Was it primarily with the motive of providing Clermont with a plausible excuse for suicide that Chapman so startlingly transformed the personality of Henry of Guise? The Duke as he appears in _The Revenge_ has scarcely a feature in common either with the Guise of history or of the earlier play. Instead of the turbulent and intriguing noble we see a "true tenth worthy," who realizes that without accompanying virtues "greatness is a shade, a bubble," and who drinks in from the lips of Clermont doctrines "of stability and freedom." To such an extent does Chapman turn apologist for Guise that in a well-known passage (II, i, 205 ff.) he goes out of his way to declare that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was "hainous" only "to a brutish sense, But not a manly reason," and to argue that the blame lay not with "religious Guise," but with those who had played false to "faith and true religion." So astonishing is the dramatist's change of front that, but for the complete lack of substantiating evidence, one would infer that, like Dryden in the interval between _Religio Laici_ and _The Hind and Panther_, he had joined the Church of Rome. In any case the change is not due to the influence of Grimeston's volume, whence Chapman draws his material for the account of Guise's last days. For Jean de Serres (whom the Englishman is here translating) sums up the Duke's character in an "appreciation," where virtues and faults are impartially balanced and the latter are in no wise extenuated. It is another tribute to Chapman's skill, which only close study of the play in relation to its source brings out, that while he borrows, even to the most minute particulars, from the annalist, he throws round the closing episodes of Guise's career a halo of political martyrdom which there is nothing in the original to suggest. This metamorphosis of Guise is all the more remarkable, because Monsieur, his former co-partner in villany, reappears, in the one scene where he figures, in the same ribald, blustering vein as before, and his death is reported, at the close of Act IV, as a fulfilment of Bussy's dying curse. While Guise is transfigured, and Monsieur remains his truculent, vainglorious self, Montsurry has suffered a strange degeneration. It is sufficiently remarkable, to begin with, after his declaration at the end of _Bussy D'Ambois_, "May both points of heavens strait axeltree Conjoyne in one, before thy selfe and me!"