is
fate, strike us as wofully crude and mechanical excursions into the
occult. But they doubtless served their turn with audiences who had an
insatiable craving for such manifestations, and were not particular as
to the precise form they took.

In point of character-drawing the play presents a more complex problem.
Bussy is a typically Renaissance hero and appealed to the sympathies of
an age which set store above all things on exuberant vitality and
prowess, and was readier than our own to allow them full rein. The King
seems to be giving voice to Chapman's conception of Bussy's character,
when he describes him in III, ii, 90 ff. as

"A man so good that only would uphold
Man in his native noblesse, from whose fall
All our dissentions arise," &c.

And in certain aspects Bussy does not come far short of the ideal thus
pictured. His bravery, versatility, frankness, and readiness of speech
are all vividly portrayed, while his mettlesome temper and his arrogance
are alike essential to his _role_, and are true to the record of the
historical D'Ambois. But there is a coarseness of fibre in Chapman's
creation, an occasional foul-mouthed ribaldry of utterance which robs
him of sympathetic charm. He has in him more of the swashbuckler and the
bully than of the courtier and the cavalier. Beaumont and Fletcher, one
cannot help feeling, would have invested him with more refinement and
grace, and would have given a tenderer note to the love-scenes between
him and Tamyra. Bussy takes the Countess's affections so completely by
storm, and he ignores so entirely the rights of her husband, that it is
difficult to accord him the measure of sympathy in his fall, which the
fate of a tragic hero should evoke.

Tamyra appeals more to us, because we see in her more of the conflict
between passion and moral obligation, which is the essence of drama. Her
scornful rejection of the advances of Monsieur (II, ii), though her
husband palliates his conduct as that of "a bachelor and a courtier, I,
and a prince," proves that she is no light o' love, and that her
surrender to Bussy is the result of a sudden and overmastering passion.
Even in the moment of keenest expectation she is torn between
conflicting emotions (II, ii, 169-182), and after their first interview,
Bussy takes her to task because her

"Conscience is too nice,
And bites too hotly of the Puritane spice."

But she masters her scruples sufficien