the
original to suggest. This metamorphosis of Guise is all the more
remarkable, because Monsieur, his former co-partner in villany,
reappears, in the one scene where he figures, in the same ribald,
blustering vein as before, and his death is reported, at the close of
Act IV, as a fulfilment of Bussy's dying curse.

While Guise is transfigured, and Monsieur remains his truculent,
vainglorious self, Montsurry has suffered a strange degeneration. It is
sufficiently remarkable, to begin with, after his declaration at the
end of _Bussy D'Ambois_,

"May both points of heavens strait axeltree
Conjoyne in one, before thy selfe and me!"

to find him ready to receive back Tamyra as his wife, though her sole
motive in rejoining him is to precipitate vengeance on his head. Nor had
anything in the earlier play prepared us for the spectacle of him as a
poltroon, who has "barricado'd" himself in his house to avoid a
challenge, and who shrieks "murther!" at the entrance of an unexpected
visitor. In the light of such conduct it is difficult to regard as
merely assumed his pusillanimity in the final scene, where he at first
grovels before Clermont on the plea that by his baseness he will "shame"
the avenger's victory. And when he does finally nerve himself to the
encounter, and dies with words of forgiveness for Clermont and Tamyra on
his lips, the episode of reconciliation, though evidently intended to be
edifying, is so huddled and inconsecutive as to be well-nigh ridiculous.

Equally ineffective and incongruous are the moralising discourses of
which Bussy's ghost is made the spokesman. It does not seem to have
occurred to Chapman that vindications of divine justice, suitable on the
lips of the elder Hamlet, fell with singular infelicity from one who had
met his doom in the course of a midnight intrigue. In fact, wherever the
dramatist reintroduces the main figures of the earlier play, he falls to
an inferior level. He seems unable to revivify its nobler elements, and
merely repeats the more melodramatic and garish effects which refuse to
blend with the classic grace and pathos of Clermont's story. The
audiences before whom _The Revenge_ was produced evidently showed
themselves ill-affected towards such a medley of purely fictitious
creations, and of historical personages and incidents, treated in the
most arbitrary fashion. For Chapman in his dedicatory letter to Sir
Thomas Howard refers bitterly to the "maligners" with