Bussy D'Ambois
Encyclopedia
The Tragedy of Bussy D'Ambois (1603-1607) is a Jacobean stage play written by George Chapman
. Classified as either a tragedy
or "contemporary history," Bussy D'Ambois is widely considered Chapman's greatest play, and is the earliest in a series of plays that Chapman wrote about the French political scene in his era, including the sequel The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
, the two-part The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron
, and The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France
.
The play is based on the life of the real Louis de Bussy d'Amboise, who was murdered in 1579.
. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register
on June 3, 1607
, and published in quarto
the same year by the bookseller William Aspley
, who issued a second quarto the next year. A revised version of the text was printed in 1641
by the stationer Robert Lunne, with the claim that this text was "much corrected and amended by the author before his death." Scholars have disputed the truth of this claim, though the weight of argument seems to fall in its favor. There are 228 variants between the two versions, "including thirty long alterations and additions and five excisions; their extent and tone show a concern only an author could feel." Some commentators have argued that Chapman revised the original Bussy when writing its sequel, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
, c. 1610, to make the two works flow together more smoothly. Robert Lunne issued a Q4 iN 1647
; Q5 was published by Joshua Kirton in 1657
.
The King's Men
acted the play at Court twice in the 1630s, on April 7, 1634
and March 27, 1638
, with Eliard Swanston
in the title role. The prelude to the 1641 edition also indicates that Nathaniel Field
played Bussy; Field may have brought the play to the King's Men when he joined in 1616. Apparently, Joseph Taylor
inherited the role after Field's death (1620), and when he was too "grey" to play a young firebrand passed it to Swanston.
Bussy was revived early in the Restoration
era; it was performed at the Red Bull Theatre
in 1660
, and often thereafter. Charles Hart
was noted for the title role. Thomas d'Urfey
adapted the play into a version called Bussy D'Ambois, or The Husband's Revenge (1691
).
, makes rich use of classical allusions. Bussy features translated passages from the plays Agamemnon and Hercules Oetaeus of Seneca
, plus the Moralia
of Plutarch
, the Aeneid
and Georgics
of Virgil
, and the Adagia
of Erasmus
. The characters in the play quote or refer to the Iliad
and to works by Empedocles
, Themistocles
, and Camillus
.
, who wishes to assemble a troupe of loyal henchmen to further his own political ends. From the start, Bussy shows that he is not cut out to be a follower: Monsieur's steward, who brings Bussy the payment, is rewarded for an impertient attitude with a fist to his face.
Subsequent scenes confirm the impression that Bussy's "cannibal valor" is too wild and uncontrolled to allow him to be a tool for ambitious nobles. He quarrels bloodily with courtiers who mock him; in a triple duel he is the one of the six combatants left standing. Bussy enters into an adulterous affair with Tamyra, the wife of the powerful Count Mountsurry. Matters grow from bad to worse as Mountsurry tortures his wife on the rack to force her to confess her affair. Tamyra is forced to write a letter (in her own blood) to Bussy, summoning him to an assignation. Tamyra's chaplain, a friar who conveyed messages between the lovers, has died of shock at Tamyra's torture, and Mountsurry assumes his robes to deliver the message. Bussy sees the friar's ghost, and communicates with a conjured spirit that warns him of unfolding disaster; but the disguised Mountsurry arrives with Tamyra's letter. The trap is sprung when Bussy responds; he is gunned down in an ambush.
ever gave his own protagonists.
Or at least, that appears to have been Chapman's intent. Critics have complained at how the moralizing protagonist of the opening scene becomes the ruthless passion-driven anti-hero of the rest of the play. Some have argued that in Bussy D'Ambois Chapman sacrificed logical and philosophical consistency for dramaturgical efficacy, for "force and vehemence of imagination" (to quote Algernon Charles Swinburne
). His succeeding French histories are more consistent intellectually, but also far more dull.
George Chapman
George Chapman was an English dramatist, translator, and poet. He was a classical scholar, and his work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman has been identified as the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Minto, and as an anticipator of the Metaphysical Poets...
. Classified as either a tragedy
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
or "contemporary history," Bussy D'Ambois is widely considered Chapman's greatest play, and is the earliest in a series of plays that Chapman wrote about the French political scene in his era, including the sequel The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois is a Jacobean revenge tragedy written by George Chapman. The Revenge is a sequel to his earlier Bussy D'Ambois, and was first published in 1613.-Genre and source:...
, the two-part The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron
The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron
The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Marshall of France is a Jacobean tragedy by George Chapman, a two-part play or double play first performed and published in 1608...
, and The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France
The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France
The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France is an early seventeenth-century play, generally judged to be a work of George Chapman, later revised by James Shirley...
.
The play is based on the life of the real Louis de Bussy d'Amboise, who was murdered in 1579.
Performance and Publication
Bussy D'Ambois was probably written in 1603-4, and was performed soon after by the Children of Paul'sChildren of Paul's
The Children of Paul's was the name of a troupe of boy actors in Elizabethan and Jacobean London. Along with the Children of the Chapel, the Children of Paul's were the most important of the companies of boy players that constituted a distinctive feature of English Renaissance theatre.St...
. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register
Stationers' Register
The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England...
on June 3, 1607
1607 in literature
The year 1607 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:*February 2 - The King's Men perform Barnes's The Devil's Charter at Court.*June 5 - John Hall marries Susanna, daughter of William Shakespeare....
, and published in quarto
Book size
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from "folio" , to "quarto" and "octavo"...
the same year by the bookseller William Aspley
William Aspley
William Aspley was a London publisher of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline eras. He was a member of the publishing syndicates that issued the First Folio and Second Folio collections of Shakespeare's plays, in 1623 and 1632.-Career:...
, who issued a second quarto the next year. A revised version of the text was printed in 1641
1641 in literature
The year 1641 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:*Pierre Corneille marries Marie de Lampérière.*Sir William Davenant is convicted of high treason.*Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon becomes an advisor to King Charles I of England....
by the stationer Robert Lunne, with the claim that this text was "much corrected and amended by the author before his death." Scholars have disputed the truth of this claim, though the weight of argument seems to fall in its favor. There are 228 variants between the two versions, "including thirty long alterations and additions and five excisions; their extent and tone show a concern only an author could feel." Some commentators have argued that Chapman revised the original Bussy when writing its sequel, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois is a Jacobean revenge tragedy written by George Chapman. The Revenge is a sequel to his earlier Bussy D'Ambois, and was first published in 1613.-Genre and source:...
, c. 1610, to make the two works flow together more smoothly. Robert Lunne issued a Q4 iN 1647
1647 in literature
The year 1647 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:* Thomas Hobbes becomes tutor to the future Charles II of England.* Plagiarist Robert Baron publishes his Deorum Dona, a masque, and Gripus and Hegio, a pastoral, which draw heavily on the poems of Edmund Waller and John Webster's...
; Q5 was published by Joshua Kirton in 1657
1657 in literature
The year 1657 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:* Prohibition of young male actors in Japan.* Madame de la Fayette becomes friends with Madame de Sévigné.-New books:*François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac - Pratique du théâtre...
.
The King's Men
King's Men (playing company)
The King's Men was the company of actors to which William Shakespeare belonged through most of his career. Formerly known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it became The King's Men in 1603 when King James ascended the throne and became the company's patron.The...
acted the play at Court twice in the 1630s, on April 7, 1634
1634 in literature
The year 1634 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:*January 1 - The King's Men perform Cymbeline at the court of King Charles I of England.*January 22 - The King's Men perform Davenant's The Wits at the Blackfriars Theatre....
and March 27, 1638
1638 in literature
The year 1638 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:*February 6 - Luminalia, a masque written by Sir William Davenant and designed by Inigo Jones, is staged at the English Court....
, with Eliard Swanston
Eliard Swanston
Eliard Swanston , alternatively spelled Heliard, Hilliard, Elyard, Ellyardt, Ellyaerdt, and Eyloerdt, was an English actor in the Caroline era. He became a leading man in the King's Men, the company of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, in the final phase of its existence.-Career:Swanston...
in the title role. The prelude to the 1641 edition also indicates that Nathaniel Field
Nathaniel Field
Nathan Field was an English dramatist and actor; his father was the Puritan preacher John Field and his brother Theophilus Field became the Bishop of Llandaff...
played Bussy; Field may have brought the play to the King's Men when he joined in 1616. Apparently, Joseph Taylor
Joseph Taylor (17th-century actor)
Joseph Taylor was a 17th-century actor. As the successor of Richard Burbage with the King's Men, he was arguably the most important actor in the later Jacobean and the Caroline eras....
inherited the role after Field's death (1620), and when he was too "grey" to play a young firebrand passed it to Swanston.
Bussy was revived early in the Restoration
English Restoration
The Restoration of the English monarchy began in 1660 when the English, Scottish and Irish monarchies were all restored under Charles II after the Interregnum that followed the Wars of the Three Kingdoms...
era; it was performed at the Red Bull Theatre
Red Bull Theatre
The Red Bull was a playhouse in London during the 17th century. For more than four decades, it entertained audiences drawn primarily from the northern suburbs, developing a reputation for rowdy, often disruptive audiences...
in 1660
1660 in literature
The year 1660 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:* January 1 - Samuel Pepys starts his diary.* February - John Rhodes reopens the old Cockpit Theatre in London, forms a company of young actors and begins to stage plays...
, and often thereafter. Charles Hart
Charles Hart (17th-century actor)
Charles Hart was a prominent British Restoration actor.A Charles Hart was christened on 11 December 1625, in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate, in London. It is not absolutely certain that this was the actor, though the name was not common at the time...
was noted for the title role. Thomas d'Urfey
Thomas d'Urfey
Thomas D'Urfey was an English writer and wit. He composed plays, songs, and poetry, in addition to writing jokes. He was an important innovator and contributor in the evolution of the Ballad opera....
adapted the play into a version called Bussy D'Ambois, or The Husband's Revenge (1691
1691 in literature
The year 1691 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:* The first of eight volumes of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy Who Lived Five and Forty Years Undiscover'd at Paris is published; subsequent volumes are issued through 1694...
).
Sources
Along with historical sources on the life of Louis de Bussy d'Amboise, Chapman, like Ben JonsonBen Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
, makes rich use of classical allusions. Bussy features translated passages from the plays Agamemnon and Hercules Oetaeus of Seneca
Seneca the Younger
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero...
, plus the Moralia
Moralia
The Moralia of the 1st-century Greek scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea is an eclectic collection of 78 essays and transcribed speeches. They give an insight into Roman and Greek life, but often are also fascinating timeless observations in their own right...
of Plutarch
Plutarch
Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...
, the Aeneid
Aeneid
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...
and Georgics
Georgics
The Georgics is a poem in four books, likely published in 29 BC. It is the second major work by the Latin poet Virgil, following his Eclogues and preceding the Aeneid. It is a poem that draws on many prior sources and influenced many later authors from antiquity to the present...
of Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
, and the Adagia
Adagia
Adagia is an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' collection of proverbs is "one of the most monumental ... ever assembled" Adagia (adagium is the singular form and adagia is the plural) is an...
of Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus , known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and a theologian....
. The characters in the play quote or refer to the Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
and to works by Empedocles
Empedocles
Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the originator of the cosmogenic theory of the four Classical elements...
, Themistocles
Themistocles
Themistocles ; c. 524–459 BC, was an Athenian politician and a general. He was one of a new breed of politicians who rose to prominence in the early years of the Athenian democracy, along with his great rival Aristides...
, and Camillus
Camillus
In ancient Rome, a camillus was an acolyte in various rituals. If the camillus was a child of the cult's officiant , the child had to be free-born and under the age of puberty, and both parents had to be alive.Camillus was also a cognomen derived from the general term, most famously used by...
.
Synopsis
As the play opens, the aristocratic but impoverished Bussy, an unemployed soldier and an accomplished swordsman, is reflecting on the corrupt, avaricious, and violent society is which he lives. In the third line of his opening soliloquy, he expresses the radical view that "Who is not poor, is monstrous." Yet by the end of the scene Bussy has pocketed a thousand pounds to enter the service of Monsieur, the brother of the reigning King Henri IIIHenry III of France
Henry III was King of France from 1574 to 1589. As Henry of Valois, he was the first elected monarch of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with the dual titles of King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1573 to 1575.-Childhood:Henry was born at the Royal Château de Fontainebleau,...
, who wishes to assemble a troupe of loyal henchmen to further his own political ends. From the start, Bussy shows that he is not cut out to be a follower: Monsieur's steward, who brings Bussy the payment, is rewarded for an impertient attitude with a fist to his face.
Subsequent scenes confirm the impression that Bussy's "cannibal valor" is too wild and uncontrolled to allow him to be a tool for ambitious nobles. He quarrels bloodily with courtiers who mock him; in a triple duel he is the one of the six combatants left standing. Bussy enters into an adulterous affair with Tamyra, the wife of the powerful Count Mountsurry. Matters grow from bad to worse as Mountsurry tortures his wife on the rack to force her to confess her affair. Tamyra is forced to write a letter (in her own blood) to Bussy, summoning him to an assignation. Tamyra's chaplain, a friar who conveyed messages between the lovers, has died of shock at Tamyra's torture, and Mountsurry assumes his robes to deliver the message. Bussy sees the friar's ghost, and communicates with a conjured spirit that warns him of unfolding disaster; but the disguised Mountsurry arrives with Tamyra's letter. The trap is sprung when Bussy responds; he is gunned down in an ambush.
Critical response
As Chapman's arguable masterpiece, Bussy D'Ambois has attracted a large body of critical commentary, discussion, and dispute. Scholars have debated Chapman's philosophical and dramaturgical intentions in the play, and whether and to what degree those intentions are successfully realized. Though no true consensus has been reached, many commentators regard Bussy as Chapman's idea of a moral hero at war with his own lower tendencies, wrapped in a conflict between his idealistic urges and the sheer power of his personality — a Marlovian hero with more conscience than MarloweChristopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...
ever gave his own protagonists.
Or at least, that appears to have been Chapman's intent. Critics have complained at how the moralizing protagonist of the opening scene becomes the ruthless passion-driven anti-hero of the rest of the play. Some have argued that in Bussy D'Ambois Chapman sacrificed logical and philosophical consistency for dramaturgical efficacy, for "force and vehemence of imagination" (to quote Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
). His succeeding French histories are more consistent intellectually, but also far more dull.