ABSTRACT
Chapman himself managed to escape, but scenes from The Tragedy of Byron were cut out and never appeared in print, while most of Act IV in Byron's Conspiracy has similarly vanished. Ghosts and supernatural omens incongruously guide the actions of Italian dukes or French noblemen. But these are only the more superficial features. Far more important is the persistence of the Senecan view of life and its compelling vision of tragedy. Another type of Jacobean tragedy takes its themes from Roman history. Both Jonson and Chapman at some time in their writing career experimented with this subject. The Duke is lured to a secret rendezvous where he hopes to find a new mistress, and is assassinated in private. Through the fifteen-nineties the tracking down of the Catholic recusants and the suppression of Puritan groups imposed a strait-jacket of religious orthodoxy.
