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Chapman's Andromeda Liberata: Mythology and Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Raymond B. Waddington
Raymond B. Waddington*
Affiliation:
University of Kansas, Lawrence
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Extract

During recent years, despite—or possibly because of—T. S. Eliot's commendation, George Chapman's verse has appealed to a fit audience, though few indeed. One of the reasons for this neglect has been the inaccessibility resulting from insufficient knowledge of the tradition and technique of platonic allegory in the Renaissance. Since Battenhouse's pioneering effort at explicating The Shadow of Night, other scholars equipped with a fuller knowledge of platonic iconography and mythology have attempted to part the veil of obscurity by reestablishing a coherent intellectual and historical context and have enhanced our understanding of several of the more difficult poems, notably Hero and Leander and Ovids Banquet of Sence. It may be time to examine a poem which has not been noted for artistic accomplishment in order to determine to what extent such a context reveals a consistent poetic mode in Chapman's verse.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , March 1966 , pp. 34 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 See Roy Battenhouse, “Chapman's The Shadow of Night: An Interpretation,” SP, xxxviii (1941), 584–608; D. J. Gordon, “Chapman's Hero and Leander,” EM, v (1954), 41–92; J. F. Kermode, “The Banquet of Sense,” BJRL, xliv (1961), 68–99.

2 Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis, 1932), pp. 212–213.

3 George Chapman: sa vie, sa poésie, son théâtre, sa pensée (Paris, 1951), p. 72.

4 Short Time's Endless Monument (New York, 1960).

5 See Gordon, “Chapman's Hero and Leander,” pp. 55–65, 79–83.

6 The most detailed, scholarly account remains that of S. R. Gardiner, History of England ..., 1603–1642. See ii (London, 1883), 166–186, 304–363.

7 E. H. Gombrich, “Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought,” JWCI, xi (1948), 163–192, provides the general background; Gordon, pp. 65–85, demonstrates the importance of visual theory for Hero and Leander.

8 The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett (New York, 1962), p. 49. I have used this text throughout. The abbreviation “d. e.” will designate line references from the dedicatory verse epistle prefixed to Andromeda Liberata.

9 See Phaedrus, 244E, Sophist, 230C ff., Phaedo, 67–69. For Plato's own use of myth, see Ludwig Edelstein, “The Function of the Myth in Plato's Philosophy,” JHI, x (1949), 463–481.

10 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1958), pp. 13–23.

11 Poems, p. 49. The source is Horace's “Odi profanum volgus et arceo” (Carmina 3, 1, 1), but the platonic adaptation puts the formula to a use Horace seems not to have intended. See Steele Commager, The Odes of Horace (New Haven, 1962), pp. 16–20.

12 The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch, entitled, Amintas Dale (London, 1592), p. 3.

13 For the platonic associations of hieroglyphics see George Boas' introduction to The Hieroglyphicks of Horapollo (New York, 1950).

14 Like Hopkins, Christine de Pisan, available to Chapman in Stephen Scrope's translation, interpreted Andromeda as the soul (Bush, p. 32). Francis Bacon makes no mention of Andromeda, but represents Perseus as “Warre” and interprets the slaying of the Gorgon as an allegory of military strategy (Wisedom of the Ancients, tr. Sir. Arthur Gorges, London, 1619, pp. 38–45). Abraham Fraunce regards the Gorgon episode as an allegory of celestial grace and wisdom overcoming mortality (Amintas Dale, p. 29), while George Sandys reads Andromeda as “innocent virtue” and Perseus as “honour and felicities” (Ovid's Metamorphosis, Oxford, 1632, p. 168). Sir John Harington's preface to Orlando Furioso presents a three-level exegesis—historical, moral, and theological—of the myth (C. G. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, Oxford, 1904, ii, 202–203); Bush, p. 70, discusses Harington's sources.

15 See Franck L. Schoell, Etudes sur l'humanisme continental en Angleterre à la fin de la renaissance (Paris, 1926), p. 195.

16 The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1961), pp. 72–73.

17 Cf. Hero and Leander iii. 235–250.

18 Hero and Leander v. 323–340; see also Jonson's Hymenaei, 197–211 (Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, Oxford, 1941, vii, 216).

19 See George Puttenham, The Arte of Englishe Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 51.

20 Schoell, pp. 1–20.

21 “Introduction” to The Poems, p. 9.

22 The Star-Crossed Renaissance (Durham, N. C., 1941), pp. 174–175.

23 Commentary on Plato's Symposium: The Text and a Translation, ed. and tr. S. R. Jayne, Univ. of Missouri Studies, xix, 1 (Columbia, 1944), v, viii, pp. 176–177.

24 Ovid's Metamorphosis (Oxford, 1632), p. 157. Cf. Lucretius, De rerum natura, i, 30–41.

25 In my exposition of this allegory I am much indebted to Edgar Wind, “Virtue Reconciled With Pleasure,” Pagan Mysteries, pp. 78–88.

26 See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1962), p. 163, n. 120.

27 See Schoell, pp. 197–245, for Chapman's use of the Moralia.

28 “This is what the fable of Mars and Venus suggests, of whom the latter corresponds to Empedoclean friendship, the former to Empedoclean strife. ... And with this agrees what is transmitted by other poets, that Harmony was born from the union of Mars and Venus: for when the contraries, high and deep, are tempered by a certain proportion, a marvellous consonance arises between them” (tr. Wind, p. 82).

29 A Platonick Discourse Upon Love ii, v, in The Poems and Translations of Thomas Stanley, ed. G. M. Crump (Oxford, 1962), pp. 206–207.

30 Wind, p. 87.

31 Jayne, Commentary, v, viii, p. 177.

32 Wind, pp. 84–85, discusses these paintings.

33 Jayne, Commentary, ii, viii, p. 144.

34 Jayne, Commentary, ii, viii, p. 145.

35 See my unpub. diss., “The Aesthetics of Some Seventeenth-Century Platonic Poets” (Rice Univ., 1963), pp. 49–53.

36 See Panofsky's analysis of the Titian painting called the “Allegory of the Marquis d'Avolos” as a visualization of a newly-wed couple in the guise of Venus and Mars (Studies in Iconology, pp. 160–163).

37 Allen, p. 175.

38 See R. V. Merrill, with R. J. Clements, Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry (New York, 1957), pp. 99–117.

39 Panofsky, pp. 163–164.

40 Chapman's Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoli (New York, 1956), ii, 140.

41 Fraunce, commenting upon the thigh wound of Adonis, allegorizes it as a nature-fertility myth, while taking for granted the sexual implications. See A. C. Hamilton, “Venus and Adonis,” SEL, i (1961), 6. Cf. Northrop Frye: “... Adonis's traditional thigh-wound [is] as close to castration symbolically as it is anatomically” (Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, 1957, p. 189).

42 See Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica v, xvii (6th ed., London, 1672), p. 300: “As for the story [of St. George] depending hereon, some conceive as lightly thereof, as of that of Persius and Andromeda; conjecturing the one to be the father of the other; and some too highly assert it. Others with better moderation, do either entertain the same as a fabulous addition unto the true and authentick story of St. George; or else conceive the literal acception to be a misconstruction of the symbolical expression; apprehending a veritable history, in an Emblem or piece of Christian Poesie.” The typology of the Perseus myth is considered at length by Edwin Sidney Hartland, The Legend of Perseus, 3 vols. (London, 1894–96). For the relationship of the St. George legend, see iii, 38–49.

43 Frye, pp. 194–197, discusses the quest-romance aspect of the first book of The Faerie Queene.

44 “Of Empire,” The Essayes, ed. Ernest Rhys (London, 1906), pp. 57–58.

45 The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford, 1952), i, 105.

46 See Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston, Ill., 1945), pp. 2 ff.

47 See Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore, Md., 1958), pp. 57–61, for explication of the Mars-Venus passage; Wasserman's notes provide further background on concordia discors and its political application.

48 See D. J. Gordon, “Hymenaei: Ben Jonson's Masque of Union,” JWCI, viii (1945), 107–145; esp. 127–128. The quotations from James are on p. 121.

49 I have relied upon Gardiner and the pertinent DNB articles for the facts in the following account.

50 Quoted by J. B. Leishman, The Monarch of Wit (London, 1959), p. 35.

51 Cf. Frye, p. 189, “The ritual analogies of the myth suggest that the monster is the sterility of the land itself.”

52 There is a play upon the similarity of the names; the older use of i for j makes the visual identification nearly exact. Cf. Gordon's explication of the Unio-Iuno anagram in “Hymenaei,” pp. 114–117. Sigurd Burckhardt's description of the semantic function of punning is relevant. See “The Poet as Fool and Priest,” ELE, xxiii (1956), 281–283.

53 Norma Dobie Solve, Stuart Politics in Chapman's Tragedy of Chabot, Univ. of Michigan Pubs. in Lang. and Lit., iv (Ann Arbor, 1928), demonstrates the consistency of Chapman's adherence to Somerset's cause. Most scholars accept Solve's explication of Chabot as an allegory of the Somerset affair, though the date of the play remains unsettled. Recently Irving Ribner has argued that Chabot dates from 1612 or 1613 and was rewritten sometime after 1621 by Chapman and Shirley to make it reflect Somerset's career. See “The Meaning of Chapman's Tragedy of Chabot,” MLR, lv (1960), 321–331.

54 See Euthymiae Raptus or the Teares of Peace, as well as Eugenia, in which he expresses the hope that knowledge will “make our generali peace so circulare; / That Faith and Hope, at either end shall pull / And make it come: Round as the Moone at full” (939–941). On James's self-styled role as Rex Pacificus see D. H. Willson, King James VI and I (New York, 1956), pp. 271–287.