SOURCE: Leggatt, Alexander. “Tone and Structure in Chapman's Byron.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 24, no. 2 (spring 1984): 307-26.

In the essay below, Leggatt posits that Byron should be more fully considered as two separate plays rather than as one long ten-act drama, arguing that Chapman employed a distinct shift in tone from the comedic to the tragic in order to distinguish the two plays.

To a degree unusual in the criticism of Elizabethan two-part plays, Chapman's The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron has been treated as a single work. Derek Crawley describes it simply as “a ten-act play,”¹ and this view is widely shared. Inevitably, it has caused problems in responding to the ending of the first play, Byron's Conspiracy. James Smith sees the break between the two plays as “an artificial contrivance,”² suggesting that the ending of the first play, in which Byron repents and...