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[Sikkila S. <rea...@tw...>]

Lated to these immediate forerunners than to the piece of which it is
the titular successor. The discovery which I recently was fortunate
enough to make of a common immediate source of the two Byron plays and
of _The Revenge_ accentuates the connection between them, and at the
same time throws fresh light on the problem of the _provenance_ of the
second D'Ambois drama. In his scholarly monograph _Quellen Studien zu
den Dramen George Chapmans, Massingers, und Fords_ (1897), E. Koeppel
showed that the three connected plays were based upon materials taken
from Jean de Serres's _Inventaire General de l'Histoire de France_
(1603), Pierre Matthieu's _Histoire de France durant Sept Annees de Paix
du Regne de Henri IV_ (1605), and P. V. Cayet's _Chronologie Septenaire
de l'Histoire de la Paix entre les Roys de France et d'Espagne_ (1605).
The picture suggested by Koeppel's treatise was of Chapman collating a
number of contemporary French historical works, and choosing from each
of them such portions as suited his dramatic purposes. But this
conception, as I have shown in the _Athenaeum_ for Jan. 10, 1903, p. 51,
must now be abandoned. Chapman did not go to the French originals at
all, but to a more easily accessible source, wherein the task of
selection and rearrangement had already been in large measure performed.
In 1607 the printer, George Eld, published a handsome folio, of which
the British Museum possesses a fine copy (c. 66, b. 14), originally the
property of Prince Henry, eldest son of James I. Its title is: "_A
General Inventorie of the Historie of France, from the beginning of that
Monarchie, unto the Treatie of Vervins, in the Yeare 1598. Written by
Jhon de Serr