As an ‘opening up’, the belief is that the signifiers of a Morality play are transparent, and that the exterior we observe is a faithful revelation of the interior: nothing can be hidden. This is the language of Eden, according to St Augustine, where words convey unambiguous meaning, allowing us to see right into the mind of the speaker. This is supposedly the language of pre-lapsarian Bussy, who, in these philosophical set pieces, stages his own sense of self (a staging Chapman uses the play’s choric commentators to reflect), believing that in so doing his inner virtue may extend past exteriors to be signified to others as clearly as it is to his own self.
What Bussy and these others tell us is in contrast with what can actually be seen. Chapman has written his character into a piece of early modern drama, not a Morality play. The characters, no longer purely symbolic allegories, have hidden insides: ‘Persons and things inwardly are […] persons and things outwardly only seem.’ The interior is still essentialised, but now it is a hidden truth: ‘Tudor and Stuart polemicists against the theatre […] acknowledge the separability of a privileged, “true” interior and a socially visible, falsifiable exterior even as they decry that separation, emphasizing the obligation of “all men at all times … to seem that outwardly which they are inwardly”.’ This is because early modern theatre is fundamentally an ‘embodied medium, limited at the level of character to externalised words and actions’, where: ‘whenever a character does a thing – speak, think, move, exist – he or she must do so with the body in order for us to know about it’. ‘The moment a character enters until the moment he or she exits, the character is always communicating, always revealing, always converting a state of being into empirical signs’, and the onus is on the viewer to interpret them. Thus interiority can only ever be inferred, rather than presented, and no single moral vision can illuminate our understanding of the play.
Bussy’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get heroic thus becomes anachronistic surrounded by the mode of representation of early modern theatre. It is ironised, criticised, undercut – brought out of the sphere of the super-human and theoretical and into the world of the spectator, made theatrical. This is never more apparent than during his death, in which his inner ‘essence’ comes into conflict with the reality of the presented body onstage. We are told previously that Nature:
[…] hath breathed a spirit
Into thy entrails, of effect to swell
Into another great Augustus Caesar,
Organs and faculties fitted to her greatness;
And should that perish like a common spirit,
Nature’s a courtier and regards no merit.
The language used here draws on contemporary medicinal understanding, in which a person’s external behaviour is defined by the internal composition of their humours:
the ‘complexion’ of humours in the centre of the body had enormous influence on personality, mood, disorders of mind and soul. Conventional wisdom had it that the mind was constantly influenced by spirits, vapours or fumes ascending from the heart and bowels to the brain.
Thus Bussy is infused with a ‘spirit’, which is not merely accidental but designed by Nature to ‘swell’ his greatness. However, in accordance with the demands of the Renaissance revenge tragedy plot, Bussy is ultimately shown to live in a world with no teleological design. We are told all in the very first line of the play: ‘Fortune, not Reason, rules the state of things’, such that, as the Monsieur explains in the choric scene quoted earlier, Nature may:
Give a whole man valour, virtue, learning,
Without an end more excellent than those
On whom she no such worthy part bestows.
Bussy’s less-than heroic death, (shot in the back by his enemies of court), thus rids us of any illusions we might hold about some great fate destined to his superlative interior spirit. It even problematises the idea of this interior essence existing at all. Realising his approaching demise, he asks:
Is my body then
But penetrable flesh? And must my mind
Follow my blood? Can my divine part add
No aid to th’earthly in extremity?
The supposedly supra-human has been forced to discover his own humanity. He is unable to transcend the physical reality of his body with his ‘divine part’, no matter how much he may try. Rather than the interior rising from within to immortalise without, we have ended up with an early modern tragedy, with its ‘emphasis on a ‘carnal, bloody and unnatural’ forcing open of the ‘artificially’ classicised body exteriors. And, as BLANK tells us, ‘it is not that such intrusion suddenly grants access to the interior, rather the interior is thereby stripped of the essence of its interiority. It is re-made as exterior’.
Bussy’s innards are spilt, they are externalised, objectified for the spectator’s view. And the spectator sees nothing but blood. Brought into the bounds of external reality, Bussy’s ‘interior’ contains nothing essential at all.
Thus many critics have responded to Bussy as being simply self-deceived, such that the true tragedy ‘lies not in his mal-adaption to the society defined by the French court nor in the gradual corruption of his character, but in Bussy’s mistaken perception of himself.’ I do not believe, however, that this is a fair summary of the play. Bussy is troubling, baffling even, but he is hardly simply delusional. If this were the case, the play might even verge on comedy; as a character of self-inflated bombast it might be difficult to feel anything for his demise, or any feeling we did have would be, as BLANK explains above, a kind of condescension, a knowing pity. But there is something genuinely tragic in his death. There is the presence of an imaginatively-created, suffering individual consciousness to which we can connect with human sympathy when, in his final words, Bussy laments the:
[…] frail condition of strength, valour, virtue,
In me, (like warning fire upon the top
Of some steep beacon, on a steeper hill)
Made to express it: like a falling star
Silently glanced, that like a thunderbolt
Looked to have struck and shook the firmament.
We are awarded an understanding of what could be, but was not, the aim of the ‘thunderbolt’, the result of the ‘falling star’. This is not potential in the sense of futurity, of Bussy’s blossoming into greatness cruelly arrested by the sharp hand of fate. Rather, it is the potential of the past, of the play, an understanding of what Bussy was that constantly eluded the spectator but was never entirely eradicated.
(I agree with what you say about the potential thing – but I do wonder whether there needs to be some sort of link here, some discussion of the falling star bit which leads into the next section about language)
Bussy’s inner worth was constantly stated by characters in the play to be transparent, expressly conveyed as ‘visible’ and ‘immediate’. The language Bussy uses, however, is hardly Edenic in its transparency. Rather it serves as evidence of the problematic matter of his interior intentions issuing into the exterior world just as he intends them. Many speeches in the play are notoriously difficult; there is an exterior boundary of hermeneutic difficulty,
a kind of mask which sometimes draws too much attention to itself, so that the material it controls is obscured. That is why the play can seem mere melodrama: the strongly rhetorical verse and the strong dramatic structure can become opaque; the life of Chapman’s tragedy lies within them.
Thus within the intricate contortions of Bussy’s self-theatricalised speech, his staging of self which formally and linguistically ‘draws too much attention to itself’, the ‘life’ of tragedy can be said to reside. In the prefatory epistle to his earlier Neoplatonic poem, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (date?), Chapman himself promotes this belief of truth which is only discoverable through ‘Obscuritie’: as ‘rich Minerals are digd out of the bowels of the earth, not found in the superficies and dust of it.’ The ‘Minerals’ that can be dug deep out of the recesses of Chapman’s verse are suggested by Brooke to be a sense of ‘imaginative complexity’, which is explored through a remarkable sensitivity to words: the contrast between vulgar and high-flown, between nuances in two words of one meaning […] between two meanings in one word […] and so on: language has for Chapman, as for many Elizabethans (pre-eminently Shakespeare), always this potential richness. Thus, despite its superficial formality, Chapman’s poetry has a strong sense of spontaneous development in the words themselves: arriving on ‘flourish’ [is that what Brooke wrote?] in one sense, he moves on without explanation from another [?]; and even when some possible meanings are not explicitly involved, they still often seem to influence a subsequent development.
This can be evidenced in many places, such as in Bussy’s expression of his strength against an enemy in Act Four Scene One:
Were I the man ye wronged so and provoked
Though ne’er so much beneath you, like a box-tree
I would, out of the toughness of my root,
Ram hardness in my lowness and, like Death
Mounted on earthquakes, I would trot through all
Honours and horrors; through foul and fair,
And from your whole strength toss you into air.
The metaphor of the ‘box tree’ seems a strange diversion until we realise that Chapman is picking up the literal use of ‘being ne’er so much beneath’ his enemy by describing himself as a famously short plant. Similarly, the simile ‘Death/Mounted on earthquakes’ is difficult to decipher until ‘mounted’ is picked up in Bussy’s ‘trot’ motion, and the earthquake, representing the hard, low, intensely-packed mass of the box tree’s roots, is the agent of foiling his enemy: ‘from your whole strength toss you into air’. By manipulating the meaning of certain words, and transferring semantic fields across metaphors Chapman does indeed create a strangely integrated whole out of disparate parts, but it is a meaning which allows for movement and evokes a sense of spontaneity within it. ‘Life’ is created out of this ‘imaginative complexity’: images are evoked but never pinned down. Although we may disagree with the sense of self projected, of Bussy as a righteous powerhouse of strength and courage, within the contorted, paratactic flights of rhetoric an irreducible occluded inner life is conveyed. If, as Ben Jonson declared, ‘Language most shows a man. Speak that I may see you’, then the dense, strenuous, conflicted, semantically overwrought and imaginatively complex language that Bussy speaks shows the struggle of a would-be autonomous consciousness to assert its presence in the play. The struggle itself constitutes an identity, an identity which will not be totally a function of the society in which he must live. In his argument that Jacobean tragedy sought to ‘decentre’ the individual, BLANK Dollimore believes that Chapman’s tragedy reveals to us that ‘the ideal of substantial essence is an illusion’, and that the self can only be reduced to a site of social process and ideological contradiction. This vision of the play sees a tragic presentation of a doomed, heroic early modern assertion of the individual will which cannot achieve the self-defining autonomy it proclaims. But it can be seen that the play’s exteriorisation of the interior is used to indicate a consciousness that is not entirely determined by social construction. And this, the sense of an inner world conjured by embodied, exterior, presentational forms, ultimately forms a microcosm of subjectivity as formed in the early modern theatre, in which, for the first time, performance might just be the ‘extrusion of some deeper, persistent reality’.