ABSTRACT
Chapman is a difficult author, as Swinburne says; he is far more difficult than Jonson, to whom he bears only a superficial likeness. He is difficult beyond his obscurity. He is difficult partly through his possession of a quality comparatively deficient in Jonson, but which was nevertheless a quality of the age. It is strange that Swinburne should have hinted at a similarity to Jonson and not mentioned a far more striking affinity of Chapman’s-that is, Donne. The man who wrote
Guise, O my lord, how shall I cast from me The bands and coverts hindering me from thee? The garment or the cover of the mind The humane soul is; of the soul, the spirit The proper robe is; of the spirit, the blood; And of the blood, the body is the shroud:
and
Nothing is made of nought, of all things made,
and Chapman. In common with the greatest-Marlowe, Webster, Tourneur, and Shakespeare-they had a quality of sensuous thought, or of thinking through the senses, or of the senses thinking, of which the exact formula remains to be defined. If you look for it in Shelley or Beddoes, both of whom in very different ways recaptured something of the Elizabethan inspiration, you will not find it, though you may find other qualities instead. There is a trace of it only in Keats, and, derived from a different source, in Rossetti. You will not find it in the Duke of Gandia….
