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The Compasse of This Curious Frame: Chapman's Ovids Banquet of Sence and the Emblematic Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Rhoda M. Ribner
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Extract

Renaissance emblem books constituted ‘manifestations of popularly accepted esoteric notions which vastly contributed to the formation of the great post-medieval styles, especially mannerism and baroque’. For some time the critical commonplace has prevailed that Chapman, particularly in Ovids Banquet of Sence (1595), is emblematic, with no explanation of precisely what that means. To understand Chapman's relation to the emblem writers one must compare their methods and their shared concerns of subject matter, as well as their individual images. The relevant question is how Chapman applies the individual emblematic elements and the method to a thematic concern with art and nature to create a poetic synthesis in Ovids Banquet of Sence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 17 , 1970 , pp. 233 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1970

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References

1 Heckscher, W. S., ‘Renaissance Emblems’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, xv (1954). 55–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Since Franck L. Schoell discredited Chapman as a Classical scholar, in Etudes sur I'humanisme continental en Angleterre (1926), by showing his sources in Renaissance compendia, critics have looked for Chapman's borrowings in other popularizing works. Mario Praz claimed Chapman as emblematic in Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery (!939)- Elizabeth Holmes and M. C. Bradbrook recognized his emblematic tendency in Aspects of Elizabethan Imagery (1929) and Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (1951), respectively, as does Marcello Pagnini in Forme e Motivi nelle Poesie e nelle Tragedie di George Chapman (1957). Finally, Millar MacLure, in George Chapman: A Critical Study (1966), goes furthest in exploring the emblematic aspects of the poem.

3 Freeman, Rosemary, English Emblem Books (London, 1948), pp. 48–49 Google Scholar.

4 Freeman, p. 35.

5 Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery, 1 (London, 1939), 189.

6 Heckscher, pp. 56-57.

7 Heckscher, p. 188. See Freeman's discussion of the history of emblem books in England, pp.34 ff.

8 Heckscher, p. 198.

9 Chapman, George, ‘Ovids Banquet of Sence’, Elizabethan Minor Epics, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York, 1963)Google Scholar. All subsequent references to this poem, cited in the body of the paper, are to this edition.

10 Pp. 54-55.

11 Freeman, pp. 24-29.

12 Praz, p. 24.

13 Praz, p. 32.

14 Picta Poesis (Rome, 1960), p. 47.

15 Clements, pp. 36-38.

16 Clements, p. 53.

17 See MacLure, Millar, George Chapman: A Critical Study (Toronto, 1966), p. 53 Google Scholar. He recognizes the setting as a device but fails to connect it with poetic inspiration.

18 Quoted in Clements, p. 34.

19 Buxton, John, Elizabethan Taste (New York, 1963), p. 104 Google Scholar.

20 See Panofsky, Erwin, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1962), pp. 151–152 Google Scholar.

21 Clements, p. 54.

22 Praz, p. 122.

23 See Heckscher, W. S., ‘Bernini's Elephant and Obelisk’, Art Bulletin, xxix (March, 1947), 155 Google Scholar.

24 Freeman, p. 39.

25 Clements, p. 192.

26 Chapman, George, Poems, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York, 1962)Google Scholar. References in the text to poems other than Ovids Banquet o/Sence are from this edition. I have modernized i/j and u/v.

27 Praz, p. 13.

28 Clements, p. 18.

29 Tayler, Edward, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York, 1964), p. 25 Google Scholar.

30 ‘The Banquet of Sense’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, XLIV (September, 1961), 68.

31 P. 51.

32 Pp. 77-84.

33 ‘Two Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Marlowe's Fantasy of Conquest and Chapman's Philosophy of Pleasure’ (unpublished Master's essay, Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University), pp. 38 ff. Olson argues that since Chapman neither contradicts Ovid with authorial insertions nor does Ovid contradict himself, Chapman is not being ironic.

34 P. 301.

35 Freeman, p. 91.

36 The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven, 1962), p. 192.

37 P. 43.

38 Freeman, p. 9.

39 MacLure, p. 51.

40 P. 18.

41 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1954), p. 515.

42 P. 64.

43 Doran, Madeleine, The Endeavors of Art (Madison, 1954), pp. 71–72 Google Scholar. See also Lee's, R. W. detailed study of the influence of the idea in Renaissance criticism in ‘Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting’, The Art Bulletin, XXII Google Scholar (Dec, 1940), 197-269.

44 Paragone, trans, and ed. Irma A. Richter (London, 1949).

45 Trattato 23, pp. 61-62.

46 Anthony Blunt, ‘An Echo of the “Paragone” in Shakespeare’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, n (1938-1939), 260-262.

47 Clements, pp. 174-178.

48 Chew, p. 193.

49 P. 115. 50 P. 51.

51 Doran, p. 404, n. 2.

52 Bradbrook, M. C., Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London, 1951), p. 234 Google Scholar.

53 Doran, p.1

54 Pp. 26-28.

55 P- 53.

56 Jacquot, Jean, George Chapman: sa vie, sa poésie, son theatre, sa pensée (Paris, 1951), p. 69 Google Scholar.

57 P. 80.

58 Freeman, p. 60.