The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France

The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France is an early seventeenth-century play, generally judged to be a work of George Chapman, later revised by James Shirley. The play is the last in Chapman's series of plays on contemporary French politics and history, which started with Bussy D'Ambois and continued through The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois.

As usual in Chapman's French histories, the characters and plot are based on actual historical personages and events – which in this case occurred in the early sixteenth century in the reign of Francis I of France, revolving around Philippe de Chabot.

Date and source

Scholars have disputed the date of authorship of Chapman's original version; it had to be later than 1611, when Chapman's primary historical source, Pasquier's Les Recherches de la France, was published. Some scholars have dated the original play as late as 1622.

Publication

The play entered the documentary record on 29 April 1635, when Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, listed it in his accounts as a work by Shirley. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 24 October 1638, again as a work by Shirley, and was first published in the following year, 1639, in a quarto printed by Thomas Cotes for the booksellers Andrew Crooke and William Cooke. The quarto's title page attributes the play to Chapman and Shirley, and states that the play was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre, as were most of Shirley's plays of the 1630s.

Revision

It is thought that Shirley's revision of Chapman's original most likely took place in 1634–35, between Chapman's death in the earlier year and Herbert's record. T. M. Parrott, a leading Chapman scholar, provided a breakdown of the two writers' shares:

Chapman – Act I, scene i; Act II, scene iii; Act v, scene ii;

Chapman and Shirley – Act II, scene ii; Act III, scene ii; Act IV; Act V, scene i;

Shirley – Act II, scene i; Act III, scene i.