Virtual Grub Street: Why and When Did the Playwright George Chapman Give Off Cursing?

The Life and Death of the merry Devill
of Edmonton (1631).

In our previous post we established that Tudors and Jacobins were given to oaths featuring the body and/or body parts of God, a habit reflected in some playwrights, among them George Chapman, and that far-and-away Chapman's favorite such oath was 'Sfoot (God's foot). But, strangely, such oaths suddenly disappeared from his plays.

Not before Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston were imprisoned for their 1605 satire Eastward Hoe. Not for oaths on body parts but for sniping at King James I for selling knighthoods to his Scottish favorites. This and other unflattering observations were played at Court. Jonson and Chapman were imprisoned. According to William Drummond's Certain Informations and maners of Ben Johnsons to W. Drumond (a.k.a. Conversations with Drummond), “the report was that they should then had their ears cutt [slit] & noses.” On top of imprisonment for an unspecified time, Chapman would be left with scars of shame the rest of his life.

Chapman was saved by the intercession of the Earl of Suffolk (Jonson, by his patron the Earl of Pembroke) but the experience must have been traumatic.

On January 1st (N.S.) of the next year “3 James 1 c.21: An Act to restrain the Abuses of Players” passed Parliament. As of the close of session, on May 27th, it would be illegal for players to “ jestingly or profanely speak or use the holy Name of God, or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghost, or of the Trinity, which are not to be spoken but with fear and Reverence”¹. Chapman would not write another comedy of which we are aware for the rest of his days.

He had had great success, in 1603, with his play The Tragedy of Bussy Ambois and stayed with that genre, vis-a-vis the stage, and Court masques. Perhaps his in-progress translations of the Homer's Iliad and Odyssey left him no time to do more. As for the tragedies, two instances of 'sfoot and one of 'slight appear in the published texts as they have come down to us. Apparently they escaped notice in the performances. The Act did not prohibit such oaths in print, but, forbidden in the plays, they were bound to disappear in both.

So then, 'sfoot tells us one more key bit of information. Chapman's The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1608) and Thomas of Woodstock had to have been acted before May of 1606. The Merry Devil making considerable reference to the full script which first appeared in print as the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor², it was likely composed between the conjectured first performance, in 1597, and 1606. Queen Elizabeth's ferocious anger at writing and acting plays about Richard II suggest that Woodstock was likely written between her death, in March of 1603, and May of 1606.³

As for Chapman's glaring authorship tell, after 1606 it is no longer available to inform the harried scholar. Other less immediately identifiable signs can still make a case for Chapman authorship. He was also in the habit of interpolating the word “come” to give his prosody a change up: “Come, come...” “Come then...” “Come, madam,...” “Come, sir...” “Come on, brave friend...” “Come, y'are a glorious ruffian...” etc. Common though the word is, in Chapman's plays it is noticeably moreso due to this prosodic ploy.

To a lesser extent, Chapman's use of let and let's is somewhat idiomatic at times. His habit, half the time, of contracting the phrase “Let's go,” leaving the verb implied, is not entirely common: “Come, let's away...” “Let's this way...” “Let's in and eat...” etc. His frequent imitation of Shakespeare's plays, of course, is another trait, however much he is by no means alone in it. In identifying him as author of an individual play these can only serve to add to the cumulative evidence.

In discerning a Chapman play from a Shakespeare play, in particular, there is generally a point of comparison that is unmistakable. As Shakespeare matured, he practiced numerous styles. Earliest he wrote in the style of the 1570s: irregular couplets, fourteeners, poulter's measure, etc. Next he wrote in the style of the early 1580s (largely prose), mid-1580s (crude blank verse), late-1580s (crude blank verse with many passages of iambic pentameter couplets). By the early 1590s, he began to display the mature Shakespearean style: upper class characters speak blank verse and rhymed poetry occasionally in instances of heightened emotion, lower class speak prose.

George Chapman's plays consistently show a similar pattern to the post-1590 Shakespeare, on one hand, and quite a different on the other. In his plays he also alternates between blank verse and prose. But when he is composing in blank verse all characters, high and low, speak in blank verse as the rule. When in prose, all characters speak prose. The impression is that he writes blank verse until it threatens to betray itself as verse (as contrived) and then switches into prose. Once he clears the audience's palate, as it were, he returns to blank verse.

All of these characteristics of Chapman are present throughout Thomas of Woodstock and The Merry Devil of Edmonton. In the former, for example, Richard's manipulative favorites, Bushie, Greene and Bishop Tresillian go back and forth, throughout the play, from blank verse to prose. In Act 3, Scene 2, Woodstock exchanges blank verse between himself and fellow noblemen, for the first half, prose between he, a servant and a courtier for a quarter and blank verse between he and the courtier alone to the end. In The Merry Devil, master and servant go blank verse and prose respectively, ala Shakespeare, then master prose then blank verse then prose. Sir Andrew starts the play prose, prose, prose, blank verse until the fifth act when he flips back and forth between the two again. The same pattern with the words lets and come prevails.

1The Statutes Project. “1605 [O.S.]: 3 James 1 c.21: Restraining abuses by Players.” Also, Statutes at Large, Volume 3 (1763). 61-2.

2See my Edward de Vere's Retainer Thomas Churchyard: the Man Who Was Falstaff (2017) for more information on the relationship between these plays. https://www.amazon.com/Edward-Veres-Retainer-Thomas-Churchyard-ebook/dp/B077LVLXY2/

3The first published edition of Shakespeare's Richard II being in 1597, that, too, might suggest the early date.

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Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
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Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.