This dissertation has been 64—11,003 microfilmed exactly as received NELSON, John Richard, 1932- THE COMEDIES OF GEORGE CHAPMAN. The University of Oklahoma, Ph.D., 1964 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE THE COMEDIES OF GEORGE CHAPMAN A DISSERTATION SUBOTTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY JOHN RICHARD NELSON Norman, .Oklahoma 1964 THE COMEDIES OF GEORGE CHAPMAN APPROVED BY DISSERTATION COmHTTEE TABLE OF COOTEÎfTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION............................................... 1 II. THE BLIND BEGGAR OF ALEXANDRIA................................. 11 III. AN HUMOUROUS DAY’S MI R T H ...................................... 38 IV. ALL FOOLS ................................................. 73 V. MAY D A Y ................................................. 120 VI. SIR GILES GOOSECAP.............................................143 VII. THE GENTLEMANUSHER .......................................... 164 VIII. MONSIEUR D’OL I V E .............................................189 IX. THE IVIDaV'S TEARS. ........................ 208 X. CONCLUSION................ 4 " ................ 230 BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................... 234 iix THE COMEDIES OF GEORGE CHAPMAN CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The eight comedies of George Chapman (1559?-l63^)» which form the subject of this study, were written in the relatively short period of time from about 1596 to about 1606. Chapman had apparently first attracted attention as a writer with his earliest extant published work, two difficult, cryptic, allegorical poems appearing under the title The Shadow of Night (1594). In The Shadow of Night and indeed in almost all of his original non-dramatic poetry. Chapman, who had claimed from the first that obscurity itself was a virtue, wrote often in a knotty impenetrable style, which he defended in a letter affixed to Ovid's Banquet s L -Sense (1595): The prophane multitude I hate, & onelie consecrate tiy strange Poems to these serching spirits, whom learning hath made noble, and nobilitie sacred....But that Poesie should be as perviall as Oratorie, and plainnes her speciall ornament, were the plaine way to barbarisme....It serves not a skilfull Painters turne, . to draw the figure of a face onely to make knowne who it represents; but hee must lymn, give luster, shaddow, and heightening; which though ignorants will esteems spic'd, and too curious, yet such as have the judiciall perspective, will see it hath, motion, spirit and life....In try opinion, that which being with a little endevour serched, ads a kinds of majesite to Poesie; is better then that which every Cobler may sing to his patch. Obscuritie in affection of words, & indigested concets, is pedanticall and childish; but where it shroudeth it selfe in the hart of his subject, utterd with fitnes of figure, and expressive Epethites; with that darkness wil I still labour to be shadowedj 1 rich Minerals are digd out of the bowels of the earth» not found in the superficies and dust of it....I know, that empty, and dark spirits, will complaine of palpable night: but those that before­ hand, have a radiant, and light-bearing intellect, will say they ^ can passe through Corvnnas Garden without the helpe of a Lanterne. Chapman's poetry was sometimes crammed with scholarly and esoteric p references and allusions. His "characteristic texture," Douglas Bush observes, "is tough and knotted with emblematic images and symbols....”^ Chapman has written great poetry— his continuation of Hero and Leander and his translations of Homer have won him a general if not exactly unanimous acclaim— but it is ordinarily only after careful and extensive qualification that the critic of Chapman's original poetry is able to bestow anything except occasional praise. Phyllis Bartlett, the most recent editor of Chapman's poetry, remarks that "he was not a careful craftsman," and that though "energetic," his brain was "disorganized."^ And the editors of a recent anthology of Renaissance writing say that "Chapman's poetry is generally graceless and obscure."^ ^George Chapman, The Poems, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (Hew York: Russell & Russell, 1962), pp. 49-$0. ^As a result of Franck L. Schoell's Etudes sur l'Humanisme Continental en Angleterre a la Fin de la Renaissance. we now know that Chapman was more dependent on Renaissance than classical sources. Schoell has shown that Chapman has used extensively Comes' Mvthologiae, The Plutarch of Xylander, the Epictetus of Wolfius, and Ficino's translations of Plato. Many troublesome passages in Chapman's poetry are cleared up once his sources have been identified. 3 Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19^5)»P« 128. h. Chapman, p. 15. ^Hyder E. Rollins and Herschell Baker (eds.) The Renaissance in England (Boston: Heath, 195^)» P* ^ 5 * 3 Similarly Chapman's tragedies,^ of which there are several recent (and thorough) examinations, do not txy any means enjoy unreserved praise. The heavy moralism of these plays, the great gasping lumps of didacticism and hard doctrine that clog the flow of action and choke the life out of character, are frequent targets of attack. It is generally agreed, however, that on occasion. Chapman will write greatly and movingly in his tragedies (as in his poetry). For the most part, though, the general impression one would derive from a reading of Chapman's critics is that his writing was hard, abstruse, tenebrous, crossed with flashes of pellucid beauty and clarity. What Lucretius said of Hereclitus would seem to apply to Chapman: ’*He was a man illustrious for the darkness of his thought." Also there is generally the feeling, among Chapman's critics and readers that the personality of the author himself is strange and enigmatic, full of lights and shadows, and disturbing thunders of thought. Chapman, a Stoic, a Christian, a Platonist, a humanist, a cynic, is capable almost simultaneously of tender sensuous beauty and ghastly doctrinal austerities. Such a combination is not unusual in the Renaissance; nor is a dualism of thought uncommon in the whole Christian tradition. Augustine, Herschel Baker writes, in his great symbol of the "two cities...unforgettably enunciated that basic Christian dualism which gives meaning to all its ^For the specific dates of the tragedies, which range probably from 1603 to at least 1613, see note, <208. 2 Chapman, p. 4. Bartlett, speaking of Chapman's poetry, remarks that "there are splendid passages, genuinely emotional with the energy of a sustained figurative language, but there is no single poem that would have been likely to satisfy him more than us." And Bush, p. 40, states that "in Chapman generally flashes of pure fire often break through the blanket of the dark....” dichotomies of earth and heaven, nature and grace, man and God, the relative and the absolute, time and eternity. Chapman's thinking was profoundly dualistic; as a Christian he belonged to both the heavenly and the earthly cities; and as a Platonist he found himself both the envisioner of a world of absolute categories of virtue and love and the occupant of a temporal world that was filled with the blundering, the blind, and the unprincipled. An idealist and a cynic Chapman was apparently never able to reconcile what he thought should be with what he knew already was. This dualism of fact and value (inherent in a Christian philosophy and in a Platonic metaphysic) was almost certainly aggravated by the whole social and political world Chapman was a witness to, and, like his great contemporary Jonson, a critic of. The structure of Chapman's thought, its Christian, Platonic, and Stoical origins, and the contradictions inherent in it between what might be called sense and soul cannot be dismissed in the attempt to understand the war of intellectual and moral opposites that takes place in his art; but the age Chapman lived in may have played the greater role in shaping the bitter and anguished cynicism of his work, especially that written after about 1604 or I6O5 . Chapman's comedies, like his tragedies, call attention to a malaise of the time; and his last comedy in particular bespeaks a profound disenchantment, perhaps in part with himself, though we cannot be certain of this, but assuredly with his whole age. The sense of loss of widespread meaning and the feeling that the forces of "valor and virtue" had been largely shattered, is a theme of Chapman's ^The Wars of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 43- 5 tragedies. But the sense of loss and the defeat of value by an actual real world is a message of Chapman’s comedies as well; and this defeat is presaged in Chapman’s comedies from the first by his inability in them to give flesh and bone to the abstract tenets of his own etherial idealism. Recent critics of the late Elizabethan, early Jacobean period have recognized that the theme of defeat is symptomatic of a problem much larger in scope than any individual. Una Ellis-Fermor writes that Marlowe, the leader of the earlier age in tragic thought already points it towards the sense of defeat that was so marked a characteristic of the Jacobeans. Robert Omstein speaks of the ’'dramatists’ preoccupation with evil and their heightened awareness of the tragic anguish and disorder of ex- perience." Douglas Bush calls attention to a ’’Jacobean pessimism” and to "the permanently unsettled state of the seventeenth century man’s inner and outer world.” He goes on to remark that . it is not unnatural that melancholy has been taken as a conspicuous, even a dominant, characteristic of late Elizabethan and Jacobean literature....Certainly we find much disgust with men and society, much vague bitterness against a world which seems out of joint, against the apparent futility of life.^ Irving Ribner has called the early seventeenth century ”the age of paradox.” ’’Jacobean tragedy," the same critic states, "reflects the uncertainty of an age no longer able to believe in the old ideals, searching almost frantically for new ones to replace them, but incapable ^Jacobean Drama.