whom the play met
"in the scenicall presentation," and asks who will expect "the
autenticall truth of eyther person or action . . . in a poeme, whose
subject is not truth, but things like truth?" He forgets that "things
like truth" are not attained, when alien elements are forced into
mechanical union, or when well-known historical characters and events
are presented under radically false colours. But we who read the drama
after an interval of three centuries can afford to be less perturbed
than Jacobean playgoers at its audacious juggling with facts, provided
that it appeals to us in other ways. We are not likely indeed to adopt
Chapman's view that the elements that give it enduring value are
"materiall instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to vertue,
and deflection from her contrary." For these we shall assuredly look
elsewhere; it is not to them that _The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois_ owes
its distinctive charm. The secret of that charm lies outside the spheres
of "autenticall truth," moral as well as historical. It consists, as it
seems to me, essentially in this--that the play is one of the most truly
spontaneous products of English "humanism" in its later phase. The same
passionate impulse--in itself so curiously "romantic"--to revitalise
classical life and ideals, which prompted Chapman's translation of
"Homer, Prince of Poets," is the shaping spirit of this singular
tragedy. Its hero, as we have seen, has strayed into the France of the
Catholic Reaction from some academe in Athens or in imperial Rome. He
is, in truth, far more really a spirit risen from the dead than the
materialised _Umbra_ of his brother. His pervasive influence works in
all around him, so that nobles and courtiers forget for a time the
strife of faction while they linger over some fragrant memory of the
older world. Epictetus with his doctrines of how to live and how to die;
the "grave Greeke tragedian" who drew "the princesse, sweet Antigone";
Homer with his "unmatched poem"; the orators Demetrius Phalerius and
Demades--these and their like cast a spell over the scene, and transport
us out of the troubled atmosphere of sixteenth-century vendetta into the
"ampler aether," the "diviner air," of "the glory that was Greece, the
grandeur that was Rome."

Thus the two _Bussy_ plays, when critically examined, are seen to be
essentially unlike in spite of their external similarity. The plot of
the one springs from that of the other; both are