GEORGE CHAPMAN, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
George Chapman in his early work confuses obscurity with profundity. It is in his translations of Homer and in the four sestiads he wrote to complete Marlowe’s Hero and Leander that his gifts are seen to full advantage, following as it were in the wake of preceding clarities. T. S. Eliot tried to put his finger on a specifically Elizabethan-Jacobean quality, a quality he associates more with Donne than Chapman: “In common with the greatest—Marlowe, Webster, Tourner, and Shakespeare—they had a quality of sensuous thought, or of thinking through the senses, or of the senses thinking, of which the exact formula remains to be defined.” When the poet-critic Edgell Rickword praises Chapman and draws attention to the end of the third sestiad of Hero and Leander as prefiguring Donne, he has something similar in mind. He singles out the lines “Graceful Aedone that sweet pleasure loves, / And ruff-foot Chreste with the tufted crown,” revealing Chapman’s skill and proving it equal, at least some of the time, to Marlowe’s. He might have looked at Chapman’s syntax, too. Chapman unfolds a sentence further than almost any other poet in English, and does it without obscurity of effort, like a singer with amazing lungs, who never needs to catch breath, yet keeps the flow of words, the flow of sense and of feeling, unbroken. De Guiana is a classic instance. Rickword, writing in 1924 of Hero and Leander, declares: “What an example for our distracted poetry, which so often now strikes at the absolute and achieves the commonplace! These poets [Chapman and Marlowe] lived life from the ground upwards.”
George Chapman is capable of some of the strangest writing of his age as well, as though Thomas Lovell Beddoes had an ancestor in the sixteenth century:
Kneel then with me, fall worm-like on the ground,
And from th’ infectious dung hill of this round,
From men’s brass wits and golden foolery,
Weep, weep your souls, into felicity.
In the dedicatory letter to Ovid’s Banquet (1595) he writes, after Horace, “The profane multitude I hate.” He consecrates his “strange poems to those searching spirits, whom learning hath made noble and nobility sacred.” If he wrote plainly it would “make the ass run proud of his ears.” After Sidney’s classical, aristocratic clarity, we meet a self-indulging mind at work. Ideas become unstable, vapory. Ovid’s Banquet, at moments vivid, is mechanical in progression. It doesn’t add up. Decoration passes for development of thought. The poem is intellectually complicated, not poetically complex. Chapman’s thought processes, Rickword says, “are nearer the surface, and interfere with its crystallisation, first into imagery and then into formal expression.”
The fault is not peculiar to Chapman. As the dedicatory letter suggests, he is a man who stands apart, “positions” himself: he thinks things out, and the act of thinking is involved in the act of making. A colorful theory, now generally discredited, suggests that there existed, centered on Ralegh, a “School of Atheism” (as its detractors called it) or a “School of Night,” perhaps the butt of the chaste college in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost. It included Marlowe and a few notable scientists and thinkers as well. The School of Night might have taken as its anthem Chapman’s lines:
Sweet Peace’s richest crown is made of stars,
Most certain guides of honoured mariners;
No pen can anything eternal write
That is not steeped in humour of the Night.
Chapman was born of gentleman-farmer stock in or near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, around 1559. Little is known of his early life. He may have attended Oxford, though by his own account he was self-taught. He may have seen service in the Netherlands: there is lived vigor in his Homeric battle scenes. His first published poems were “The Shadow of Night” and a companion piece (1594). In both he developed a theory of false and true dreams. The poems mix eloquence, obscurity, and dull comprehensibility. The matter was not so deep as he thought. He grew away from but never outgrew his clouding aesthetic.
In 1595 his first play was produced. He was admired by Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Shakespeare and others. Some associate him with the “rival poet” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the one who lures away the beloved. “Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, / Bound for the prize of all too precious you.” If so, there are no answering poems. Chapman became a sonneteer with the elegant “Coronet for his Mistress” appended to Ovid’s Banquet. In 1596 he wrote De Guiana, supporting Ralegh in his troubles with the queen. The poem did not influence Elizabeth but includes a fine evocation of Chapman’s figure of Hero, a figure often encountered in his plays, a man of intellect and passion:
But you patrician spirits that refine
Your flesh to fire, and issue like a flame
On brave endeavours, knowing that in them
The tract of heaven in morn-like glory opens;
That know you cannot be the kings of earth,
Claiming the rights of your creation,
And let the mines of earth be kings of you;
That are so far from doubting likely drifts,
That in things hardest y’ are most confident;
You know that death lives, where power lives unus’d,
Joying to shine in waves that bury you,
And so make way for life e’en through your graves...
This is a portion of an immensely spacious single sentence, a whole verse paragraph. De Guiana, his one poem in blank verse, is a carmen epicum (epic song) without narrative plot, an oration addressed to the queen, dramatic in rhetoric.
His hero, like many of Shakespeare’s, has some affinities with the heroes evoked in one of the great translations of his age, Sir Thomas North’s rendering of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (which replaced the Lives of the Saints and was in turn replaced, a couple of generations later, by John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs as inspirational reading). This was the period in which the indomitable Bess of Hardwick cut the faces of saints out of the copes from Lilleshall Abbey, which she acquired to hang at Chatsworth, and stitched in classical faces, embroidering their names above them. Plutarch taught action, civic responsibility and devotion to the larger order now embodied in the queen. North says as much.
In 1598 Chapman completed Hero and Leander and began to publish his translations of Homer. In 1609 Euthymiae Raptus, a philosophical poem subtitled “The Tears of Peace,” was published. In it Homer as guide reveals to the poet the figure of Peace in tears. The poem is dedicated to James I’s son, Prince Henry, a patron of his translation work and an ally of Ralegh who died two years later. Chapman composed the “Epicede on Prince Henry.” The loss of his noble patron was a disaster to him and his purse. Chapman was impecunious: he was first arrested for debt in 1599, and the last ten years of his life were plagued by creditors.
He saw prison, too, after the accession of James I. With his then friends Ben Jonson and John Marston he was locked up for staging the comedy Westward Hoe. It included ill-timed jests at the expense of the Scots. Chapman turned hostile to Jonson, resenting his arrogance and success. In 1634 he died in poverty and probably bitterness. He was buried in St. Giles-in-the-Fields, London, and Inigo Jones (who also fell out with Jonson) provided a monument.
It is de rigueur to criticize Chapman’s four sestiads of Hero and Leander. Warton long ago commented on the “striking inequality” between Marlowe’s and Chapman’s parts of the poem. Edward Thomas said: “Marlowe died, and Chapman knew not the incantation.” The tide against Chapman should turn. Edgell Rickword pointed to the crucial line in the transition to the third sestiad. “Love’s edge is taken off”—the moral must follow. Marlowe enacted the consummation; Chapman, temperamentally suited to the task, had to enact the consequences. Chapman is a thinker. Some of his best writing is expository—and so is some of his worst.
He understands from the outset his task in Hero and Leander: “New light gives new direction, fortunes new.” The poem finds an altered register, and intensity. There are moments of Marlovian physicality. Of Leander he says: “Now (with warm baths and odours comforted) / When he lay down he kindly kiss’d his bed.” Hero treats her bed with similar sexual piety. Chapman’s sestiads abound in small transformations, preparing for the culminating metamorphosis of the lovers into birds. He has a sense of the whole poem, his and Marlowe’s parts. The parallelisms are not mechanically but poetically and dramatically right, the characters develop; there’s nothing static in how they recognize the consequences of their actions.
The lovers have sinned against Ceremony, furtively committing an act for which they should have sought religious sanction. Leander is visited by Thesme, goddess of Ceremony. She appears
...with a crown
Of all the stars, and heaven with her descended,
Her flaming hair and her bright feet extended,
By which hung all the bench of deities;
And in a chain, compact of ears and eyes,
She led Religion; all her body was
Clear and transparent as the purest glass:
For she was all presented to the sense;
Devotion, Order, State, and Reverence
Her shadows were; Society, Memory;
All which her sight made live; her absence die.
For C. S. Lewis this is the classic evocation of the Elizabethan world order. Chapman’s Ceremony is what Concord is to Spenser and Degree to Shakespeare: it is that ordained, hierarchical proportion that provides institutions with legitimacy and authority. Ceremony draws a human and divine meaning from mere nature. To offend against her is to offend against her shadows, Devotion, Order, and State and Reverence; it is to deny society’s custom, ignore the past, usurp authority. Ceremony admonishes Leander. She
Told him how poor was substance without rites,
Like bills unsign’d, desires without delights;
Like meats unseasoned; like rank corn that grows
On cottages, that none or reaps or sows...
That final humble metaphor, suggesting an abandoned village, has the rustic precision of Homeric simile. The drama of two lovers broadens out into an interpretation of all human experience. Hero is compared with a city surprised and pillaged: thoughts are invading troops. So broad a simile would seem absurd in another context. Chapman makes it work. The development of their reactions—Leander’s decision to act, Hero’s to accept—is realized with a psychological aptness that recalls Troilus and Criseyde.
There is the other Chapman. His name is best remembered because of Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told.
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Keats—ridiculed by his educated contemporaries for being unable to read Homer in the original and for confusing Balboa with Cortez—was right: Chapman “speak[s] out loud and bold.” If his boldness is different in complexity from Marlowe’s, there is a similar vigor and a livelier intelligence. He made Homer integral to English literature. His Iliad and his Odyssey are—alongside Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—neglected masterpieces, like most translations.
Chapman’s notion of the “great man” hardly squared with the Homeric hero, and he distorts to some extent. For him Homer is “learning’s sire.” He makes him didactic, seeks a deep sense in each phrase and action, interpolates, moralizes. Prefacing the Iliad, Chapman writes, “It is the part of every knowing and judicious interpreter, not to follow the number and order of words, but the material things themselves, and sentences to weigh diligently.” Sentences are “meanings.” The prescription is thoroughly Horatian. It accounts for the virtues and flaws of his versions. Warton is harsh: Chapman forfeits dignity and simplicity, writes redundantly, impoverishes where he cannot “feel and express.” Warton calls the fourteeners used in the Iliad “awkward, inharmonious, and unheroic.” Pope, himself a notable translator of Homer, was less dismissive. Chapman, Pope noted, covers his defects “by a daring fiery spirit that animates his translation, which is something like what one might imagine Homer himself to have writ before he arrived at years of discretion.” Pope had arrived at years of discretion, and perfected the precise couplet that clicks shut like a latch.
Homer was Chapman’s destiny—“angel to me, star and fate.” He completed the Iliad in 1611, the Odyssey in 1616, and the Hymns in 1624. “The work that I was born to do, is done,” he says. Whatever its flaws, it is a triumph. It can be appreciated only in extenso. I offer a sample, the death of Hector from the Iliad:
...Then all the Greeks ran to him,
To see his person; and admired his terror-stirring limb:
Yet none stood by, that gave no wound, to his so goodly form;
When each to other said: O Jove, he is not in the storm
He came to fleet in, with his fire; he handles now more soft...
The verse is plain, the syntax loose but clear and dramatically phrased to the climax, and the choice of words as right as it is unexpected.
Chapman was prolific. He did not suffer academic critics gladly, especially when they attacked his Homer. His purpose was “with poesy, to open poesy.” In translating Homer he became a form of his own notion of the hero. There are four hundred pages of his poetry and about a thousand of his translations. More than many neglected Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, Chapman is worth persisting with. There are always rewards—seldom a whole poem, but passages so fine that they outshine, however dull their context, some of the classic lyrics of the age. Yet he will never be forgiven for daring to complete Marlowe’s Hero and Leander.
That is why it is best to praise Chapman before cuing Marlowe on stage. Marlowe’s first two sestiads of Hero and Leander are uniquely wonderful in English: witty, easily erotic in a dozen ways, the language unaffected, riveting. No wonder ten editions of the poem appeared in the forty years after its first publication: after Sidney’s Arcadia it was the best-seller. Few copies survive: it was so popular that it was “read to rags.” Linley’s 1598 edition was the second, the first to contain Chapman’s “completion.” (There are other “completions,” the first by Henry Petowe, who prefaces his with a panegyric on Marlowe: “I being but a slender Atlas to uphold and undergo so large a burden.” His happy ending turned the lovers into pine trees.) The irony is that Marlowe stops at the point beyond which he would have lost interest: fulfillment. In lighter mood, the great tragedian leaves it to the stage hands to deal with the consequences and clean up the psychological, moral and metaphysical mess he created.
In his plays as here, Marlowe’s characters exist at the perilous brink of caricature. In Hero and Leander his “over-reaching” sweetens with a hint of comedy. Michael Drayton—author among much else of the great topographical poem Polyolbion and of memorable sonnets (including “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”), heroic verse and the “Ballad of Agincourt” (“Fair stood the wind for France”)—loved Marlowe’s verse, and in his “Elegy of Poets and Poesie” Marlowe appears “bathed in the Thespian springs.” He
Had in him those brave translunary things,
That the first poets had: his raptures were
All air, and fire, which made his verses clear:
For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.
Like all his contemporaries Marlowe is a borrower. Eliot demonstrates how he borrows from that very different poet, Spenser. The evidence is in Tamburlaine, and less nakedly elsewhere: Spenser showed him a way of being lyrical, importing into his vigorous verse strange and complementary tones. Marlowe, like Spenser, repeats line and passages, recycling, sometimes improving as he goes.
His first important borrowing is from Ovid, the undervalued Amores, wonderfully simple, the language transparent.
In summer heat, and mid-time of the day,
To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay;
One window shut, the other open stood,
Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood,
Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun,
Or night being past, and yet not day begun.
Christopher Marlowe the poet achieves quite different effects from Kit Marlowe the playwright. The playwright evokes ambition and power, but the poet is a younger man, creating a world of balance and proportion. The poems lack the exaggerated action, the grandiloquence of the “mighty line.” Puttenham disparaged Marlowe’s hyperbolic dramatic style—“the over reacher, otherwise called the loud liar”—and Nashe commented on “the specious volubility of a drumming decasillabon.” The poems aren’t vulnerable to these strictures. They neither overreach nor drum. None of his “monstrous opinions” (unless you consider sexual frankness monstrous) disfigures them. They are thrifty of language and serious in content, though the tone is light.
Marlowe, born in Canterbury in 1564, was the son of a shoemaker. He became a scholar at the King’s School, Canterbury, and afterward at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He took his BA in 1584, his MA three years later, by which time he had probably completed Tamburlaine. He was the first of the university wits to employ blank verse. It’s generally thought that most if not all of his small surviving body of nondramatic verse—Hero and Leander, “The Passionate Shepherd,” and the Ovid and Lucan translations—were written in his university years, the fruit of youth and relative leisure. The six years that elapsed between his taking his MA and his shadowy death—possibly as a result of drink, or low political intrigue, or a romantic entanglement with a rough character “fitter to be a pimp, than an ingenious amoretto,” or perhaps a tussle over the bill (“le recknynge”)—at the hand of Ingram Frisar in a Deptford tavern on 30 May 1593 were busy ones. He wrote plays, was attacked for atheism, was associated (if it existed) with Ralegh’s “School of Night,” and lodged with Thomas Kyd (author of The Spanish Tragedy), who later brought charges of blasphemy against him. These he had to answer before the Privy Council in 1593, the very council that secretly employed him to spy on English Catholics on the Continent. He achieved much in a short life.
Had Chapman not brought it to a competent end, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander might almost be taken as a whole poem. Completion, or moral conclusion, was not necessary. If Marlowe wrote it at Cambridge, he could have moralized it himself had he felt the need. The absence of a moral is moral statement enough, and characteristic of this poet. The poem is an epyllion or miniature epic, a form common in the sixteenth century, deriving from Theocritus, Catullus and Ovid. Marlowe knew his Ovid, and his poem is Ovidian mythological-erotic verse of a high order.
It provides a contrast with Shakespeare’s efforts in the same genre, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Shakespeare begins in action. In the earlier poem, “rose cheek’d Adonis” is at chase by line three, laughing love to scorn in line four, and being loved in line five. The Rape of Lucrece begins with the lustful Tarquin off hotfoot, “Borne by the trustless wings of hot desire.” Conventionally dramatic, both poems awkwardly accommodate the reflective laments that, excellent in themselves, like static arias interrupt the dramatic pace.
We cannot judge Marlowe as a tragic poet in Hero and Leander. He portrays consummation: desunt nonnulla (“the rest is lacking”) leads into Chapman. But it’s not absence of tragedy that makes his poem superior to Shakespeare’s: it’s a difference of procedure and tone. Shakespeare’s six-line pentameter stanzas rein in his natural pace and hobble narrative continuity, much as the sonnet form can distort thought and weaken emphasis in his great sequence. The stanzas are conclusive with the resolving couplet at the end, a tonal sententiousness or closure just when fluid movement is required. Marlowe chose the more versatile pentameter couplets, which move swiftly when they must and can be used for reflection and description too. They carry a voice, its passions and ironies, lightly modulating from register to register.
Marlowe avoids, or deflates, the heroic exaggeration that vitiates other epyllia, humanizing his protagonists in the process. They are, in the end, girl and boy. The mission of the poem is to get them to this natural end. When Hero first appears in the temple, she wears a gaudy veil of artificial flowers and is covered from head to foot in leaves. She looks rather like a pot of ivy. In seeming to praise her, Marlowe defines the unnatural conventions that overlie the natural girl. He praises her chastity but does not condemn her for letting drop her fan. Only her eyes and hands are plainly visible. He thwarts idealization by ironizing ideality and by simple satire. The truth he presents boldly: “Love is not full of pity, as men say, / But deaf and cruel where he means to prey.” The word “prey” is at one with the animal images running through the poem: animal desire, not courtly refinement, drives the action. The animal images are natural, not censuring. Love is stripped of mystique. Hero is finally naked. Leander’s argument against chastity does not convince; his desire does. He speaks “like a bold sharp sophister” with borrowed arguments, for he is (like Hero, but in a different sense) “a novice.” “ ‘My words shall be as spotless as my youth, / Full of simplicity and naked truth.’ ”
The core of his argument is charming: I shall be faithful to you as you are more beautiful than Venus. With such logic Satan prevailed upon Eve. The indictment of virginity, “ ‘Of that which hath no being do not boast, / Things that are not at all are never lost,’ ” can indict all metaphysical belief. The poem is wedded to the physical world. The images metamorphose, making the poem more sensually vivid. Hero has “swallowed Cupid’s golden hook / The more she striv’d, the deeper was she strook.” Neptune fondles Leander’s swimming body, making it exquisitely real. Gods too are lusty.
The love of Hero and Leander is not consummated in the temple. Hero will not let Leander so much as touch her sacred garments. She bids him “Come thither” to her turret set squarely in the natural world:
Upon a rock, and underneath a hill,
Far from the town, where all is whist and still
Save that the sea, playing on yellow sand,
Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land,
Whose sound allures the golden Morpheus
In silence of the night to visit us,
My turret stands...
The deferred subject and verb and the dramatic unpleating of the syntax demonstrate the flexibility of Marlowe’s handling. The drama is in language and character, not action.
Metamorphosis is the heart of the poem: Hero’s change is richly Ovidian. She is the first and last character we see, her transformation complete. At the start she’s Leander’s opposite. Her wreath and veil “shrub her in,” her costume and scent are hyperbolically described, she exists only as a figure. Leander, by contrast, is “beautiful and young.” “His body was as straight as Circe’s wand.” It was with her wand that Circe transformed men into beasts.
Their first encounter is in Venus’s temple, among portrayals of “heady riots, incests, rapes,” the loves of the gods, especially those in which they became animals—bulls or swans. In this place Hero sacrificed turtledoves. The mythological pictures amuse and affect us; their significance is ironic. Hero’s change is complete at last:
Thus near the bed she blushing stood upright,
And from her countenance behold ye might
A kind of twilight break, which through her hair,
As from an orient cloud, glims here and there.
In the very completeness of his two sestiads, Marlowe suggests that no lessons can be drawn from love, only about it.
His versions of Ovid’s Amores, the Elegies—the first translated into English—deserve more attention than they receive. For his contemporaries his translation of Lucan may have been more important. For us that labor has lost its force, but the Ovid remains fresh, with an expressive range almost as wide as that of Hero and Leander. Jonson, Donne and other poets owe him a debt for the Elegies. “Elegy” was originally the generic term used for a song of mourning in alternate hexameters and pentameters. The elegiac meter was later adopted for the expression of personal feelings. For Ovid, as for Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Carew, it was a language of reflection, exhortation, tribute, varied in subject matter and tone, often amorous.
Marlowe condensed Ovid’s Amores from five into three books. This exercise sharpened his prosodic skill with the couplet and the Ovidian manner. There are direct echoes of Hero and Leander or, if the Elegies came first, in Hero and Leander, a similar variety of emotion and allusion. We find the arguments against chastity, the quest for pleasure as an end, and the “atheism” (“God is a name, no substance, fear’d in vain”).
“The Passionate Shepherd,” Marlowe’s best-known poem, attributed to a range of poets, including Shakespeare, is the more memorable by the number of replies it inspired, among them Ralegh’s and, perhaps indirectly, Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress.” Marlowe’s poems and translations make a small body of work. He may have given up writing poems at the age of twenty-three, but the Marlowe who is lamented in As You Like It as the dead shepherd is the poet of Hero and Leander, “The Passionate Shepherd” and the Elegies.