There are 228 variants between the two versions, "including thirty long alterations and additions and five excisions; their extent and tone show a concern only an author could feel.
Apparently, Joseph Taylor inherited the role after Field's death (1620), and when he was too "grey" to play a young firebrand passed it to Swanston.
The first modern production of Bussy D'Ambois was at The Old Vic (London) in 1988, with David Threlfall in the title role and Jonathan Miller directing.
[7][8][9] Along with historical sources on the life of Louis de Bussy d'Amboise, Chapman, like Ben Jonson, makes rich use of classical allusions.
Bussy features translated passages from the plays Agamemnon and Hercules Oetaeus of Seneca, plus the Moralia of Plutarch, the Aeneid and Georgics of Virgil, and the Adagia of Erasmus.
[11] As the play opens, the aristocratic but impoverished Bussy, an unemployed soldier and an accomplished swordsman, is reflecting on the corrupt, avaricious, and violent society in which he lives.
Bussy sees the friar's ghost, and communicates with a conjured spirit that warns him of unfolding disaster; but the disguised Mountsurry arrives with Tamyra's letter.
Some have argued that in Bussy D'Ambois Chapman sacrificed logical and philosophical consistency for dramaturgical efficacy, for "force and vehemence of imagination" (to quote Algernon Charles Swinburne).