George Chapman's All Fools - some wit, some wealth

George Chapman has the funny distinction of being famous, courtesy of Keats, but unread.  He was one of the finest poets and playwrights of the Age of Shakespeare, one of the great Not Shakespeares.  His 1604 comedy All Fools gives a good idea of how he is good and why he is little read.

All Fools is a blend of two Terence plays, much like Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is a mix of two Plautus plays.  The sons want to marry for love, against the will of their fathers.  The sons are right; the fathers get their (mild) comeuppance.  In the B-plot, a jealous husband also learns his lesson.

The sons and their secret wives and girlfriends are barely distinguishable, like the romantic quartet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The distinctive character is Rynaldo, a younger brother, who is the trickster figure, arranging various schemes so the lovers can put one or two or more over on their gullible fathers.  He is a bit like Puck, or the Duke in Measure for Measure, “gulling” the other characters, arranging the plot behind the scenes.  Although All Fools does not have a hint of the more disturbing side of Measure for Measure.  It is essentially a pastoral, full of lovestruck shepherds wandering in the woods, although they are neither shepherds nor in a forest.

Chapman, as a poet, is a real Classicist, light and correct, elegant and lovely, but – maybe here is a reason he is less read – seldom surprising in a word or phrase the way Shakespeare so often is.  Nor is he a linguistic screwball like John Marston.  I had trouble taking notes on All Fools because the verse is so consistent, so smooth.

Here is Rynaldo soliloquizing at the beginning of Act V, where he will successfully wrap up his schemes.  I say “soliloquizing” but this might as well be a direct address to the audience:

Fortune the great commandresse of the world,

Hath divers wayes to advance her followers:

To some she gives honour without deserving,

To other some deserving without honour,

Some wit, some wealth: and some wit without wealth:

Some wealth without wit, some, not wit not wealth

But good smocke-faces: or some qualities,

By nature without judgement, with the which

They live in sensuall acceptation,

And make show onely, without touche of substance;

My fortune is to win renown by Gulling…  (V.1, 59-60)

His purpose in life is to play tricks.  The verse flows along pleasantly, smartly alliterated and assonated, varied and intelligent.  The whole play is more or less like this.  Very nice.  There are some limits, in literary style, to “very nice.”

There was a surprise at the very end of the play, when one of the lovers delivers a long satirical prose speech on the subject of horns.  I suppose the first thing, perhaps the only thing, everyone learns about Shakespearean language is that a wife’s infidelity causes the husband to grow horns, thus the endless stream of hilarious puns about horns.  All Fools ends with not with a joke but an entire Erasmus-like Menippean satire, In Praise of Horns.

For their power it is generall over the World, no Nation so barbarous, no Country so proude, but doth equall homage to the Horne.  Europa when shee was carried through the Sea by the Saturnian Bull, was said (for feare of falling) to have held by the Horne: and what is this but a plaine shewing to us, that allEurope, which took name from that Europa, should likewise hold by the Horne…  (V.2, 70)

Etc., etc.  All of this could easily be omitted from a performance.  I wonder what it is doing there.

The text and page numbers are from the 1998 Penguin  Plays and Poems.  Next fall I will read at least one more Chapman play, the tragedy Bussy D’Ambois.  If I have the strength I will spend some time with his poems this summer.   The last play of this spring will be John Marton’s The Dutch Courtesan (1604), about which I know nothing.