An Eternizement of the Savoursome
Barbara Burns talks to Zenón Luis-Martínez, whose edition of George Chapman’s The Shadow of Night & Ovid’s Banquet of Sense has just been published in the MHRA Critical Texts series.
BB. George Chapman was a contemporary of Shakespeare, perhaps best known as the first English translator of Homer. His work famously inspired the sonnet by the Romantic poet John Keats, ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (1816). But Chapman was also an important poet and dramatist of the late English Renaissance in his own right. What can you tell us about his literary context and achievement?
ZL-M. Not long ago at a conference a British colleague described Chapman to me as one of the Elizabethan Fab Four, the other three being Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson. The analogy is valuable beyond the joke. Despite a certain neglect of his writings and despite the poet’s conviction that part of his work had been written for the very few, it’s important to think of him as a key Elizabethan figure. Chapman is mainly remembered as the author of a handful of elegant comedies and tragedies. But he began his career as a poet, and he devoted his greatest mature efforts to translating Homer.
Even if for us translation hardly counts as a poet’s original work, Chapman saw his poems and his translations as a continuum. His experiments with the Greek hymn in The Shadow of Night, or with the Ovidian erotic elegy in Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, or with the short epic in Hero and Leander (1598), are important in themselves, but they were also preparations for his grand epic project. Yet instead of writing his own epic, he gave us first the Iliad (1611), then the Odyssey (1616), and finally the remaining poems that tradition attributed to Homer, to end up claiming proudly: ‘The work that I was born to do is done’.
That is why the sonnet by Keats that you mention is so relevant: it is about how Chapman’s translations can reveal the sublimity of Homer’s poetry to someone who does not read Greek. Chapman would have felt truly flattered by Keats’s praise of the ‘bold and strong’ style of his English Homer, because in many ways this is how he wanted to be remembered. Like fellow poets such as Edmund Spenser or Michael Drayton, Chapman conceived of his career as starting with more ‘modest’ efforts that would lead to epic culmination, even if these early efforts turned out to be anything but modest.
This edition partly aims to supply a link to the Homer translations that the MHRA published not long ago, hence my emphasis on the import of classical literature and culture to these poems. Yet there is much more to them: born second son in a family of the provincial gentry, Chapman was in permanent need of money and sought the patronage of important courtly figures; he also travelled in Europe and fed his mind on bold philosophical speculation, new scientific discoveries and provocative political ideas. All these anxieties and interests feature in his early poems and are given their due part in this edition.
BB. Commentators on Chapman’s work have tended to describe his style as complex, dense, and indigestible, drawing on the philosophical traditions of Neoplatonism and Stoicism, with a strong didactic purpose. What are the key concepts underpinning his writing, and what strategies do you employ in your edition to help the reader navigate their way?
ZL-M. The pronouncement that these poems are among the most difficult in the English language is a heavy burden for a world like ours, obsessed with instant access to certainties. The first responsibility of an editor of Chapman’s poetry is to explain why its difficulty matters for the author and why its obscurity is worth the reader’s effort. The gold standard of poetry’s endurance is both what it has to say and how it says it. I believe that Chapman has things to say that still matter nowadays about the value of intellectual honesty, the ethics of hard effort, or the insufficiency of the senses and the emotions as vehicles to the deeper truths of our frail existence.
Good to his own message, Chapman’s method is to avoid easy paths, and he puts all his fascination with myth, magic or ancient learning at the service of complicating his own meaning. A restless ingenuity also leads him to coin new terms and twist the syntax. Yet despite these complications, Chapman wanted to be understood: somewhat paradoxically, he claimed that the aim of difficulty was ‘clearness of representation’. And for him the reader’s effort was the key to the paradox. But Chapman himself acknowledges that his writing may fall short of his aim for clarity, so in my role as editor I have proceeded gradually and comprehensively. The introduction begins with contextual information, expounds Chapman’s theory of poetry and carefully dissects passages not only to unfold meaning but to propose a close reading method. Footnotes give access to difficult meanings of words or phrases. The commentary reconstructs Chapman’s writing strategies by excavating sources and explaining how the poet used these texts. It may look crammed, but one wonders whether there is any other way.
BB. Your volume is an edition of Chapman’s earliest published works, The Shadow of Night (1594) and Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595). Can you give us a flavour of the theme and style of these two poems?
ZL-M. The two poems in The Shadow of Night are written in the tradition of the classical Greek hymn; they are ritual prayers to two ancient goddesses, in which legends associated with those goddesses mingle with historical episodes. The first poem, ‘Hymnus in Noctem’, invokes primordial Night, whom Chapman makes a symbol of moral renovation and dedication to study. Night paves the way for the arrival of Cynthia, the protagonist of ‘Hymnus in Cynthiam’, in whom three goddesses converge: the Moon, the demonic sorceress Hecate, and the chaste huntress Diana. Chapman’s Cynthia is also Queen Elizabeth I, whose presence in the poem evokes a utopian empire of the mind and divine knowledge.
Ovid’s Banquet of Sense is the first part of a triptych completed by ‘A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy’ and ‘The Amorous Zodiac’. The title poem makes the Roman poet Ovid its protagonist, and narrates an encounter with his mistress Julia, nicknamed Corinna, daughter of Emperor Augustus. Guided by his five senses, Ovid follows his mistress to a fountain in which she bathes her naked body. This is an excuse for erotic exhilaration, but also for a philosophical discussion of the workings of the five senses and the excellencies of a kind of love that goes beyond mere sensual perception. The poem mixes narrative, meditation in the form of monologue, and dialogue between the lovers, and also allows Corinna’s own viewpoints to be heard. In ‘Coronet’, Philosophy becomes the poet’s mistress; it is written in the witty form of the corona — a circular string of sonnets in which the last line of each poem begins the next, while the first line of the first poem closes the sequence. ‘Zodiac’ is a translation of a French erotic poem in which the different parts of the mistress’s body are compared to the twelve zodiacal constellations. Ultimately, the two works in this edition are linked by their classical influence, their deep philosophical nature and their difficult style. Bringing them together in one volume permits a fuller grasp of Chapman’s originality as a poet in his early years.
BB. How did you first encounter the work of George Chapman? Can you remember the initial impact his writing had on you, or why you felt it was important to make him a focus of your research?
ZL-M. Chapman is not the kind of poet readers fall in love with at first sight. I encountered some of his tragedies first as a graduate student, and read most of the Homer, but even then the rest remained a dim reality. Years later I was caught by the sophistication of Ovid’s Banquet of Sense. And I fell under the strange spell of The Shadow of Night, even if I understood little of it. It was later, in 2017, when I was putting together an application for a project about relations between poetic theory and practice around relatively neglected texts in this period, that I realized that Chapman should be essential to the research. Unlike, for instance, Philip Sidney, Chapman never wrote a treatise on literary theory, but his ideas about writing and reading, clarity and difficulty, or labour and inspiration are fundamental.
Work began merely as an attempt to explain the poems to myself, and in the process I thought that a scholarly edition in a readable, modern-spelling text could do justice to these essential, though less fashionable poems. I’ve devoted eight long years to this task, digging, as Chapman would say, ‘rich minerals out of the bowels of the earth’. I might have rather spent my time doing something more profitable, as Chapman’s minerals are unfortunately metaphorical, but my feeling is that these poems chose me, and in many ways this profession is, or should be, about inexplicable acts of love. Public funding from the Spanish Agency for Research and the support from the right publisher did the rest.
BB. Could you give us a brief quotation from one of these poems that encapsulates a sense of Chapman’s style?
ZL-M. I’d rather do the opposite: instead of a morsel of that indigestible style for which his poetry is proverbial, I’ll give you one of those moments in which Chapman’s verse rewards readers with its exuberance. This one comes from the beginning of Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, when Corinna enters the garden and reaches the fountain. First, a glimpse of her hair strikes readers paradoxically as a ‘downward-burning flame’: even if I didn’t know then the modern English phrase ‘Titian hair’, my reading of this line took me to one of Titian’s early paintings (1520), which I first saw in the National Galleries of Scotland (Edinburgh) when I was a student, called Venus Anadyomene (‘Venus rising from the sea’).
One look at Venus’s hair in the painting leaves hardly anything else to explain. After this first glimpse, a delicate moment ensues, as the poet must expose the lady’s full nudity. This could have been done through the kind of conventional description that we often find in sixteenth-century erotic poetry, in which a male poet itemizes a woman’s body almost pornographically. However, Chapman’s similes take an unusual path by making readers look elsewhere:
Then cast she off her robe, and stood upright:
As lightning breaks out of a labouring cloud,
Or as the morning heav’n casts off the night,
Or as that heav’n cast off itself and showed
Heav’n’s upper light, to which the brightest day
Is but a black and melancholy shroud,
Or as when Venus strived for sovereign sway
Of charmful beauty in young Troy’s desire,
So stood Corinna, vanishing her tire.
Flashes of heavenly light invade the scene, and one recalls that this is the way light breaks through the clouds in Renaissance landscape painting. Then the reader’s memory is directed to the mythological scene of the Judgement of Paris, in which Venus’s competition with the other goddesses for attracting the young shepherd’s gaze is described with melodious precision: ‘strived for sovereign sway’. This is still difficult poetry, but it is the difficulty we associate with the old master painter’s virtuoso stroke. This is the kind of artistry that I find most remarkable in Chapman’s verse.
BB. Chapman is known for his use of lexical innovation, frequently coining new words to enrich the English language and capture complex meanings. Are there any examples of his neologisms that are still in use today?
ZL-M. Chapman is not a widely read poet, and so his linguistic creativity did not have the chance to produce words that could survive their times. Scholars and editors have registered many neologisms that unfortunately remain archaeological pieces in obscure wordlists, glossaries and dictionaries. Some of these I love for their uniqueness: at the end of ‘Hymnus in Noctem’, for instance, the poet calls Cynthia’s multi-coloured mantle a ‘disparent lawn’. It seems, if we consult the Oxford English Dictionary, that Chapman is the only recorded user of the word ‘disparent’ in English, at least with the meaning ‘diverse’, even if the instance found in the dictionary is later than the one in our poem.
Chapman can also surprise readers by using words in their original etymological meanings: the English verb ‘reiterate’, that is, repeat, means for the poet ‘to walk over again’ — playing on Latin iter, road. He also enjoyed creating new words by adding unusual endings: ‘savoursome’, ‘pestiferent’, ‘circumvecture’, ‘tortury’, ‘insensive’, ‘expansure’ or ‘eternizement’ (as I type them my computer keeps producing those annoying red underlines) are curiosities in Chapman’s verbal Wunderkammer. Another favourite of mine is the ‘gulfy flood’ of Corinna’s beauty, meaning sublimely deep, but also treacherous and dangerous in its lurking whirlpools — as deep and dangerous as Chapman’s own lexical resourcefulness!
BB. I imagine that preparing this edition will have been rich in both challenges and rewards. Was that the case?
ZL-M. Challenges and rewards do not always come together, but it’s fantastic when they do, and this project has been lucky in their confluence. The main challenge has been Chapman himself — his style, his mind, his diving into referential universes that constantly take you to other disciplines and languages. Having myself an unequal command of those languages and disciplines, study and archive work was never enough. I was fortunate to benefit from the learning of great colleagues who could explain things as minor, but also as important, as the fact that a Latin word which I felt was incorrectly spelt in the source text was in fact a borrowing from Greek for which other morphological rules were in order. Or there was the email from a colleague that changed the course of part of the introduction just by pointing out how a literary concept that was essential for me was equally important for the Renaissance theory of painting.
On the other hand, there have been challenges in a project that began before Covid-19, was approved at its height, and was completed in the post-Covid world. I was able to do most of my archive work in Britain before 2020, and was generously assisted by curators and imaging services of American institutions when travel or access to libraries was impossible. Other challenges emerged at the correction and production stages of the book itself, but my rewards have been MHRA publishing manager Simon Davies’s learning, dedication and good sense, which have made a world of difference to the final result.
BB. You are Professor of English at the University of Huelva in Spain. Are you able to include any work by Chapman or indeed any other of the great Elizabethan dramatists in the modern Spanish university curriculum? How do you make this material accessible and interesting for today’s generation of readers.
ZL-M. The University of Huelva has had a BA programme in English language and literature since its foundation in 1993, as well as opportunities for teaching at graduate level, so I’ve always been able to include English writers of all eras in my syllabi. In the last two decades, changes in European University curricula under the so-called Bologna Process have made themselves felt in small universities like ours in the form of fewer courses and fewer opportunities to teach older texts. But I still manage to teach Renaissance plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster or Ford. Recently I’ve run a poetry course that lets me bring together texts ranging from Old English elegies and riddles to contemporary poets like Geoffrey Hill, Thom Gunn, Stevie Smith, Carol Anne Duffy or Benjamin Zephaniah. I’ve taught some Chapman there, particularly the sonnets from ‘A Coronet for His Mistress Philosophy’. And always at least one canto of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, to the joy of some and the despair of others (I’ll spare you the percentages from the feedback forms!).
These may not be good times for poetry or difficulty. But reading poetry with students from all parts of the world who, like myself, are not native speakers of English, has the advantage of being an alternative way of learning the language. One also needs to convince younger readers that there is a lot like themselves in these poets and poems, and a lot unlike themselves that is at least as interesting.
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