Arth PREFACE THIS, the first volume of a new edition of the plays and poems of George Chapman, includes his tragedies, Bussy D'Ambois, The Revenge of Bussy, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron, Chabot, and Cæsar and Pompey, together with the two tragedies ascribed to him by their first publishers, Alphonsus Emperor of Germany, and Revenge for Honour. The second volume will contain his comedies, and the third his poems, along with a general introduction, a glossary, and a bibliography. The need of a complete edition of Chapman's plays and poems has long been felt by students of Elizabethan literature. It was not until more than two centuries after his death that the first collection of his plays, The Comedies and Tragedies of George Chapman, London, 1873, appeared. This collection was incomplete, omitting Chabot and Eastward Ho, and the text which professed to be an exact reprint of the old editions left much to be desired. In 1874-5 the first complete edition of his works appeared, edited by R. H. Shepherd, who is generally understood to have been the editor of the previous edition. This later edition, although remedying the omissions of the former, is satisfactory neither to the general reader nor to the student of the Elizabethan drama. There is no need to go into details here; evidence of the careless manner in which the task was performed will be found in abundance in my Text Notes to the various plays. Since 1875 only selected plays of Chapman have been published, and of these the largest collection, that included in the Mermaid Series, rests upon the work of Mr. Shepherd. There is, I believe, ample room for a new and complete edition, which will at once satisfy the demand of scholars for an accurate text, and present the work of the noble old poet in a form suited to the general reading public. Such, at least, is the opinion of the present editor, and it is at this goal that he has aimed in the preparation of the present edition. The text has been the object of peculiar care. Founded in every case but1 one upon the first edition of the play in question, it has been compared, wherever possible, with later editions in Chapman's own age, and with the work of modern editors. The spelling has been modernized throughout, and for this, in a work offered to the general public, I believe that I need offer no apology. Exact reproductions of old books are for a limited circle of scholars. They are not editions in the true sense of the word, as I understand it, but merely material from which scholars who have not access to the originals may construct editions. Nothing is gained for the general reader, nor indeed for the average student, by reproducing with painful exactness the misprints, variants in spelling, often due to the old compositors rather than to the author, and the confusing punctuation of the old texts. On the other hand, I have attempted to keep, so far as possible, the actual language of the author. I have made no attempt to correct his grammar in accordance with our modern notions of propriety. I have even retained the old spellings when they appeared to me to denote a true, though now obsolete form of the word, as, for example, murther, shipwrack, and porcpisc. Here I have in the main followed the guidance of the New English Dictionary, modernizing such forms as it includes under the mere variants of spelling, and retaining those to which it assigns an independent place. That I have been strictly consistent in dealing with the hundreds of cases on which I have had to pass judgment, I will not venture to assert. Compromises are rarely consistent, and this edition is a frank attempt to find a middle ground between a slavish retention of the errors of the old texts, and such a radical revision as would dispel the ancient flavour of the work. In the matter of metre, I have gone perhaps to undue lengths in my desire to retain the old. Nothing, I think, is clearer than that Elizabethan blank verse, written for the stage and meant to be judged by the ear rather than the eye, differed very widely from our modern conception of the ten-syllable iambic line meant rather to be read than heard. What seem to us irregularities and even palpable errors, were licenses which were claimed and freely employed by the Elizabethan playwright. I have 1 The one exception is Bussy D'Ambois, where the edition of 1641 presents Chapman's own revision of his text. See Notes, p. 541, therefore seldom emended a line for the sake of rendering it more regular,' never, indeed, except when I have been persuaded that the 'irregularity' was not due to the author, but had occurred at press. One typographical matter I may be allowed to mention here. Chapman, it seems, was in the habit 1 of denoting the contracted pronunciation of the past tense and the past participle in -ed by using the apostrophe; where he wrote out the e he meant to indicate that the final syllable was to be pronounced. I have followed this usage throughout, even at the cost of reproducing forms that may seem uncouth to modern eyes; where I have altered it I have treated the alteration as a correction of the text and have noted it in the Text Notes. Any additions that I have made either to the text or to the stage directions of the old editions I have included within square brackets. Where the alteration has involved the dropping of a word or part of a word, as in the change of suspection to suspect, on p. 362, l. 105, it has been impossible to indicate this in the text, but all such changes have been carefully recorded in the text notes. In regard to the text itself no comment is necessary on this customary practice, but a word may be in place in regard to the added stage directions. It is a matter of common knowledge that the earliest editions of Elizabethan plays are, to our modern minds, extremely deficient in stage directions. So scanty are they, indeed, that often it is difficult to grasp the situation at a glance without adding, in imagination at least, the stage directions that a modern author would supply. To facilitate the reading, then, of Shakespeare or of Chapman, I believe that a modern editor is justified in introducing whatever stage directions may seem to him to conduce to this end. On the other hand, to omit to distinguish such additions from the original directions is at once to give a false impression of the old texts, and to render the edition quite unreliable for that study of the Elizabethan stage to which at present so much attention is being directed, and from which such valuable results are, we may well hope, shortly to be obtained. I have, therefore, added stage directions whereever I saw fit, knowing that all danger of confusing my additions with the original was prevented by the typographical device of including the new within square brackets. 1 Instances of this usage may be found in the first lines of the first play of this volume, Bussy, I, i. 19 and 22. Cf, with these I, i, 44. One addition alone is not so marked. Where the old texts gave us no list of the dramatis personæ I have supplied such a list, omitting on account of the awkward appearance of the device to include the whole list within square brackets, but calling attention to it in the Text Notes. Where the old text gives a list, but omits one or more of the personages, the additions are marked as usual. For the convenience of the reader and for the purposes of reference I have divided the usually 2 unbroken acts of the original into scenes and have numbered each scene separately. The notes, beginning on p. 541 of this volume, include a special introduction, illustrative and explanatory notes, and text notes on each play. The introduction attempts to give whatever is known as to the date of composition, the sources, the stage history, and so forth, of the play, together with a brief appreciation of its peculiar characteristics. In the case of collaboration or of disputed authorship I have tried to give a careful and, I hope, impartial survey of the facts on which I have based my conclusions. So far as possible I have tried to give an answer to the varied problems presented by these plays, but I do not presume to think that I have in any case 'settled Hoti's business.' I can only hope that my work has made the conditions of the problems clearer, and brought them some stages nearer to a final solution. The notes in general are meant to elucidate and illustrate the text. Chapman is by no means easy reading. Swinburne ranks him along with Fulke Greville as ' of all English poets the most genuinely obscure in style.' I have tried to throw light upon his obscurities, sometimes by comment, sometimes by the method of paraphrase; but I cannot pretend to have solved all the difficulties which the text presents. The definition of single words has as a rule been left to the Glossary, which will appear in the third volume. Special attention has been paid in these notes to Chapman's use of his sources, to his borrowings from the classics, to parallels with other Elizabethan writers, and to parallels with other passages in his own work illustrative of his trick of repetition. The text notes give an account of the former editions, both 1 This is the case, for example, with Bussy, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron, and Chabot. Revenge for Honour alone of the plays in this volume presents the modern division into scenes. |