Produced by Melissa Er-Raqabi, Ted Garvin, Lisa Reigel, Michael Zeug, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note: Words italicized in the original are surrounded by _underscores_. Words in bold in the original are surrounded by =equal signs=. Greek words may not display properly--in that case, try the plain text version. BUSSY D'AMBOIS AND THE REVENGE OF BUSSY D'AMBOIS BY GEORGE CHAPMAN EDITED BY FREDERICK S. BOAS, M.A. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN QUEEN'S COLLEGE, BELFAST BOSTON, U.S.A., AND LONDON D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS 1905 COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY D. C. HEATH & CO. Prefatory Note In this volume an attempt is made for the first time to edit _Bussy D'Ambois_ and _The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois_ in a manner suitable to the requirements of modern scholarship. Of the relations of this edition to its predecessors some details are given in the Notes on the Text of the two plays. But in these few prefatory words I should like to call attention to one or two points, and make some acknowledgments. The immediate source of _Bussy D'Ambois_ still remains undiscovered. But the episodes in the career of Chapman's hero, vouched for by contemporaries like Brantôme and Marguerite of Valois, and related in some detail in my _Introduction_, are typical of the material which the dramatist worked upon. And an important clue to the spirit in which he handled it is the identification, here first made, of part of Bussy's dying speech with lines put by Seneca into the mouth of Hercules in his last agony on Mount Oeta. The exploits of D'Ambois were in Chapman's imaginative vision those of a semi-mythical hero rather than of a Frenchman whose life overlapped with his own.