Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois was printed in 1607 after enjoying ‘a more-or-less continuous period of revival’ since its first performance in, probably, 1604 and was reprinted in a 1641 quarto edition, which suggests that it was still in performance or at least inviting interest many years later. Skipping forward to our modern era, the first scholarly edition of the play emerged as late as 1964. ‘One of the most popular stage plays of its day’ has had just two professional productions in the last hundred years.
Critics have often put forward the play’s putative failings in dramatic structure as the reason for its fall in popularity. The commonplace understanding ‘has been for a heavy sententious manner, tricked out with Senecan rhetoric, ill-adapted to the theatre for which, we are often told, Chapman had little affection, and less talent’. Either too ‘philosophical’ or indeed excessive in using theatrical tropes, the play has been said to exist in a ‘rather quaint junction between sophisticated moralizing and crude melodrama.’ Combining differing strains with no clear discernible thread, Bussy D’Ambois, it has been claimed, is invested in a variety of influences which are ‘not perfectly integrated, and part of the difficulty of grasping it whole derives from Chapman’s failure to bring all his complexities into clear focus.’ What I would suggest, however, is that rather than diffusing or obscuring meaning, the patchwork nature of this text is the agent in creating all that is most complex and interesting about the play. It is in the conflict between competing strains, in the process of undercutting and of creating irony, indeed in the act of ‘failure’, where meaning is able to evolve. The play is concerned with the conflict between a Stoic ideology of the ontological primacy of the interior mental life and the nature of a theatre where the interior is secondary, something only to be inferred from outward signs. This conflict is figured in the presence of the would-be Stoic hero in the French court, where the superficial exterior seems to rule. But ultimately the interior will show itself to be equally as significant.
Bussy D’Ambois, the eponymous central character, is characterised as the Renaissance archetype of a ‘full’ or ‘complete’ man. This is a hero with origins in classical literature, possessing an inner quality which pushes him ‘to the outermost reaches of the human and even beyond’; what ‘the Romans called virtus, a word related to both vir and vis, “man” and “energy”.’ This concept of male energy most often translates into an almost super-human strength and courage in its heroes. As ‘the sum of all the bodily and mental excellences of man’, it is not however limited to physical feats. Mental rigour and discipline is equally important, with Seneca describing the ‘entire man’ as one who: ‘ought not to be surmounted with exterior things, he must admire nothing but himselfe, he ought to be confident […] a composer of his own life’. The hero must be able to propagate his own will. This is not self-assertion in the political sense of Machiavellian virtù, which allows a ruler to ‘withstand the blows of Fortune [… ] and to rise in consequence to the heights of princely fame, winning glory and honour for himself and security for his government’, and is thus innately involved in achieving and accumulating external power. Rather, since ‘in the drama of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period’ it is stoicism which ‘furnishes the model of the virtuous “antique Roman”’, it is the ‘Stoic ideal of virtus’ as an internal compass existing in opposition to ‘exterior things’, which informs the Renaissance ‘compleat man’. The ontological primacy of the interiority of Stoicism, combined with the personal masculine glory of virtù, creates a hero who is only motivated by being true to how he sees himself in his own mind. Bussy D’Ambois is characterised by this understanding of virtue which is internally led, being, as the King declares:
A man so good, that only would uphold
Man in his native noblesse, from whose fall
All our dissensions rise; that in himself,
Without the outward patches of our frailty,
Riches and honour, knows he comprehends
Worth with the greatest [….]
Often the exact nature of internal worth is left unexplained, but for Chapman’s contemporary audience the Christian imagery would make it clear: Bussy represents the innate goodness of pre-lapsarian man before the corruption of the Fall. This is an interior ‘noblesse’ which transcends the need of external trappings, the ‘outward patches of our frailty,/Riches and honour’. The opposition between inner and outer riches is formed in the very first stage direction: ‘Enter Bussy D’Ambois, poor’; his poverty an invention of Chapman’s which: ‘runs quite contrary to the circumstances of his historical source.’ For Maurice Evans, this addition forms the basis in claiming the Morality play as a source for Chapman, as verging ‘at times on allegory’, the opening dialogue might represent ‘a debate between Poverty and Riches’. The contrast between the value of poverty in comparison to riches can be expanded to the broader debate between inner worth and rich exteriors, as Bussy explicates: ‘only Need/Gives form and worth to every human seed.’ Riches, by contrast, can only imitate greatness without endowing it:
Unskilful statuaries, who suppose,
In forging a Colossus, if they make him
Straddle enough, strut, and look big, and gape,
Their work is goodly: so our tympanous statists
In their affected gravity of voice,
Sourness of countenance, manners’ cruelty,
Authority, wealth, and all the spawn of Fortune,
Think they bear all the kingdom’s worth before them;
Yet differ not from those colossic statues,
Which, with heroic forms without o’er-spread,
Within are nought but mortar, flint, and lead.
A near translation of lines I.1.6-7 in Plutarch’s Moralia, this section demonstrates how men attempt to ape greatness through external signifiers, but remain empty inside – the literal opposite of the ‘full’ man. Such men attempt to work ‘outside in’, using their external bearing to conjure a sense of inner worth, rather than, as Bussy does, working ‘inside out’, allowing their inner worth to be expressed in all the outward actions of their life.
Stoicism would have this method of ‘inside out’ work on a social as well as an individual scale. Although ‘in the ideal world the state withers away because each Stoic sage is self-sufficient and his own authority’, in reality the virtuous man, impelled by his ‘concern for universal order and the dignity of individual man’, might practise his own virtue in a public forum, and in so doing, set an example for others to follow (thus the Stoic is often depicted as the enemy of tyrants in Renaissance drama). The Monsieur uses this philosophy as a means of persuading Bussy to enter the French court:
[…] our lives
In acts exemplary not only win
Ourselves good names, but do to others give
Matter for virtuous deeds, by which we live.
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