One feature of enjoying literature is the appreciation of tradition. Literary works involve both individual authorial expression and allusion, implicit or explicit, to some earlier work or works. Indeed, one of the reader’s pleasures is recognizing and evaluating an author’s sometimes complex or intentionally tricky commerce with a predecessor. One of the more remarkable poetic monuments of this sort is a sonnet of John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”. In this famous poem the young English poet related his first experience of Homeric epic. The Iliad and the Odyssey are about as close to ground zero of Western poetry as you can get. Yet very few modern readers—and I am certainly not among the happy few—are able to read the original Homeric Greek with ease. The prominence of English as a world language is a huge advantage to those of us for whom it is a native tongue, but one that undoubtedly makes us linguistically lazy. We think, and mainly correctly think, that if a book is important, it will be translated into English. Indeed, most of us, at least most Americans, read a great deal of world literature in English versions translated from something else. Hence the great importance of literary translation as a semi-autonomous artistic undertaking. Keats in his sonnet is perhaps extravagant in describing his encounter with Homer in English. He felt like an astronomer who had discovered a new planet. He felt like a heroic explorer, like Hernan Cortez, as his European eyes viewed for the first time the vastness of the Pacific Ocean! But any lover of good reading will have a sure sense of what he is talking about. Keats implies that his discovery of Homer, made possible for him by Chapman’s translation, is itself an epic event like the European discovery of the Pacific!
The point of all this is that I have spent a good deal of time this week “looking into” George Chapman—though not his Homeric translations. Chapman is a minor if not an obscure figure in English literary history, yet for me this is not strictly speaking a first look. In preparing for my doctoral general examinations more that sixty years ago I did read a couple of his plays—concerning which I today recall very little. In the context of such competitors as Marlowe, Jonson, and William Shakespeare, George Chapman has to be relegated to minor status. But even the minor Elizabethans seem pretty mighty to me.
We think that Chapman was born in or about the year 1569, in or about Hitchin, an old town north of London and about midway between Oxford and Cambridge. We think he spent time at both universities, gaining a high level of mastery in the classical tongues and earning the reputation, in particular, of a considerable Greek scholar. Later classicists have found some fault with various aspects of his Homeric translations, and the general reader of today is likely to be put off by aspects of his Elizabethan high style, but he was widely read by a general audience right through the nineteenth century. My late colleague and friend Robert Fagles, whose translations of Homer gained a very large English-speaking audience in the 1990s, appreciated Chapman’s achievement.
Literary history is replete with examples of writers who excel in one genre but fall short in another. If you are Henry James, and maybe the world’s greatest novelist, why should you in your heart of hearts desire to be a playwright instead? Chapman appears to have regarded his Homer as apprentice work. His heart was in the theater. The Elizabethan theater was home base for some pretty tough characters. Ben Jonson, who killed a man, barely dodged being hanged himself. Christopher Marlowe was killed in a bar-room brawl. In comparison to these worthies, Chapman seems to have been a rather dull and sober citizen. He wrote many plays, but only one or two of them have passed the test of time. I have on my shelves a nearly complete set of the old “Mermaid” series devoted to early British drama—advertised as “The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists”. The title of the series is taken from the name of the Mermaid Tavern, a long-vanished public house in Cheapside, near St. Paul’s cathedral, a notable haunt of poets, dramatists, and actors in search of ale and witty conversations.* The group habitually gathering there just might, maybe, have included the Bard himself—though probably not. The Mermaid thus became the most famous pub in British literary history. In 1913 the once popular English poet Alfred Noyes published a long poem, Tales of the Mermaid Tavern, dealing with the literary eminences supposed to be the habitués of the place. The Chapman volume in the Mermaid series was published in 1895 (!) and edited by the young William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943), a Yale professor destined to become famous as one of America’s first public superstar academics, and apparently the first person ever to teach a university course devoted to the novel. There were in those days academic giants in the earth. Phelps appreciated Chapman’s dramatic abilities but was not shy of pointing out that they were too infrequently displayed. He confidently declares long passages, and indeed whole plays “worthless”. On one occasion, indeed, he declares a venerable literary relic “trash”. His general summary is that “An unbiased study of his work for the stage will show that as a dramatist he has been vastly over-rated”. This is very bracing for a reader familiar with some of our contemporary reviewers who, usually out of current political or cultural enthusiasm, seem expert at discovering covert excellences in apparent mediocrity.
But in truth what led me back to old Chapman was not his plays but a few intriguing and intricate poems on classical themes. In particular I have in mind a long, ornate, and mildly pornographic early poem of his called “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense.” I haven’t yet figured out the meaning of this exotic production, supposing that it has a meaning to figure out. The intellectual battlefield is clear enough: the Platonic-Christian conflict of reason and sensuality. The subject of the poem is old Ovid, the great classical poetic authority on sensual love. Ovid has spotted a gorgeous young girl, Corinna—a female figure taken from Ovid’s actual love poems—privately (as she thinks) bathing in a kind of bower of bliss. The old poet has snuck into this little paradise to make a sexual approach that only begins with voyeurism. He lusts after her extravagantly and schematically through all five of his bodily senses, achieving an ambiguous final physical intimacy with her by the progression that classical and medieval literary theorists called the quinque gradus amoris, the “five steps of love.” The lover [1] sees the beloved woman, [2] approaches her, [3] talks to her, [4] kisses her. Step five is called “the deed”. The old poet’s lubricious activity is delineated in incrementally lubricious verse: five senses, exercised in five steps, a Pythagorean bonanza. Chapman makes his reader the voyeur of “Ovid’s” voyeurism. Quite a poem, but is it philosophy or pornography? Figuring that out will require more than a first look into.
approximate site of the vanished Mermaid Tavern
*Readers of a philological turn of mind will note that both the surname Chapman and the topographical names Cheapside and East Cheap—along with hundreds of others in Britain--derive from mercantile activity, ceap meaning a market in Old English. What today is cheap in England and America is in France à bon marché,
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