from the unseen
world at last stirs up Clermont to execute the long-delayed vengeance
upon Montsurry, though he is all but forestalled by Charlotte, who has
donned masculine disguise for the purpose. But hard upon the deed comes
the news of Guise's assassination, and impatient of the earthly barriers
that now sever him from his "lord," Clermont takes his own life in the
approved Stoic fashion. So passes from the scene one of the most
original and engaging figures in our dramatic literature, and the more
thorough our analysis of the curiously diverse elements out of which he
has been fashioned, the higher will be our estimate of Chapman's
creative power.

Was it primarily with the motive of providing Clermont with a plausible
excuse for suicide that Chapman so startlingly transformed the
personality of Henry of Guise? The Duke as he appears in _The Revenge_
has scarcely a feature in common either with the Guise of history or of
the earlier play. Instead of the turbulent and intriguing noble we see a
"true tenth worthy," who realizes that without accompanying virtues
"greatness is a shade, a bubble," and who drinks in from the lips of
Clermont doctrines "of stability and freedom." To such an extent does
Chapman turn apologist for Guise that in a well-known passage (II, i,
205 ff.) he goes out of his way to declare that the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew was "hainous" only "to a brutish sense, But not a manly
reason," and to argue that the blame lay not with "religious Guise," but
with those who had played false to "faith and true religion." So
astonishing is the dramatist's change of front that, but for the
complete lack of substantiating evidence, one would infer that, like
Dryden in the interval between _Religio Laici_ and _The Hind and
Panther_, he had joined the Church of Rome. In any case the change is
not due to the influence of Grimeston's volume, whence Chapman draws his
material for the account of Guise's last days. For Jean de Serres (whom
the Englishman is here translating) sums up the Duke's character in an
"appreciation," where virtues and faults are impartially balanced and
the latter are in no wise extenuated. It is another tribute to Chapman's
skill, which only close study of the play in relation to its source
brings out, that while he borrows, even to the most minute particulars,
from the annalist, he throws round the closing episodes of Guise's
career a halo of political martyrdom which there is nothing in