Year: 1969
Type: article
Abstract: see in his revolt how honour's flood Ebbs into air, when men are great, not good Charles de Gontaut, Duke of Byron, is no reincarnation of Bussy D'Ambois.The super- ficial similarities he bears to Chapman's earlier hero only serve to outline more clearly the distance between them.The Prologue awards him the status of an autumnal star (1.12) and a fanfare of loud music (I.ii) announces his entranceso unlike the posthumous stellification and quiet choric self-introduction of Bussy.Byron approaches the discontented La Fin, "alone, and heavy countenanc'd" (II.i. 54), in a way reminiscent of Monsieur's approach to Bussy, just as La Fin's description of the chaotic influence of the moon (III.i. 6-16) recalls the lunar control of Monsieur's imagistic delineation of Bussy's "great heart" (Bussy D'Ambois, I. ii.[138][139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146].But in The Conspiracy the roles of victimizer and prey are reversed, and the mention of the moon is not part of an ominous encomium but of an admitted lure.It is Byron who is played upon when he commiserates with La Fin as surely as it is he who falls the victim of this Machiavel's "feigned passion" (III.i. 1). Hs heroic vaunts about leaving his statue eternally rooted on a mountain (III.ii. 141-55),^being a "law rational" (III.iii.145), and filling his sails "with a lusty wind" (III.iii.136) are quite removed from Bussy's marbled death stance as "a Roman statue" (V.iii.144), his defense of that kingly prerogative to "do a justice which exceeds the law" (III.i. 199), and his humble reliance on (or appearance as) a virtuous guide to prevent "shipwreck in our safest port" (I.i. 3 3).The Tragedy casts Byron's pronouncements in an even less sympathetic light.Unlike Bussy's eventual joining with Hercules (V.iii.270) and his rugged stand as a box-tree (IV.i. 85), Byron appropriates the Atlas-like role of Hercules (III.i. 151) and considers himself a lofty and unbeaten "cedar on Mount Lebanon" (V.iii. 1 3) disdaining the box-tree lowliness of his judges.But, as Henry remarks, Byron's eventual port is only "despair and ruin" (III.ii.69), and, in Epernon's view, his outcome is a disappointment of previous stellar potential, comparable to "An exhalation that would be a star . . .which fell, when the sun forsook it, in a sink" (IV.ii.292-3).Self- pitying hyperbole seems to dominate his conclusion that "virtue in great men must be small and slight, / For poor stars rule where she is exquisite" (V.ii. 186-7)and hence to distinguish it also from the detached choric utterance of Monsieur about the fate of "this full creature (who) now shall reel and fall" (Bussy D'Ambois, V. iii.46).Although similar features, such as a shared encomiastic treatment of Elizabeth, outbursts of viciousness, riddles, chess games, and forms of choric commentary, may appear to link the plays more closely together, in reality such similarities separate them even more.While Bussy's King praises Elizabeth's court, Byron's King proposes an educative sojourn there to calm his splenative Duke (III.ii.274-84).The viciousness of the honest assessments which Bussy and Monsieur engage in resides whoUy in verbal power; in contrast, the revelation of La Brosse^adds to the tension of The Conspiracy by unleashing the Duke's physical rashness and extracting his confession about a pitiful preference of flattery, so foreign to the searing truth of Bussy's encounter with Monsieur.The riddle of the easily won Pero about
Source: Renaissance and Reformation
Author: Patricia Demers
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3042474416