tral figure. Chapman's weakness in plot construction is very evident here where, so far as is known, he was drawing on his own invention for the story. The main thread of the plot is constantly obscured by superfluous iflntroUuction xxi incident, or buried under unnecessary dialogue. But it is never quite broken, and all the motives of the play find in the end their fit solution. Chapman had, it seems, by this time clarified his conception of comedy, although he was not yet sure enough of hand to realise it in actual composition. The gap between An Humorous Day' s Mirth and Chapman's next surviving play is immense. Mr. Swinburne has rightly pronounced All Fools ** one of the most faultless examples of high comedy in the whole rich field of our Elizabethan drama. ' ' Possibly, however, this gap may seem to us wider than in reality it was ; for All Foolsy originally written for Henslowe in 1599, ^^'^5 ^^^ °^y revised for a later production at Blackfriars, but was, if we may trust the testi- mony of the dedication,^ published by the author him- self to forestall the appearance of a pirated edition, ** patcht with others wit." How great a difference this supervision on the part of an author made in the printed version of a play only those can rightly esti- mate who have struggled in vain to catch the play- wright's plan in such a botcht-up piece of work, for example, as The Blind Beggar. All Fools appears to have been the first play published by the author him- self, and in spite of an occasional misprint or wrong assignment of speeches it may be read with delight even in the old quarto of 1605. It is impossible to determine with any degree of precision what changes were made when this play was revised. I fancy that they consisted in polishing ^ See Appendix^ p. 139. xxii 3lntroDuction the poetry, sharpening the dialogue, and, probably, in the addition of several prose orations somewhat after the manner of Lyly, a manner which would especially delight the cultivated audience of the Blackfriars Thea- tre. The main plot and the characters must have been very much the same in both versions, since plot and characters aUke are drawn directly from known sources. I shall discuss the relation of All Fools to the Heau- tontimorumenos and the Adelphi of Terence at a later point in this introduction. It will be sufficient to say here that Chapman's sources gave him in this case ex- actly what he most needed, a plot carefully involved and clearly worked out, and typical characters, limited in depth but sharply defined. His own genius for ro- mantic poetry, his talent for vigorous dialogue, and his dexterity in the invention and handling of comic situation did the rest. Apart from certain excrescences in speech and incident, and a slight weakness of treat- ment in the solution. All Fools is the most nearly per- fect of Chapman's plays. How much All Fools owes to its sources we can best realise when we turn to what was probably Chap- man's next succeeding comedy. The source of May Day, long unknown to Chapman's commentators, has been clearly shown by Stiefel (^Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. 35) to be the Alessandro of the Italian poet, A. Piccolomini. In fact it would hardly be unfair to call May Day an adaptation of the Italian play, for Chapman has retained the three intrigues, and most of the characters, of his source. Yet he has been by no means a mere translator ; he has discarded cer- SlntroDuction xxiii tain superfluous figures, added others, and transformed the stock braggadocio of Italian comedy into a typic- ally Elizabethan figure. And his advance in power of dramatic construction is shown by the fact that he has bound the severed intrigues of the Italian play closely together in the character of Lodovico, whose restless energy, Uke Lemot's in An Humorous Day* s Mirthy leads him to take an active part in them all, and thus to serve as the mainspring of the whole action. Yet Ma-y Day is by no means one of the best of Chapman's comedies. Based as it is upon an Italian comedy of intrigue, the interest lies wholly in the ac- tion, and this is so hurried and involved as to perplex and weary the reader. It is impossible to take any lively interest in the characters, for the reason, I sup- pose, that these stock figures of Italian comedy were incapable of the humanising and vitalising treatment which Terence, and Chapman after him, succeeded in applying to the types of the New Comedy. And the play as a whole quite lacks the poetry and the breath of romance which illuminates and enlivens All Fools, The Gentleman Usher y and Monsieur D^ Olive, The prose dialogue is capital, but verse is almost wholly absent. In this respect, also, though superior in con- struction. May Day closely resembles An Humorous Day* s Mir thy — another reason for fixing its date be- fore, not after. Chapman's best romantic comedies. If Sir Giles Goosecap was written by Chapman about 1 60 1 or 1602, as I have tried to show else- where,^ it would seem at first glance to denote a dis- ' The Authorship of Sir Gyles Goosecappe : Modern Philology y July, 1906. xxiv 31ntroDuction tinct relapse both in Chapman's conception of comedy and in his power of execution, for it is markedly in- ferior in both these qualities to All Fools and May Day. It seems to have been one of Chapman's first plays for the Children of the Chapel, then acting at Blackfriars. And in his attempt to hit the taste of this audience and working, as it seems, without a model before him, the author came largely under the influence of Jonson, then the leading play wright for this company. The satiric description, in Act i, sc. i, of dramatis fersonae not yet upon the stage is a palpable borrowing of one of Jonson' s well-known devices, and if Mr. Fleay is right in his conjecture that the various knights who appear in the play are personal carica- tures, we should have another marked imitation of Jonson. More interesting, however, in relation to Chapman's later development is the appearance in Sir Giles for the first time of a romantic love-story of a high and serious type, founded, as Professor Kittredge has shown,' upon Chaucer's Troilus and Cryseide. The scenes which deal with this theme are written for the most part in verse, studded with passages of lofty, but, at times, somewhat obscure poetry. As a whole Sir Giles is not a play of which the author had reason to be proud, and it may be for this reason that Chap- man never owned it ; but these love-scenes might well be the prototype of some of his finest work in The Gentleman Usher and Monsieur U Olive. The Gentleman Usher marks the triumph of poetic and romantic comedy in Chapman's work. Mr. Swin- ^ Journal of Germanic Philology^ vol, 2, pp. 7-13. 31ntroDuction xxv burne notes that this play is ** distinguished from all Chapman's other works by the serious grace and sweet- ness of the love-scenes, and the higher tone of femi- nine character and masculine regard which is sustained throughout the graver passages." A more detailed ex- amination of the play will be made later. It is enough to say here that Chapman nowhere else appears more original, or after the action has once started more completely in sympathy with and master of his subject. The romantic love-story — a theme rather in the vein of Fletcher than of earlier dramatists — is lightened and diversified by comic scenes ranging from frank buf- foonery and gross farce to little masterpieces of high comedy. In the figure of Bassiolo Chapman created a character at once more real and more genuinely hu- morous than any that he had been hitherto able to con- ceive. But even in the scenes which are dominated by this figure the comic entertainment is furnished not so much by the revelation of his character as by the exquisitely ridiculous situations in which he is in- volved. Here as elsewhere Chapman holds to the necessity of action and situation in comedy. In Monsieur D^ Olive we find Chapman's talents as a comic and a romantic poet combined, but by no means so successfully blended as in The Gentleman Usher. The play is composed of two distinct plots which have only the slightest connection with each other. The first deals with a purely romantic theme ; the second with the gulling of Monsieur D' Olive, the character who gives his name to the play. The ar- rangement seems to me somewhat mechanical; each xxvi 31ntroliuction act falls into two scenes, and, with the exception of the last scene of the play, where an unsuccessful at- tempt is made to combine the two plots in a common denouement, the first scene regularly deals with the romantic story, the second with the comic underplot. And as Swinburne has pointed out, ** the main interest is more and more thrust aside * ' as the play goes on, until at the close **it is fairly hustled into a corner.'* Curiously enough, considering Chapman's earlier work, the underplot is notably deficient in action. The trick which the courtiers play upon D' Olive is far from fur- nishing sufficient material for a comic action, and as a matter of fact the original underplot comes to an end in the fourth act, where a new intrigue has to be devised to bring its main figure once more before the public and include him in the final solution of the play. On the other hand, the figure of Monsieur D' Olive is Chap- man's most elaborate piece of characterisation. Half- wit, half-gull, and wholly Elizabethan in his mingled good nature, vanity, and volubility, he is one of the most diverting figures in the whole range of contem- porary comedy. In a sense he belongs to the humorous characters which Jonson had introduced to the Eliza- bethan stage, but although he was doubtless meant as a satiric portrait of the giddy-pated, fortune-hunting courtiers who had flocked in their hundreds to wel- come the accession of James I, there is not the slightest trace of that earnestness, not to say bitterness, of moral reprobation which Jonson would have thrown into his delineation of such a figure. The influence of Jonson may be felt also, I believe, in the racy, idiomatic 31ntroDuction xxvii prose in which D' Olive betrays his follies to a de- lighted world. It is unfortunate that Jonson's influence over his friend did not extend farther and lead him to devise a proper plot in which to set this well-drawn character. Only an analysis of the comic scenes of Monsieur D^ Olive will reveal their utter emptiness of action, and this is the more remarkable, since, as I have pointed out, it is as a rule in action and incident that Chapman's comic force consists. One can only conjecture that the influence of Jonson's comedy of humours, and possibly the stage success of Bassiolo in The Gentleman Usher, may have induced Chapman to compose this underplot which relies for effect solely upon a humorous character study. The influence of Jonson is, of course, even more apparent in Eastward Hoy where Chapman was collab- orating with Jonson and Marston. An exact assign- ment of the scenes of this play has not yet been made, except by Mr. Fleay, ^ who, without giving any reason for his opinion, ascribes Acts i-ii, i, to Marston, Acts II, ii-iv, i, to Chapman, and the conclusion to Jonson. That Chapman wrote the part here as- signed to him no student of his comedies can doubt. The only question is whether he did not write consid- erably more. My own opinion, after a repeated read- ing of the play, would be that Jonson furnished the plot. Chapman wrote practically the whole play, and Marston touched it up here and there with satire on the Scotch and on King James's knights, and, in Swin- burne's phrase, ** dropped one or two momentary * Chronicle of the English Drama, vol. 2, p. 8 1. xxviii 31ntroUuction indecencies to attest his passage. ' ' Such an assignment would account at once for the admirable construction and precise characterisation of the play, for its genial and sunny temper far more characteristic of Chapman than of either of his fellows, and for the ease and nat- uralness of the general conduct of the action. ^ Assuming, as I think we are justified in doing, that a very considerable portion of this excellent comedy belongs, so far at least as the actual composition goes, to Chapman, we find him here engaged on a realistic comedy of contemporary English life akin to Jonson*s Every Man in his Humour and Dekker's Shoemaker^ s Holiday ; and even if the credit of the construction and the characterisation belong, as they probably do, to Jonson, it is hard to find due terms of praise for Chap- man's admirable execution. Particularly remarkable for their comic force are the scenes in which Gertrude sets out in her coach amid the plaudits of admiring neigh- bours to ** dress up" that castle in the air which she fancies she has won by marriage, and the later scene, where stranded in her poor garret she clings desper- ately to her shreds of nobility and sadly contrasts the behaviour of her own knight with that of the Knight of the Sun or Palmerin of England. Eminently characteris- tic of Chapman's manner of letting the audience into the * Bearing in mind Chapman's tendency to repeat himself, I would call attention to the similarity of Gertrude's behaviour in i, ii (a scene assigned by Mr. Fleay to Marston), to that of Elimine in The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (Chapman's Dramatic Works^ vol. I, pp. 27-28), and to the still more striking similarity between the behaviour of Security in iii, ii, and in, iii, and that of Gostanzo toward Rinaldoand Marc. Antonio in All Fools (iii, i, and iv, i). ^Introduction xxix secret of a comic situation is the way in which Security is induced to play the go-between for his own wife and the gay Sir Petronel ; and Chapman's love of farcical stage effect is never more happily displayed than in the scene where the shipwrecked Security in dripping gown and nightcap is rebuked by his spouse for spending the night abroad at taverns. So successful indeed in con- ception, construction, and detailed execution is this lively comedy that one can only regret that Chapman and Jonson did not form a literary partnership as close and lasting as that of Beaumont and Fletcher. Chapman's last comedy. The Widow^ s Tears y printed in 1612, but probably written much earlier,^ has never received the attention it deserves. Possibly its brutally cynical tone toward women has disgusted the commentators, but it is certainly permitted a comic writer to take this tone. Congreve, for example, is none the less one of the greatest of English comic dramatists because of his utter disbelief in women's vows and women's tears. And if a dramatist takes for his theme the story of the Ephesian matron as told by Petronius, it is hard to see what other tone he could adopt. As a matter of fact. The Widow^ s Tears is written with amazing force and sparkles with cynical humour. The character of Tharsalio, in particular, who wins his goal by sheer audacity, and whose rooted distrust of woman- kind is based upon his own unsavoury experiences, is one that Fletcher might have envied. The adaptation of the classic story to a dramatic form is, up to a certain I Fleay, Chronicle of the English Drama, vol. I, p. 61, dates it ca. 1605. XXX 3|ntroDuctton point, a marvel of ingenuity, and Chapman's substitu- tion of the disguised husband for the stranger of the Petronian tale as the widow's tempter — an uncon- scious reversion to the earlier Oriental version ^ of the story — is a true stroke of dramatic genius. It points directly to the only proper solution of the plot, the widow's pretended recognition of her husband's disguise and her imposition upon him of this belief by dint of feminine audacity and voluble reiteration. But the actual solution in the drama is perhaps the most hope- less muddle in Elizabethan comedy. It is quite impos- sible to make out what effect Cynthia's declaration that she had recognised her husband has upon the wretched man. Nor can we at all accept the whis- pered mediation of Tharsalio's wife as a proper substi- tute for the legitimate conclusion of the play, an eclair- cissement between husband and wife and a restitution of the lady to her old position in her husband's con- fidence on the basis of his belief in her protestations. The truth seems to be that Chapman, left without a clue for such a solution in the source he used, and possibly pressed for time in preparing his drama for the stage, simply evaded the solution altogether, and sub- stituted for it a scene of broad farce where a fooHsh magistrate of the well-known Elizabethan type talks a flood of nonsense in the manner of Dogberry and Verges. Chapman at his best was no master of con- struction, but none of his dramas exhibits so hopelessly an inept conclusion as The Widow^ s Tears. * See Die treulose TVittivt und ihre Wanderung durch die Welt- litteratuTy Ed. Griesbach, Stuttgart, 1877. 31ntro0uction xxxi The Bally licensed in 1632, was printed five years after Chapman's death as the joint work of Chapman and Shirley. That the play as a whole belongs to Shirley ' there cannot be the slightest doubt. It is, how- ever, possible that one or two of the passages which the licenser forced Shirley to omit were filled up by Chapman, and Freshwater' s account of his travels in V, i, in its vigorous prose and farcical jumble of absurd- ities is distinctly reminiscent of Chapman's style. The foregoing survey of Chapman's comedies has, perhaps, made it possible to attempt an estimate of his gifts and limitations as a comic dramatist, and the re- lation in which he stood to his contemporary labourers in this field. Perhaps the most noticeable defect of Chapman is his want of constructive abihty. On the whole more nearly allied to Jonson than to any other Elizabethan poet, not only by the circumstances of his life but by his scholarly acquirements and the general temper of his mind, he quite lacks Jonson' s architectonic genius. With only one or two exceptions Chapman's plays are ill-planned and badly propor- tioned ; and these exceptions. All Fools ^ Eastward Hoy and, perhaps. May Day, are all cases where, so far as plot and structure are concerned. Chapman was working upon models furnished him by an elder, or, in one case, by a contemporary dramatist. That this defect was inherent and not merely due to lack of acquaintance with the requirements of the stage ' See Fleay, Chronicle of the English Drama ^ vol. 2, pp. 238- 2395 Ward, English Dramatic Literature^ vol. 3, p. 107; Koeppel, Siuellen und For so hungen, Heft 82, sub The Ball. xxxii 3|ntrotiuction is shown by the appearance of the grave faults that have been pointed out in such late w^ork as Monsieur D* Olive and The Widow^ s Tears. That Chapman w^as not ignorant of stage effect is shown by numerous scenes of high comic force whose effectiveness could only be heightened by actual representation. But he seems from the beginning to have lacked the ability to plan and execute a play as a well-proportioned whole. Chapman, it must fiirther be confessed, is no great master of characterisation. He seems to have lacked almost entirely the range and depth of human sympa- thy which enabled men such as Dekker and Heywood, certainly his inferiors in intellectual ability, to create characters that still retain the breath of life with which these poets endowed them. Chapman is too often in- clined to crowd his stage with puppet-like figures only slightly differentiated from each other and quite devoid of Hfe. This fault is particularly noticeable in his ear- lier work. It is difficult for the reader, it must have been quite impossible for the spectator, to keep in mind the mob of gentlemen who crowd the boards in An Humorous Daf s Mirth and May Day. And if in the latter case the fault was originally that of the Italian dra- matist whose work Chapman is adapting, it is significant that the English poet has rather added to than dimin- ished Piccolomini's swollen list of dramatis personae. Under the influence of his study of Latin comedy and guided, perhaps, by the example of Jonson, Chapman came in time to learn the value of restraint in this re- spect and the need of distinguishing between his figures. He is most generally successful, I think, when working ^Introduction xxxiii on stock types, such as those furnished by Latin comedy, as in All Fools ^ and in such ** humorous " figures as the swaggering captain in May Day, the jealous hus- band in All Fools, or that " true map of a gull " who gives his name to Monsieur /)' Olive. But he is not altogether unsuccessful in the sphere of romantic com- edy ; Clarence, the poet-lover, and his mistress, Eu- genia, in Sir Giles Goosecap, Vincentio and his friend Strozza in The Gentleman Usher, are distinctly con- ceived and attractively presented. Margaret, the hero- ine of the latter play, is one of the most delightful girls outside the plays of Shakespeare ; and the audacity, ready wit, and quenchless good-humour of Tharsalio in The Widow* s Tears, raise him distinctly above the stock figure of the impudent gentleman adventurer. The general impression left by a repeated and con- secutive reading of Chapman's comedies is one of lively and vigorous comic force. This is due, in the main, I believe, to the abundance of action that characterises these plays. With the possible exception of Sir Giles Goosecap, the action of Chapman's comedies calls rather for pruning than for reenforcement ; and this is the more notable since his tragedies are as a rule very deficient in action. I take it that the theory of dramatic composition which checked Chapman's hand in the composition of his graver works was cast aside when he turned to comedy ; and his early apprentice- ship to Henslowe must have taught him that a lively bustling plot with plenty of amusing incident would cover a multitude of sins. Accordingly he was often careless of construction, wasted little time in psycho- xxxiv 3(|ntroliuction logical analysis of character, and as a rule seldom de- layed the action to display his wit. It is quite in keeping with this abundant action that Chapman's humour should be one of incident and situ- ation rather than of character and dialogue. It ranges all the way from the clownery of such figures as Sir Giles and Pogio, through the broad farce of certain scenes in The Blind Beggar y or the intoxication of Corteza, to genuine specimens of high comedy in All Fools and The Gentleman Usher. Chapman is, I think, specially a master of ludicrous situation. I know few scenes in any literature more essentially comic in the mere situation than those in which Valerio's mock re- pentance obtains his father's feigned forgiveness, or Bassiolo's gulled importunity wins from the assumed prudery of Margaret the favour of a letter to her lover. It is in scenes like these that Chapman's comic genius appears at its highest. We feel that he himself per- ceives the value of the situation, elaborates it, and wrests from it all of comic that it contains. And Chapman has the special merit in his comedy of keeping the audience always in touch with the action. [He makes little or no use of the element of surprise, which is so prominent a feature of Fletcherian and later comedy. No matter how completely the characters in the action may be gulled, the reader always comprehends the cause and looks forward to the consequence, and so obtains a double gust from the situation. A word should be said in passing of Chapman's style as a comic dramatist. Like most of the Eliza- bethans proper he is ambidextrous and uses prose or 31ntroDuctlon xxxv verse as the occasion demands. In blank verse he was, as his first play shows, originally a student of Mar- lowe, but he soon worked out a style of his own. In tragedy this was elaborate, elevated, sententious, and at times turgid and obscure. In comedy on the other hand it is, to quote Swinburne's happy phrase, ** limpid and luminous as running water," rising at times to heights of impassioned poetry, and jinking easily again to familiar and fluent dialogue. , No poet before Fletcher, I believe, was able to impart to blank verse so easy and conversational a tone,. Chapman's prose, like that of most of his contempo- raries, was strongly coloured by the influence of Lyly. This is particularly noticeable in the set speeches of All Fools and Monsieur D' Olive. Where Chapman escapes from this influence and is content to speak Hke a man of this world, his prose is racy and vigorous, simpler, I think, and more idiomatic than that of Jon- son, more forcible and efi^ective than that of any other of his contemporaries, with the one exception of Shake- speare. II The main source of All Foolsy as was pointed out by Langbaine, is the Heautontimorumenos of Terence. A second source of considerable importance in the characterisation and final solution of Chapman's play has recently been pointed out in the Adelphi of Ter- ence. ^ ' By Miss Woodbridge in The Journal of Germanic Fhilology^ vol. I, p. 338 ssq.5 and independently and more fully in a paper xxxvi 31ntroDuction It is not without interest to note that in the very- year that Chapman composed All Fools for Henslowe's company, Ben Jonson wrote The Case is Altered^ Hke Chapman's play a contamination of two Latin comedies, in this case the Captwi and Aulularia of Plautus. Considering the close personal relations that existed between Chapman and Jonson at this time, one is almost forced to believe that the appearance of these plays represents a conscious attempt on the part of the two scholarly dramatists to domesticate Latin comedy upon the Elizabethan stage ; and the fact that in both cases two Ladn plays were combined to make a single English one/goes to show that both dramatists consid- ered the plot and incident of a Latin comedy too slight and scanty to hold the attention of an Elizabethan audience/ It is no injustice to the fame of Jonson to say that of these two attempts Chapman's is distinctly the superior. The Case is Altered adheres almost slavishly to its originals, and the two plots are rather placed in juxtaposition than blended into one harmonious whole. All Foolsy on the other hand, seems to me almost a perfect model for work of this sort. Chapman has treated his originals with a free hand, and while retain- ing the main structure and numerous incidents and even at times translating almost directly from the Latin, he has cut away and added at discretion, and has wholly modernised the spirit of the play. I have pointed out in the Notes many particular instances read before the English Seminary, at Princeton, by C. W. Kennedy, in 1904. 3(|utroDuction xxxvii where Chapman either adheres to or deviates from his originals. Certain changes which he has made in the dramatis personae and their effect upon the general tone of the play are, however, well worth noting. Bacchis, the courtesan of the Heautontimorumenos, has become Gratiana, the secret wife of the hero ; Antiphila, the daughter of Chremes, who had been exposed as an infant and by mere accident restored to her parents, is represented by Bellanora, who has never left her father's house. In like fashion the intriguing slave, Syrus, has been transformed into a younger brother of the hero, a quick-witted, roguish ** clerk of Padua." With these changes the whole atmosphere of the New Comedy, an atmosphere of courtesans, exposed infants, and rascally slaves, disappears, and the play becomes at once wholly modern, v This transformation is aided also by the sub-plot of Cornelio's jealousy, apparently Chapman's own invention, and distinctly Elizabethan rather than classical in spirit^/ Chapman's skill is furtKer seen in his omission of the ** self- torturing ' ' motive of the play which he chose for the basis of his plot and his substitution for it of the strong contrast in character between the two fa- thers, which he found in the Adelphi. The whole intrigue of All Fools turns upon the harsh character of Gostanzo, who corresponds to Demea in the Adelphiy and upon his son's natural unwillingness to confess to him his secret marriage until he has made sure beforehand of forgiveness. It is not too much, indeed, to say that the characterisation and mutual re- lations of the dramatis personae of All Fools find their xxxviii introduction source rather in the Adelphi than in the Heauton- timorumenos. In one respect, indeed, the Adelphi has influenced the structure o^ All Fools and, perhaps, not altogether to its advantage. Swinburne has noted as the one slight blemish of the EngHsh play ** that the final scene of discovery ... is somewhat hurriedly despatched, with too rapid a change of character and readjustment of relations." Inasmuch as Chapman had transformed the courtesan of the Heautontimorumenos into the secret wife of All Foolsy it was of course impossible that the solution of the Latin play, in which Bacchis is dis- missed and her lover consents to marry a neighbour's daughter, should be retained. For this solution Chap- man has substituted that of the Adelphi, where the stern father suddenly becomes mild, consents to the marriage of his elder son with a poor girl, and allows the younger to retain his mistress. But while Terence has carefully motivated this change of front. Chapman introduces it suddenly and without warning. It is possible, indeed, to explain Gostanzo's transformation in the last scene on the hypothesis that he realises that his anger is fruitless and wisely resolves to make the best of what is after all not so bad a business. Yet even with this explanation the fact remains that Gostanzo's change of mind is rather dramatically admissible than psychologically true.' * Another objection urged by Professor Koeppel (Snellen und Forschungen, 1897) to the construction of J// Fools seems to me to lack real weight. I have dealt with this objection in a note on the passage (in, i, 83-84). 3|nttoDuction xxxix After all it is, of course, ii^dle to look for depth of characterisation and psychological truth in a play like All Fools. I The characters, borrowed directly from Latin cortiedy, are rather types than distinct and well- rounded individuals. We have here the familiar figures of the New Comedy, the stern father, the indulgent father, the riotous son, and the witty intriguer who sets the action going. It is, I think, greatly to Chapman's credit that, while adopting these threadbare types, he has contrived to make them so real and freshly enter- taining. And he has, moreover, succeeded in throw- ing about these stock figures and this old-world intrigue a mingled atmosphere of Elizabethan realism and romance. Valerie's secret marriage and Fortunio's secret love give a romantic interest to All Fools which i is quite lacking in its prototypes. And the repeated touches of realism, the adventure of Valerio with the bailiffs, his vanity in his courtly accomplishments, and the final scene in the Half Moon Tavern, with its accompaniment of dice, tobacco, a ** noise " of music, and the pledging of healths, complete the transforma- tion of the play of Terence into a modern comedy of intrigue and of manners. The Gentleman Usher presents so remarkable a con- trast to All Fools as to give us a striking impression of Chapman's range and versatility as a comic dramatist. The construction is far more loose and irregular, the characterisation more individual and human, the poetry more fervent and impassioned, and the prevailing interest is shifted from a series of amusing intrigues to a tender and romantic love-story. Chapman's women are as a xi BltttroUuttion rule not particularly attractive figures ; the young wives of All Fools are little more than puppets ; the widows of his last comedy are, to put it mildly, no better than they should be. But the matron and the maid in The Gentleman Usher — Cynanche, the perfect helpmate, and Margaret, the merry, modest, and devoted sweetheart — are alone sufficient to redeem Chapman from the charge of having been consistently cynical in his attitude toward women. No source has yet been discovered for the story of The Gentleman Usher. I have shown elsewhere that certain characters and incidents seem to have been taken over from Chapman's earlier play. Sir Giles Goosecap.^ These, however, are wholly subordinate and do not affect the main story. I fancy that this may yet be discovered in some French or Italian novel. Chapman was by no means strong in invention, and I am in- clined to believe him incapable of creating a story so simple, straightforward, and well-balanced as that of Vincentio and Margaret. On the other hand, if the story had already been dramatised. Chapman, who in All Fools and May Day had shown himself so capable an adapter, would hardly have floundered and stumbled through two whole acts before getting under way. It is to this long delay in starting the action that I am inclined to attribute, in part at least, the strange neglect which has overtaken this most delightful of Chapman's comedies. It requires no litde patience in- deed to push resolutely through the first two acts, ' The Authorship of Sir Gyles Goosecappe^ Modern Philology^ July, 1906. 3IntroDuction xli which are at once notably deficient in the central in- terest and filled to overflowing with incidental matter, the clowneries of Pogio, the pedantries of Sarpego, and the disgusting farce of Corteza's drunkenness — to say nothing of the various masks and shows which, however diverting they may have been to a contem- porary audience, have, in the lapse of time, become stale and flat. But the reader who has the courage to go on will reap a large reward. From the time the action is properly started at the beginning of Act in, it runs along swiftly and smoothly with sparkling inter- change of comedy and romance. In the last act, in- deed, it assumes a serious and almost tragic tone, which at the very close of the play, when the fortunes of the lovers have touched the nadir, is dissipated by the ap- pearance of a wonder-working physician who heals their wounds and joins their hands. The cruel father is reconciled to the match, the intriguing enemy is ex- posed and banished, and the play ends as a romantic comedy should do with the sound of wedding-bells. No other of Chapman's comedies has, I think, so well worked out and satisfactory a conclusion. And this is in large measure because the solution, with its miraculous cure of Strozza, and its deus ex machina in the person of Benivemus, harmonises admirably with the romantic tone of the play. It speaks well for Chapman's judgement and discrimination as an artist that such a facile and, as it were, supernatural solution of a tangled plot, which appears nowhere else in his work, should have been admitted here where alone it is in keeping. xlii 31ntroDuction As is eminently fitting in a romantic comedy, the characterisation in The Gentleman Usher is at once more individual and more interesting than in All Fools. Chapman's grasp of character and firmness of touch is seen even in such minor parts as those of Pogio, Al- phonso, Corteza, and Cynanche. The main interest centres, naturally, in the figures of the lovers, their constant friend, Strozza, and their gull and go-be- tv^een, Bassiolo. Vincentio is slightly but surely draw^n. Without any attempt at elaborate analysis Chapman has here given us a w^holly satisfactory por- trait of a romantic young lover, good-tempered, high- spirited, and devoted to his mistress. Strozza, too, is a distinctly human figure, far above the mere stock confident of comedy. Of Margaret's charm I have already spoken, but it is hard to pass over in silence the quaUties that go to constitute that charm, the modesty with which she repels the advances of the Duke, the gaiety with which she befools Bassiolo, the heart-broken sorrow for the supposed loss of her lover, and the fine unselfishness with which she rejects her lover's offer to wed her after **her beauty's sacrifice." Above all, in the noble passage where she and the Prince exchange vows and bind themselves in a marriage cere- mony of their own devising, the passionate purity of her mind banishes from the scene the faintest suspicion of a baser motive. One trembles to think how such a situ- ation would have been treated by Fletcher. But the heroine of Chapman's play is more nearly akin to Juliet than to any female figure that Fletcher was ever able to conceive. 3(|ntrot)uction xliii The character of Bassiolo also demands a word, the more so because Swinburne has passed him over in si- lence, and Professor Ward, as well as Professor Koep- pel, appears to regard him merely as an unsuccessful imitation of Malvolio. Such a judgement, I am bound to say, seems to me quite unsatisfactory. It is quite pos- sible that the success of Malvolio upon the stage may have suggested to Chapman, writing a few years after the first performance of Twelfth Night, the notion of trying his hand upon the figure of a conceited gentle- man usher. But the similarity between the two figures lies wholly upon the surface. Both occupy the same position in the world, and both are tricked into believ- ing that their merits have won for them a favour which will advance them above this rank. Here, however, the likeness ends. At heart Malvolio is a bad-tempered peacock, Bassiolo a good-natured goose. There is not a trace in Chapman's figure of the soured Puritanism which leads Malvolio to interfere in the revels of Sir Toby and his friends, nor a shadow of that overween- ing self-love which makes Oh via' s usher so easy a mark for the palpable trickery of Maria. On the contrary, it requires the strongest personal effort of the Prince him- self, seconded by gifts and kind embraces, to persuade Bassiolo that his merits have indeed exalted him to be a great man's favourite. And if the action of this scene should seem impossible to us, we must remember that it would by no means appear so in an age which was only too familiar with base fellows exalted to be their sovereign's favourites. We have such an instance, in fact, in this play itself, and Bassiolo might well imag- xiiv 31tttrotiuction ine that his clauns to be the Prince's favourite were as good as those of Medici to be Alphonso's minion. Malvolio is something too seriously conceived to be a purely comic character ; he is sick of self-love ; the device that is put upon him only stimulates the expres- sion of his swollen self-conceit, and at the close of the play he breaks from the laughing throng of his torment- ors with a bitter cry for revenge. Bassiolo, on the other hand, is by no means so confident of his good fortune. At the approach of danger he is more than ready to desert his friend, and expresses a well-founded belief that he has been gulled. His struggle between greed and vanity in the last scene of the fourth act, his reckless bravado in the fifth when he has once chosen his part, his outcry against the wicked Prince when he anticipates punishment, and his instant volte- face when he learns that Vincentio is reconciled to his father, are pure emanations of the comic spirit. Nor is it difficult to look beyond the close of the play and see Bassiolo installed as the efficient, officious, and wholly spoiled major-domo in the household of Vin- centio and Margaret. Finally, as All Fools looks back to the past. The Gentleman Usher is an anticipation of the fiiture in comedy. It is in many ways a forerunner of later Jacobean comedy, particularly that of Fletcher. The atmosphere of the play is one of courtly romance. The plot, turning as it does upon a prince's love-affair, — troubled and for a time broken off by the passion of a monarch for his son's mistress, — is a common theme with Fletcher; and the way in which the comic relief is 31ntroDuctton xiv blended with the romantic plot is to me distinctly more Uke the manner of Fletcher than like that of earlier writers. The construction, particularly in its fondness for reverses and surprise, — see especially Act v, — is rather romantic than classic and dimly anticipates the deft craftsmanship of Fletcher along these lines. The characters themselves, the prince and his mistress, the amorous monarch, the villainous favourite, the de- voted wife, and the beldame, Corteza, would fit easily into the frame of more than one of Fletcher's comedies. The easy gaiety with which the character of Bassiolo is handled brings him nearer to the " humorous " fig- ures of Fletcher than those of Jonson ; and Strozza, in his loyalty to his friend, his scorn of the intriguing courtier, and his frank outspokenness, seems to me a clear prototype of the honest soldier so common in Fletcher's work. None of the peculiar metrical char- acteristics of Fletcher appear, so far as 1 can see, in The Gentleman Usher ; but the ease and fluency with which Chapman employs blank verse in dialogue in such scenes as in, ii, and v, i, in this play, is, at the least, suggestive of Fletcher's careless and colloquial mastery of this form of verse. The question of Chapman's relation to Fletcher has not yet, I believe, received its due attention. I have no wish to exaggerate the importance of this rela- tion, or to make Fletcher a disciple of Chapman. But I am inclined to think that the later writer caught more than one hint from his predecessor, and to believe that a comparative study of their work would show that in certain plays. Sir Giles Goosecapy Monsieur D' Olive, xivi 31ntroDuction and especially The Gentleman Usher y Chapman was the first to strike into that field of romantic comedy which is now so peculiarly associated with the name of Fletcher. TEXT jill Fooles was first printed in quarto in 1605 for Thomas Thorpe. Mr. Sidney Lee informs me that the devices of this edition show the printer to have been the G. Eld who four years later set up Shakespeare's Sonnets for T. T. (the same Thomas Thorpe). There was but one early edition of ^// Fooles, for the variations in different copies of the Quarto of 1605 are no greater than one expects to find in Elizabethan books of the same edition. Thus in i, i, 184, A and D read unusering ; five other Qq, unnurishing. In 11, i, 9, most Qq read Adsolve ; M, and a copy in the possession of T. J. Wise, resolve. In 11, i, 30, A, B, D read veale ^ M, lueale. In I, i, 3, the Garrick copy in the British Museum reads straines ; A, D, M, and the King's copy in the British Museum, steaines. See also footnote, p. 81. For the significance of my lettering of the Quartos, see the third paragraph below. One point which might serve to distinguish various copies of this Quarto as belonging to an earlier or later state of the impression is the presence or absence of the parenthesis, ( ), before the last word of the Epilogue. See note ad loc. p. 139. The first reprint of this comedy appeared in the Select Collection of Old Plays edited by Isaac Reed and published by Dodsley in 1780. It was next reprinted in Walter Scott's Ancient British Drama, 1 8 10. J. P. Collier included it in his Select Collection of Old Plays (a new edition of Dodsley), printing the Dedication (see Ap- pendix) for the first time and emending the text in various places. A professedly exact reprint appeared in The Comedies and Tragedies of George Chapman, published by Pearson, 1873, and edited, as the present editor is informed by Pearson & Co., by R. H. Shepherd. This retained the old spelling and punctuation, but is marred by several omissions, misprints, etc. Mr. Shepherd presented a mod- ernised text in The fVorks of George Chapman — Plays (Chatto and Windus, 1874-75). The text of the Mermaid Edition (^George Chapman, edited by W. L. Phelps, 1895) is based upon the reprint of 1873, with modernised spelling and punctuation. xlviii XE^tXt The present edition is based upon the editor's transcript of a copy of the Quarto formerly belonging to Drummond of Hawthornden and now in the Library of Edinburgh University. This transcript has been collated with copies in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bodleian Library. The result of this collation has been the discovery of numerous minor variations in spelling and punctuation and a few corrections made while the edition was in press. These are noted in the variants. The original spelling has been retained, though the capitalisation has been modernised, and the use of italics for proper names disregarded. The confusing punctuation of the original text has been revised throughout, but wherever the original seemed to indicate a different meaning from that adopted by the editor, it has been recorded in the variants. A few obvious misprints of the Quarto I have corrected silently, as custodie for Qq cuffodie, in iv, 334. Other corrections are indicated by brackets, [ ] , as are all additions to the original stage-directions. In the footnotes I have used the symbols, Qq, to note a consensus of the Quartos, A, a reading of the copy in the Advocates' Library, D, of the Drummond Quarto, B, of the two copies in the British Museum, M, of the Malone copy in the Bodleian. For modern editions Do stands for the Dodsley of 1780, Co for Collier's edition, P for the Pearson reprint, and S for Shepherd's modernised edition. Changes by the present editor are denoted by " Emend, ed." In the Quartos the play is simply divided into acts. These have been subdivided into scenes. In designating speakers the whole name is given for the first speech in each scene, an abbreviation thereafter. These abbreviations have been normalised to avoid the confusion of the Quarto. %l fooled SOURCES Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatic Poets, 169 1, long ago pointed out that this comedy ** seems to be built in part upon the same Fabrick with Terence's Heautontimorumenos.^'' Professor Koeppel once more called attention to this fact in his S^ellen-Studien 'zu den Dramen George Chapmans, etc. {^ellen und Forschungen, Heft 82, 1897). Professor Koeppel, however, did not note that Chapman had also made use of another play by Terence, the Adelphi. This was first pointed out by Miss Wood- bridge in The Journal of Germanic Philology, vol. i, pp. 338, seq., and later, but quite independently and more fully, in a paper read at Princeton University by C. W. Kennedy, English Fellow. Mr. Kennedy showed that All Fooles is as regards the main plot a contaminatio of the Heautontimorumenos and the Adelphi. The many resemblances in characters, situation, and even speech between All Fooles and the comedies of Terence on which it is founded are pointed out in the Notes to this edition of Chapman's play. The sub-plot relating to the jealousy of Cornelio is thought by Professor Koeppel to have been suggested by the Merry Wi-ves of Windsor ,• but the only resemblance between the two plays is in their common presentation of a jealous husband, a figure peculiar neither to Shakespeare nor Chapman. Stier ( Chapman'' s All Fooles, etc., Halle, 1904) sees certain resemblances to Jonson's Kitely. From the dragging action of the under-plot the present editor is inclined to believe that this part of the play was Chapman's own invention. (^/A.]Lr Comedy, PrefenteJ at the Black Fryers,