The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy
D'Ambois, by George Chapman

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois

Author: George Chapman

Editor: Frederick S. Boas

Release Date: March 24, 2007 [EBook #20890]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BUSSY D'AMBOIS ***

Produced by Melissa Er-Raqabi, Ted Garvin, Lisa Reigel,
Michael Zeug, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net

Transcriber's Note: Words italicized in the original are surrounded by
_underscores_. Words in bold in the original are surrounded by =equal
signs=. Words in Greek in the original are transliterated and placed
between +plus signs+. A complete list of corrections follows the text.

BUSSY D'AMBOIS

AND

THE REVENGE OF
BUSSY D'AMBOIS

BY GEORGE CHAPMAN

EDITED BY

FREDERICK S. BOAS, M.A.

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN
QUEEN'S COLLEGE, BELFAST

BOSTON, U.S.A., AND LONDON
D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS
1905

COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY
D. C. HEATH & CO.

Prefatory Note

In this volume an attempt is made for the first time to edit _Bussy
D'Ambois_ and _The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois_ in a manner suitable to
the requirements of modern scholarship. Of the relations of this edition
to its predecessors some details are given in the Notes on the Text of
the two plays. But in these few prefatory words I should like to call
attention to one or two points, and make some acknowledgments.

The immediate source of _Bussy D'Ambois_ still remains undiscovered. But
the episodes in the career of Chapman's hero, vouched for by
contemporaries like Brantome and Marguerite of Valois, and related in
some detail in my _Introduction_, are typical of the material which the
dramatist worked upon. And an important clue to the spirit in which he
handled it is the identification, here first made, of part of Bussy's
dying speech with lines put by Seneca into the mouth of Hercules in his
last agony on Mount Oeta. The exploits of D'Ambois were in Chapman's
imaginative vision those of a semi-mythical hero rather than of a
Frenchman whose life ove