Abstract
Gunilla Florby’s essay situates George Chapman’s two-part play The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron at the intersection between topical reference and classical intertext. In particular, Florby investigates the transformation of Seneca’s Oedipus into an eloquent debate with a bearing on current political events such as the Essex conspiracy. By exploring the double take in this double play, Florby is able to sound the text’s “dynamic interaction of positions and ideologies”—something which lies at the heart of Chapman’s obsessive exploration of the classical heritage that informed his writing.
Highlights
I have elsewhere argued for a reading of George Chapman’s Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron in which this two-part play is seen to be imbricated within an anti-absolutist discourse.1 My claim was that while relaying a series of historical events, the text betrays its anxiety about the absolutist tendencies of contemporary statecraft in its excessive rhetoric and in tell-tale discontinuities
Biron’s story would have been of interest to a contemporary audience because it dealt with recent events across the Channel, events that would have seemed especially relevant to the British public due to the joint war effort against Spain in which Biron played a part, but perhaps mainly because it presented a close parallel to a political scandal
The textual traces of the earl of Essex and the duke of Biron are intertwined. They were both victims of a courtly culture in which the zeal for individual glory clashed violently with the monarch’s demand for absolute allegiance, and where a process of exclusion and a narrowing down of the customary rights of noble families was sensed to be in progress
Summary
I have elsewhere argued for a reading of George Chapman’s Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron in which this two-part play is seen to be imbricated within an anti-absolutist discourse.1 My claim was that while relaying a series of historical events, the text betrays its anxiety about the absolutist tendencies of contemporary statecraft in its excessive rhetoric and in tell-tale discontinuities. Such debates and attempts at persuasion are what one might expect in a dramatization of the fate of the rebellious duke of Biron, but what complicates the response of the auditor/reader is that behind the lines another kind of debate is going on.
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