Golden Foolery

Summary

Andrew Hadfield assesses George Chapman as an enigmatic poet whose difficult, learned writing combines esoteric and neo-Platonic interests with irony, humour, and acute awareness of poetic artifice. In The Shadow of the Night, apparently exalted invocations of darkness and divine inspiration coexist with striking absurdities, while Ovid’s Banquet of Sense leaves unresolved whether sensual experience leads toward higher love or matters chiefly in itself. Hadfield therefore questions editor Zenón Luis-Martínez’s consistent interpretation of Chapman as a convinced neo-Platonist offering readers a window onto the divine, arguing that occult philosophy did not necessarily define or constrain Chapman’s imagination. Nevertheless, he judges the edition extraordinarily detailed and helpful, crediting its extensive introduction, section summaries, and full notes even where its governing interpretation remains debatable.

Highlights

• Chapman’s poetry is notoriously difficult and challenging, which is why he is sometimes touted as the rival poet in Shakespeare’s sonnets, while his interest in esoteric philosophy and neo-Platonic thinking has led to speculation that he was a member of the atheistic “School of Night”, centred on Walter Raleigh. (There is not much evidence that they knew each other, apart from a dedicatory poem that Chapman wrote for Raleigh’s account of his voyage to Guiana.) It is hard to work out how serious Chapman’s philosophical speculations are. Does his poetry point us towards intimations of the divine through his belief in poetic fury and enargia, as his meticulous and dutiful editor, Zenón Luis-Martínez, argues? Or are his works elaborate and cunning explorations of poetic language, replete with irony, making him a “metaphysical” poet?
• Like Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, it balances two contrasting states: the thoughts and beliefs of the goddess of the melancholy night in “Hymnus in Noctem”; and the power of the moon in “Hymnus in Cynthiam”, which is also an elaborate paean to Elizabeth I. The poems can be read as works that are aimed at the occult interests of Chapman’s patron, Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, alongside Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night, as the introduction suggests.
• He certainly has an eye for striking absurdities. His address to his fellow poet Matthew Roydon that prefaces Ovid’s Banquet of Sense compares poor judgement to wandering “passportless men” who are not regulated enough to understand “the divine discipline of poetry”. The long poem narrates Ovid’s affair with Julia leading up to the Ars Amatoria, and his subsequent banishment. In the final stanza, we are told that “Ovid well knew there was much more intended, / With whose omission none must be offended”. The poem thus asks readers to wonder whether Ovid’s erotic experiences point him to higher forms of love or whether it is the actual experiences that matter, rather than the elaborate justification for them. Is this a banquet of the senses or does the feast point us to a truer form of desire? Ovid is here made to muse, “She is a sweet Elysium for the sense, / And nature doth not sensual gifts infuse / But that with sense she still intends their use”. Should we rely on our sense experience, or is Ovid on a journey to enlightenment? Chapman may have been interested in the esoteric and the occult, but I suspect that they cannot have bound and defined his imagination.
• Luis-Martínez argues throughout that Chapman is a convinced neo-Platonist whose work is designed to provide a window to the heavens. One does not have to share this reading of Chapman’s poetry to find the apparatus enlightening and to be grateful to such a diligent editor.

Notes

• Beauty is a ladder. Platonism moves from bodily beauty toward soul, knowledge, and divine Beauty. Julia may inspire Ovid’s ascent -- or let him disguise lust as philosophy.

• Sense can lead to spirit. Chapman combines sensory knowledge with Neoplatonic ascent with physical experience awakening the mind and, potentially, lasting poetic song.

• “Poetic fury” means divine-seeming inspiration; enargia means vivid presentation. Chapman tries to make transcendence feel real to poet and reader, but that is artistic experience, not proof of a mystical event.

Source

Author

Andrew Hadfield

Publication

The Times Literary Supplement

Date

August 7, 2026

URL

https://www.the-tls.com/literature/the-shadow-of-night-ovids-banquet-of-sense-george-chapman-book-review-a ↗

Reviewed work

"The Shadow of Night" and “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense” by George Chapman