When I have a problem, Johanna—a.k.a. my wife—typically solves it by asking me one of four questions.

George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (c. 1604, pub. 1607) is another play performed by one of London’s boys’ companies.  It is a bloody, crazy tragedy disguised as a history, a strange blend of the static Senecan and dynamic Elizabethan play.  Chapman’s verse is allusive and compact – I sure needed my edition’s notes – and in places magnificent.  It was written for an audience that wanted this kind of verse, this density of reference, and that had a sophisticated understanding of theatrical convention.  Sophisticated, jaded, I don’t know.  Anyway, they paid more than Shakespeare’s audience, and not just to sit in a theater with a roof.  No groundlings at Bussy D’Ambois. Incidentally, reading in this period (1598-1608) the importance of the adult vs boys’ company distinction.  The ambitious, highbrow, satirical, meta-textual plays were at the boys’ theater.  Jonson, Marston, Chapman, they wanted the intellectual prestige of the boys’ companies.  Meanwhile, over at the crass commercial adult company, Shakespeare was producing King Lear, so things did not work out exactly as expected.  In fairness, those adult companies also clearly churned out a lot of junk. Anyway, Bussy D’Ambois.  He is a French soldier who briefly becomes a successful courtier despite being rude, belligerent, and sarcastic.  He offends everyone around him except for the king’s brother, and eventually the king, who like that he is not the usual empty flatterer.  Everyone else hates him, though, and you can guess how the tragedy ends. The core conceit of the character is quite good.  Bussy imagines himself as a man of perfect integrity, but what if he is unconsciously as Machiavellian a schemer as anyone else at court.  He has just promised the king’s brother, Monsieur, that he will do anything to serve him but kill the King: MONSIEUR:  … and thy gall Turns all thy blood to poison, which is cause Of that Tode-poole that stands in my complextion; And makes thee (with a cold and earthie moisture, Which is the damme of putrification, As plague to thy damn’d pride) rot as thou liv’dst; To study calumnies and treacheries; To thy friends slaughters, like a Scrich-owle sing, And to all mischiefs, but to kill the King.  (III.2) Much of the verse is of this quality.  Here the love interest, Tamyra, is not debating but rather feeling, in monologue form, the conflict between her loyalty to her husband and her new love for Bussy: TAMYRA: Now all the peacefull regents of the night, Silently gliding exhalations, Languishing windes, and murmuring fals of waters, Sadnesse of heart, and ominous securenesse, Enchantments, dead sleepes, all the friends of rest, That ever wrought upon the life of man, Extend your utmost strengths…  (II.2) Marvelous stuff for actors and readers with a taste for blank verse.  I often had some doubts about what I would understand sitting in the audience. On the one hand, as the editor of my edition writes, “eight men die, a woman is tortured, a maid is stabbed, several devils are raised and a ghost appears to a roll of thunder” (p. 345).  Pretty exciting.  On the other, speeches are highly rhetorical, monologues discourse on envy and flattery and other elevating topics, often paraphrasing or translating Plutarch and others, and five of those deaths occur offstage during a three-way duel, all described in a terrific messenger scene full of Homeric metaphor – “Storme-like he fell, and hid the feare-cold Earth” (II.1) – also exciting, buy why is the duel not onstage?  It would not be onstage in Seneca. There is a deep nicke in times restlesse wheele For each mans good, when which nicke comes it strikes; As Rhetoricke, yet workes not perswasion, But only is a meane to make it worke…  (I.1) My text has been the fine, aside from the small type, Penguin Renaissance Dramatists edition of Chapman’s Plays and Poems (1998). I am currently reading another Chapman play, The Widdowes Teares, which is Bussy D’Ambois but as comedy.  But the next play from my tattered schedule is Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (1609 or 1610).  It is likely that the main role was played by young Nathan Field, whose first big hit role was Bussy D’Ambois.

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Perhaps it’s age but I find growing satisfaction in resolution. I like stories that conclude satisfyingly, often ending where they started, with the distance covered in between being the important part. I feel the same way about most music. You can keep the dissonance, chords that leave you hanging. I’ve grown more aware of cycles. Not cosmic. More prosaic than that – the migration of birds, the hustle of squirrels in the fall, kids returning to school. There’s a Scriptural subtext to Bill Coyle’s “Autumn” (The God of This World to His Prophet, 2006):  “Harvest time. The circle is complete. Time to crush the ripened fruit for wine. Time to grind the gathered grain for bread.   “Tru to form, the geese pass overhead, Giving us the ‘V for Victory’ sign Even as they beat their long retreat.”   When he was seven years old (he is now thirty-nine), I took my oldest son to a nature preserve near Albany, N.Y., where the rangers were leading a twilight walk into the marshes to witness the spectacle of frog courtship. The frogs were Hyla crucifer, peepers the size of postage stamps with a pattern of ill-defined crosses on their backs. In April, males serenade females – a more reliable gauge of spring’s imminence than the return of the robins. At that latitude, spring returns incrementally.   We carried flashlights, fifteen or twenty of us, and approached the booming in the night. Though tiny, peepers en masse, thousands of them, are almost deafening. Even when we shined our lights on them, to watch their throats balloon as they called, they ignored us. Everyone laughed, out of amusement and astonishment.   Then another, more raucous sound began, impossibly, to drown out the peepers. It was past sunset, black without the flashlights. Directly overhead, flying no more than 25 feet off the ground, a flock of Canada geese honked like drunken saxophonists. In the dark, I felt privileged, disoriented and a little scared (the combined volume of frogs and birds was overwhelming). The darkness and the noise created an illusion of closeness, as though we were indoors, and again everyone, kids and grownups, laughed.   In Walden, Thoreau described “the circling groping clangor of some solitary goose.” Multiply that by dozens, and add the steady basso of the peepers. His journal is filled with references to frogs, including the genus Hyla, but he made relatively few observations of geese. Concord, Mass., is at the same latitude as Albany. On April 30, 1852, he followed the sound of the peepers and noted:   “It seemed to be a note of alarm. I caught one – It proved to be two coupled. They remained together in my hand. This sound has connexion with their loves probably.”   The bachelor Thoreau on the sex life of amphibians: “their loves probably.”