sense Of "Ovid's Banquet of Sense," the argument is that "Ovid, newly enamoured of Julia, daughter to Octavius Augustus Cæsar, after by him called Corinna, secretly conveyed himself to a garden of the Emperor's court, in an arbour whereof Corinna was bathing, playing on her lute, and singing." Ovid's sense of Hearing was pleased with her song, his sense of Smell with the perfumes of her bath, his of Sight with the pride of her nakedness. She saw him behind her when she looked in her glass, and, covering herself, was about to withdraw in anger. But, in a dialogue of amorous logic, Ovid won her to satisfy with a kiss his sense of Taste. She had further suffered him to place his hand upon her side for satisfaction of the sense of Touch, when other ladies came into the garden. This poem of the delights of earthly love is set forth in musical stanzas of tensyllabled iambic lines, each formed of nine lines that rhyme ababcbedd, and Chapman interposes but one didactic touch in painting sensuous delight without descent into the sensual. That one touch is the suggestion in Corinna's song that pleased the ear "'Tis better to contemn than love And to be fair than wise, For souls are ruled by eyes." "Ovid's Banquet of Sense" has grace and charm. Although written in the spirit of the "Hymn to Night," it suggests the delight of the senses with a right freedom from didactic comment that is rare in Chapman. His purpose is served by contrast of this poem with that which he places next to it, "A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy." The coronet is a round of ten sonnets, of the pattern of Spenser's as to rhyme; the last line of each sonnet is repeated as the first of that which follows, and, the last line of the last being also the first line of the first, the circle is complete, and ends where it began. In these sonnets Chapman turns from "Muses that sing love's sensual empery, And lovers kindling your enragéd fires Blown with the empty breath of vain desires." He calls to wiser love those votaries of Cupid, and says to them, "Your eyes were never yet let in to see The majesty and riches of the mind, But dwell in darkness; for your god is blind." The poet's love is for the higher wisdom that "to living virtues turns the deadly vices," "And let my love adorn with modest eyes' Muses that sing Love's sensual emperies." As here she does. There is more sense of labour in the framing of these sonnets than in the graceful stanzas of Chapman's free, but innocent, " Banquet of Sense." "The Amorous Zodiac" is a lover's fanciful but laboured division of his lady's body, from "fleece of hair, yellow and curled," to "slender feet, fine slender feet that shame Thetis' sheen feet, which poets so much fame," into twelve signs like those of the Zodiac. And these shall be the rest of all his moving through the year. Lastly, "The Amorous Contention of Thetis and Flora," from a mediæval Latin poem, sets forth in stanzas each of four lines with a single rhyme, dispute upon the question whether a soldier or a clerk in orders be fittest for love "A little yet unlike they prove, And somewhat hostilely they strove ; But Phillis liked a soldier's love." They went to have the question settled by Cupid himself, who decided that "the clerk is fitt'st for venery." In full accord with the spirit of these early poems of his own is the spirit of the Sestiads with which Chapman completed Marlowe's "Hero and Leander." Marlowe had painted the delight of the flesh. Chapman could paint that also with the liberal touch of a wisdom that has no austerity, but at the same time he makes it his whole purpose to ring the knell of Fancy, born and cradled in the eyes, with gazing fed. Chapman dedicated his continuation of Marlowe, arranged as the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth Sestiads of "Hero and Leander "-" the last affections of the first two lovers that ever Muse shrined in the Temple of Memory" -to the wife of Sir Thomas Walsingham. His Leander returned from snatching "that unblessed blessing Which, for lust's plague, doth perish with possessing. Leander returned had a vision of the goddess Ceremony, who reproved "Leander's bluntness in his violent love." He vowed to celebrate the nuptial rites. And then Chapman, when he is proceeding to the tale of sorrows that ensued, seeks conference with the soul of Marlowe, seeks to "find th' eternal clime Of his free soul, whose living subject stood Up to the chin in the Pierian flood, And drunk to me half this Musæan story, Inscribing it to deathless memory : Confer with it, and make my pledge as deep, Then follows illustration of how Hero fared within "the expugned fort of her chaste bosom," by a simile shaped from the attack of Essex upon the ships at Cadiz. This was another carrying out of the suggestion Chapman made in a note when using a simile drawn from the struggle of war before Nimeguen. Thus came George Chapman in mid-life into our literature, marked for strength among the strong. His early life would be worth knowing, but we only know that it had been tried by adversity. He was poor when he began to publish, and although he was impatient of the dominance of "Custom, that the apoplexy is Of bed-rid natures and lives led amiss " Chapman's --he described it so in "Hero and Leander "-he had as a poor poet to fall in with the custom of finding words for the players. Meres names him in his list of the best writers of comedy and tragedy. George Chapman's "Blind Beggar of Alexandria," which remains to us, was first acted in February, 1596, and first printed in 1598. Henslowe found it profitable. Other plays of his are named in Henslowe's Diary, but they are lost. There remains "A Humorous Day's Mirth," first printed in 1599. It is probable that he wrote also before 1599, under another title, the excellent comedy, Fools," based upon Terence's Heautontimoroumenos. this was not printed until 1605. Plays. "All But John Webster is among workers at plays mentioned after November, 1601, in Henslowe's Diary; but they are lost plays, and, as we know him, he is dramatist of the reign of James I. John Thomas Heywood may have been about twenty years old when he was first mentioned in Henslowe's Thomas Diary as receiving thirty shillings for a Heywood. playbook, towards the close of the year 1596. In 1598 he was engaged as a regular member of the Lord Admiral's company. His "First Part of Edward IV." was "The Four 'Prentices of London," printed in 1600, and written in his youth, was printed in 1601. Heywood's activity was very great. He said, in 1633, that he had an entire hand, or at least a main finger, in 220 plays. But the two here named are all that remain of what he wrote under Elizabeth. Except his "Woman Killed with Kindness," which was first acted in 1603, Thomas Heywood's place is mainly in the literature of the reign of James I. and Charles I. Thomas Thomas Middleton was about thirty-two years old in the year of the death of Elizabeth, and belongs chiefly to the reign of James I. He was the only son of William Middleton, a gentleman settled in London, by his wife Anne, daughter of William Snow. In 1597 Thomas Middleton published "The Wisdom of Solomon paraphrased," and not improved by the process. In 1599 he followed the fashion of the day, and published "Microcynicon, Six Snarling Satires." He is first mentioned by Henslowe, in May, 1602, as fellow-worker on a lost play, "Cæsar's Fall," with Munday, Drayton, Webster, and others, and in a play of "The Two Harpies," with Munday, Drayton, Dekker, and Webster. An excellent comedy, "The Old Law," known only in an edition of 1656, in which Middleton and Rowley worked together, has been ascribed to the last years of Elizabeth. William William Rowley was another of the young dramatists who earned money by work for the theatres at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and grew to their full powers in the reign of James. John Ford was seventeen years old, Philip Massinger was twenty, Francis Beaumont nineteen, and John Fletcher twentyfour in the year of the death of Queen Elizabeth. None of them became dramatists until the reign of James. With these young men there passed into the reign |