SOURCE: MacLure, Millar. “Tragedy.” In George Chapman: A Critical Study, pp. 108-57. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966.

In the following essay, MacLure provides a comprehensive survey of Chapman's tragedies, demonstrating that the playwright displays a marked conflict between pedantic knowledge and creative imagination in his works.

Chapman's definition of tragedy is frequently quoted, with or without the reservation that it does not necessarily describe his own contributions to the genre:

Poor envious souls they are that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions; material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, limbs and limits of an autentical tragedy.

A highly characteristic utterance, complete with physiological analogy, moral energy, and contempt for such poor creatures as might take any other view, though it echoes pretty closely some Jonsonian phrases in the preface to Sejanus: “truth of Argument,” “gravity and height...