SOURCE: Burbridge, Roger Truscott. “Speech and Action in Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois.” Tennessee Studies in Literature 17 (1972): 59-65.

[In the following essay, Burbridge argues that despite Chapman's efforts to unite language and action in Bussy D'Ambois, he succeeds in representing “the constructive force of virtue only in words, not in deeds.”]

Early in the first act of Bussy D'Ambois, Bussy justifies his entering the corrupt world of the court by announcing:

I am for honest actions, not for great:
If I may bring up a new fashion,
And rise in Court with virtue, speed
                    his [Monsieur's] plough.

(I.i.128-30)¹

In the rest of this speech Bussy prepares the audience for a struggle between his virtue and the “policy” of Monsieur and other politicians of the court. As the play progresses, however, this conflict between good and evil is blurred by the action, as well as by the inaction, of the hero. We are told by everyone in the play that Bussy has superior strength and virtue, yet his actions fall far short of the standards indicated by the various comments made about him both by others and by himself. He becomes, in fact, a murderer and an adulterer, and he is exposed by the very people he has determined to purge from the court. Yet trapped though he is by circumstances, everything that is said by and about Bussy makes his death seem a glorious one, his spirit “made a star.” The play seems to move, as Eugene Waith says, on two parallel lines, one the adventure of the historical Bussy, the other the progressive revelation of a mythic figure, “a Herculean disguised as Bussy.”²

It is essential to keep this discrepancy between the language and the action of the play in mind. If we see Bussy's fall in terms of the action alone we will be tempted, as others have been, to interpret the play as an exemplum, condemning Bussy for not living according to Christian virtues.³ If we focus on language alone, we will tend to see Bussy as a stoic hero, master of his fate. Neither of these interpretations represents the impression made on us by the play as a whole. We must assume, therefore, that Chapman was only partially successful in coordinating the two elements of the play in achieving his overall purpose. He seems to have had a definite moral in mind, but it remains to be discovered. There are important questions to be asked regarding the moral pattern of Bussy D'Ambois. What is the nature of good and evil in the world of the play? Does the moral framework of the play provide Bussy with a satisfactory basis for action? What do his struggle with society, and his failure, mean?

In the opening scene Bussy condemns the evils of society from the safety of his “obscure abodes,” his “green retreat.” At first he seems a complainer rather than a reformer, and his first words betray the bitter sense of personal injustice and indignity of the typical malcontent:

Fortune, not Reason, rules the state of things,
Reward goes backwards, Honour on his head;
Who is not poor, is monstrous. …

(I.i.1-3)

Chapman seems to have made Bussy of lower social status than is warranted by the historical sources to develop in him the rebellious spirit of an outcast. However, Bussy is not discontent with his personal lot alone, but with the very nature of the social system from which he is excluded. It soon becomes clear that the root of society's corruption for Bussy is “policy.” This term represents for Bussy, as it would for Chapman's audience, all the vices such as hypocrisy, flattery, and intrigue which further the lawless pursuit of personal ambition at the expense of the common good. Bussy is not really ambitious, and in the speech rationalizing his entry into court society he contrasts the calculating “learning-hating policy” of Monsieur with his own nature, whose “… smooth plain ground / Will never nourish any politic seed …” (I.i.126-27). From the beginning Chapman takes pains to emphasize the uncorrupted nature of Bussy's virtue and uses it to put his actions in a special light. His relatively minor good actions are enlarged upon and his bad ones minimized, both by himself and by those around him. His blunt, impolitic destruction of court manners is amplified by Monsieur until it becomes proof of Bussy's extraordinary moral courage and elemental passion:

His great heart will not down, 'tis like the sea,
That. …
… never will be won—
No, not when th' hearts of all those powers are burst—
To make retreat into his settled home,
Till he be crowned with his own quiet foam.

(I.ii.138-46)

Bussy's deliberate grossness, his discourtesy to the great men at court, and even his murders are finally seen not as blameworthy but as the energetic outpourings of a noble soul. Since policy, as established by both Bussy and the King, is the wellspring of evil, then anything Bussy does which is unpolitic comes to represent a good in itself. Even Monsieur admires him for his refusal to play the politic game.

For the King, Bussy represents a prelapsarian ideal:

… Man in his native noblesse, from whose fall
All our dissensions rise. …
… kings had never borne
Such boundless eminence over other men,
Had all maintained the spirit and state of D'Ambois. …

(III.ii.91-97)

Yet Henry's characterization is slightly awry. As Edwin Muir has pointed out, Bussy's essential virtue is not innocence but, as the King himself calls it, “native noblesse”: “Bussy is like a cross between Adam and Achilles crossed again by something quite different, the Renaissance man stepping out of the Middle Ages into a new world.”⁴ Bussy is not, after all, content to remain in his uncorrupted garden outside the pale of society but wishes, godlike, to blaze an exemplary path of virtue within it; for

There is a deep nick in Time's restless wheel
For each man's good. …

(I.i.134-35)

Bussy must, of course, be seen as the moral center of the play. He is the only character besides the King who avoids, in his intentions if not always in his deeds, the use of policy. Significantly, however, Chapman does not provide him with positive moral values by which to act. Bussy's avowed purpose is simply to tear out the rotten heart of society. The difficulty of acting in a world which is entirely corrupt is that positive values are impossible, and good lies only in destruction. Thus Bussy's main virtue has to be a negative one, the defiance not only of policy but of society itself.

Bussy knows, on entering society, that it is ruled by Fortune and Chance and that its values have lost real meaning. Law in this society is what one makes it and is to be used for personal gain. Bussy calls this rapacity “Protean law” and declares that even sacred law is turned by the lawyers “… Into a harpy, that eats all but's own …” (III.ii.54). Yet since this world is the only one in which he can act, Bussy must have faith that his “destiny” and inner law will win out over those of the politicians. His opposition of his own “higher” law to that of society is made clear after the King has pardoned him for the slaying of Barrisor and his comrades:

                                                                                … since I am free,
Offending no just law, let no law make
By any wrong it does, my life her slave:
When I am wronged, and that law fails to right me,
Let me be king myself, as man was made,
And do a justice that exceeds the law …
Who to himself is law, no law doth need,
Offends no king, and is a king indeed.

(II.i.194-204)

Bussy sounds at this moment like the self-sufficient Senecan man whose adherence to the absolute command of reason and virtue places him above the dictates of others. And, except for the spontaneous and passionate nature attributed to Bussy by the other characters, this is the view of him that they generally accept. The King's admiring reactions to Bussy are typical of the other characters throughout the play.

Before exploring the inconsistencies of this picture with Bussy's actions, it is important to determine what Chapman intended by emphasizing the importance of his “inner law.” While Bussy's defiance of policy is essentially a negative virtue it has a positive side, since it represents a desire to preserve man's freedom. Bussy defies Fortune by entering a world ruled by her; his assurance of his personal “destiny” is an assertion of his independence from Fortune's caprice. He defies court conventions to prove this freedom, and the King approves because he too senses the degree to which the human spirit is stifled by society.

Bussy's justification for his adulterous affair with Tamyra is simple: he is furthering his defiance of policy, in this case the policy of false virtue, by which man's soul is imprisoned. He chides Tamyra for her “puritan” conscience:

Sin is a coward, madam, and insults
But on our weakness, in his truest valour,
And so our ignorance tames us, that we let
His shadows fright us. …
… the sly charms
Of the witch Policy makes him like a monster
Kept only to show men for goddess money. …

(III.i.18-26)

Rationalization though it seems, this speech is Bussy's sole argument for the major portion of his action in the play. We are left with the distinct impression that he takes Tamyra simply because he wants her. In fact, Bussy's superior law works out to be more or less a license to do what he wants. He is a would-be Marlovian superman trying to exercise absolute freedom. Unlike Tamburlaine, however, Bussy really wants to be morally responsible. Instead of fighting society with its own weapons, he would like to purge it with the aid of virtue and honesty. But Bussy's moral energies are vitiated by the strangely tangential intrigue which occupies most of the play and which brings about his downfall, assuring the survival of the evil forces he has set out to destroy.

The struggle between Bussy and society is, then, a conflict more of words than of deeds. For one thing, there is no one in the play evil enough for Bussy to defy in meaningful dramatic terms. Monsieur is, it must be remembered, unwilling to kill the King to further his ambitions, and it is what Bussy says about him that creates the monstrous image rather than anything he does. On the other hand, Bussy himself fails to act in the exemplary fashion which we are led to expect from the language of the play. As many critics have shown, Chapman confuses his moral concerns by having his hero work out his fate through a melodramatic intrigue filled with such hackneyed devices as the letter written in blood, the faithful friar, and the conjuring of spirits.

It is true that Chapman does seem to realize the disparity between speech and action in his hero and makes efforts to pull the two together. He has Monsieur and the Guise plot to trap him in an affair with one of the “greatest women” of the court, which makes Bussy's seduction of Tamyra right under their noses seem like a poetically just foiling of policy, although ironically it is Bussy's spontaneous, passionate, and somewhat careless wooing of Tamyra which finally makes it possible for these two Machiavels to succeed. Chapman also makes Montsurry a monster intent only on saving face and not at all loath to torture his wife. The bond of love between Bussy and Tamyra, which is unconcerned with form, is put in a far more sympathetic light by Montsurry's lack of human feeling and preoccupation with convention. Chapman also minimizes Bussy's faults in scheming with the friar by changing his picture of the friar at the end from that of a religiously hypocritical intriguer to that of a saintly ghost bidding Bussy to forgive his enemies. (Eugene Waith points out that even the earlier friar's traffic with the occult, and thus Bussy's, is never made explicitly evil as is that of Faustus.)

Even at the end of the play, however, Chapman is still unable to resolve the essential conflict between what his hero says and what he does. Bussy's affair involves him deeply in the intrigues of the society with which he is supposedly at odds. He continues to believe until the very end that he has the special privilege of involving himself in society without having to obey its rules, either the traditional values which Tamyra tries unsuccessfully to follow, or the relativistic rules of the Machiavellian court. Even when he is trapped by Monsieur and the Guise, Bussy trusts that “Fate is more strong than arms, and sly than treason, / And I at all parts buckled in my fate” (V.iii.87-88). Bussy is incredulous that his unfettered spirit can be conquered by intrigue, that his “fate” finally becomes the fickle Fortune which mocks society's members. To the end he considers his virtue unassailable. He resolves the dilemma in the only way possible, by realizing that such a virtue as his can exist only as an ideal. His final wish is to keep that ideal alive:

                                                                                                    Oh, my fame,
Live in despite of murther! Take thy wings
And haste thee where the grey eyed Morn perfumes
Her rosy chariot with Sabaean spices! …
And tell them all that D'Ambois now is hasting
To the eternal dwellers; that a thunder
Of all their sighs together, for their frailties
Beheld in me, may quit my worthless fall
With a fit volley for my funeral.

(V.iii.145-58)

What does Bussy's fall mean within the context of the extravagant words used to describe his life and death? Bussy's fall is not due to a moral failing, for within the moral framework of the play he is at worst a sincere opponent of the forces of evil. Bussy's failure can only be ascribed, I think, to the practical impossibility of any positive ideal action in a society riddled with intrigue and artifice; Bussy is heroic material in the wrong place. Chapman's vision thus presents him with an unresolvable problem. He is well aware of this for he makes Bussy say that “… rhetoric yet works not persuasion, / But only is a mean to make it work …” (I.i.136-37). In the fallen world he has chosen to depict, however, he can represent the constructive force of virtue only in words, not in deeds. For Tamyra as for Bussy, finally, the only way to realize Chapman's ideal of natural virtue is to defy the norms of society, yet this is both philosophically and dramatically an incomplete fulfillment. Tamyra's irresolution is ours also, because men must live in society. Bussy's failure is in a sense necessary, for any success Chapman could have given him would have become increasingly tainted in action. Bussy's morality could not possibly work in any society, but that does not prevent Chapman from holding him up as an ideal.

Notes

1. All quotations taken from the New Mermaid edition of Bussy D'Ambois, ed. Maurice Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966).

2. Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962), p. 93.

3. For example, Ennis Rees in The Tragedies of George Chapman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954) sees Bussy's fall as exemplifying the dangers of the active life.

4. Edwin Muir, “Notes on the Tragedies of George Chapman,” Shakespeare's Contemporaries, ed. Max Bluestone and Norman Rabkin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), p. 234.

5. Waith, p. 103.