Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/107

Rh closing scene. I cannot myself discover Chapman's style in the crude plays Revenge for Honour (1654) and the Tragedy of Alphonsus (1654).

In Chapman's comedy the influence of Jonson is obvious. His comic characters are grotesque and absurd humourists, his comic incidents clumsy feats of gulling. But Chapman does not attempt to imitate Jonson's careful structure and his singleness of satiric purpose. His comic scenes are interwoven with romantic story. The romantic incidents are extravagant and grotesque, but are relieved by outbursts of the same splendid poetry as illumines the tragedies—passages of the same glowing enthusiasm for the spirit which can rise superior to mortal limitations and social conventions. Perhaps of all his comedies—in spite of the high praise given to All Fools—the most readable as comedy, but for the close, is the sardonic Widow's Tears.

Chapman's tragedies bear an interesting family resemblance to one another. They are taken from French history, and Mr Boas has shown that Chapman's Holinshed was Edward Grimeston's Inventorie of the Historie of France, published in 1611. Dramatically and poetically they recall the tragedies of Marlowe. Their hero is a man "like his desires, lift upward and divine."