George Chapman

 

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.

 

a tavern full of Renaissance poets as imagined by Victorian artists

 

            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,

 

Making Sense of the Senses

Cluny Museum tapestries: taste

 

During their recent trip to Paris, my spouse and our elder son Richard dropped by the Cluny Museum, housed in one of the city’s most ancient buildings, and featuring one of the world’s greatest collections of medieval European art.  Joan brought back a set of postcards of one of the museum’s renowned holdings: the series of six spectacular tapestries depicting “The Lady with the Unicorn” (La dame à la lincorne).  You are probably aware of them, or of a somewhat similar set in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  I have often stood in awed admiration before the originals.  Now a couple of postcards are enough to set the mind racing.

 

wheel of the senses (14th c.) Peterborough, Cambridgeshire
 

            The principal achievement of the maker(s) of these amazing objects was to give birth to new beauty in the world, but the tapestries  do have an intellectual and scientific theme: five of them exemplify the five corporal senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste).  The sixth, in which the Lady does not seem to be “sensing” anything in particular, has puzzled scholars; but there is a clue to its probable “meaning” in an earlier mural painting discovered almost by accident in Longthorpe Tower, part of a late medieval domestic compound in Peterborough  in East Anglia.  The survival of medieval mural paintings in domestic buildings is comparatively rare.  One of the most interesting of the Longthorpe murals is a wheel of the five senses, in which each of the senses is allegorically represented by an animal: monkey (taste), spider (touch), boar (hearing), smell (vulture), and sight (rooster?).  These correspond to lore textually preserved in The Nature of Things (De natura rerum), the popular encyclopedia of Thomas of Cantimpré, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar.  In that work, however, the emblem for sight is a lynx or an eagle.  The Longthorpe “rooster” is unfortunately in the only seriously damaged section of the painting.

 

Earlier attitudes toward the bodily senses were complex.  In their brilliant exuberance, the Unicorn tapestries present beautiful and affirmative ideas that seem very different from the gloomy moral attitudes of medieval Christian asceticism, which regarded the pleasures of the senses with the deepest suspicion and sometimes with horror.  Medieval saints’ lives are replete with examples of the perverse warfare holy people waged against the gratification of sense.  They sprinkled ashes on their food, hardly “gourmet” to begin with, to render it a penance.  They wore hair shirts, cultivated body lice, slept on sharp gravels near the stench of orchestrated ordures.  Women went to heroic lengths to mar and conceal their beauty.  Origen castrated himself.  The modern mind recoils.  Learned men explained the story of Ulysses’ survival of the Sirens’ song, bound to the ship’s mast with wax-blocked ears, as a prefiguration of the crucifixion of Jesus, whose sacrificial death was also a triumph over sensual gratification.

                                   

 

wheel of the seven deadly sins

  

The elder Jan Breughel, collaborating with Rubens, did a famous series on the senses.  Four of the five individual panels of a set by Jan junior survive.  They are thematically related to the well-known Bosch “wheel” of the Deadly Sins.  The wheel itself was probably suggested by the very common medieval image of Fortune’s Wheel from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, where the figure standing by the wheel—usually Fortune herself—is sometimes Lady Philosophy and sometimes the author Boethius.  (I suggest that the standing supervisory male monarch at Longthorpe reflects this version of the image; the “lady” in the Cluny tapestries may echo some female allegorical authority figure like Lady Philosophy.)

                                     

wheel of Fortune

   

All of this is of particular interest to me because I have long had in my sights a learned Elizabethan poetic mini-epic, or epyllion, by George Chapman—the same Chapman whose translations of Homer so fired the imagination of John Keats.  Chapman’s poem, which nobody has claimed to understand entirely, is entitled “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense.”  On the surface this is a fantastical bit of erudite pornography in which a fictional version of the poet Ovid becomes a voyeur who sneaks into a private garden where the beautiful young Corinna is bathing.  His exquisite lust for her is elaborated in more than a thousand lines of exquisite verse.

 

The identification of the five senses is ancient, and so is the moral or philosophical analysis of their operations.  Though it to some extent continued Greek philosophical traditions, Christian theology, with its deep hostility to sexual pleasure in particular, insisted on the dangerously misleading nature of all bodily gratifications.  In this regard, strange to say, the Roman erotic poet played a major pedagogic role, for though popularly regarded as a randy writer, he actually treated sexual passion as a madness and a disease.  His lines are frequently cited in medical and moral writings.  This surprising reputation is encouraged by his authorship of a poem called the Remedia Amoris (Medicines Against Love), a kind of palinode to his Art of Love.  But his epic Metamorphoses is likewise a huge catalogue of erotic disasters and sexual crimes in which the gods of Olympus are often the worst offenders.  The genre of the Latin elegy (overwhelmingly love poetry, often light-hearted) conventionally treated the sexual act as a five-stage process (seen from the male point of view).  The five steps of love (gradus amoris) were seeing the woman (visus), some friendly pick-up lines (adloquium), osculum (kiss), tactus (touch), and finally concubitus or factum (copulation).  This quite artificial scheme appears widely in Latin elegy, and then later in many medieval and Renaissance poems and plays.

 

            Ideas are often born of mixed marriages.  It takes only a little vigorous mental shoehorning—regard a kiss as a taste rather than a touch, concentrate on the auditory part of the spoken word, and punt on smell, of which there is a good deal in Chapman’s poem—and you have a reasonably tidy correspondence of the five senses and the quinque gradus amoris, the five steps of love.  That is the sequence of “Ovid’s” experience in Chapman’s poem.  You are hardly likely to lose the sequential plot of the poem’s progression according to the “steps of love”; but the printer of Chapman’s first edition (1595) makes sure you get the five senses part as well.  In the right margin of the “Argument” (brief synopsis) preceding the poem the senses are listed in order of narrative appearance: auditus, olfactus, visus, gustus, and tactus—hearing, smell, sight , taste, and touch.

 

            The “steps of love” had already become the steps of lechery in medieval moral theology.  Chaucer’s Good Parson, in the nearly endless sermon on penance that concludes the unfinished Canterbury Tales, calls the five-step program the devil’s five fingers.  “The firste finger is the fool lookynge of the fool woman and of the fool man.”  Chapman, a deeply scholarly man of the Renaissance, is both more learned and more subtle than a simple medieval parson, of course, and no one has yet explained to my satisfaction the ambiguities of his poem.  But once again we have the printer to help us.  He has put a rare Renaissance emblem or allegorical picture on Chapman’s title page.  Its motto[Mens] sibi conscia recti (“A mind conscious of its rectitude” from the Æneid 1, 604) does not take us too far.  But the picture itself speaks.  Old philosophers in the Platonic tradition, followed later by the Christian moralists, were deeply skeptical concerning the powers of the human sensory apparatus to deliver truth, which belonged to the world of the spirit, not that of the body.  “We see as through a glass, darkly,” wrote St. Paul.  The sensory world is replete with misleading distortions.  An example often used was the palpable distortion of objects viewed through water.  A straight oar seemed to bend at the junction of its submersion.  That is the principle demonstrated in the rather crude title page emblem.  A straight piling or signal post rising from the sea-bed appears to bend at the water’s surface.  The word rectitude derives from a Latin word meaning straightness, uprightness.  Sibi conscia recti. The mind, in the rectitude of which it is conscious, must not surrender to the distortions of mere corporal sense.