The Shadow of Night and Ovid's Banquet of Sense

George Chapman (1559-1634) is mostly remembered as the first English translator of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and as the author of a handful of plays for the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. His poetry, however, has often been dogged by a reputation for obscurity. The poems contained in his first two published volumes, The Shadow of Night (1594) and Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595), have been considered among the most difficult in the language. Yet Chapman perceived difficulty as a vehicle for aesthetic innovation and philosophical audacity. While the two Homeric hymns of The Shadow of Night put their magical-religious invocations and mythological resourcefulness at the service of their author's visionary ideas, the three amatory pieces of Ovid's Banquet of Sense explore the limits of sensuality and eroticism in their pursuit of deeper truths.

This edition presents for the first time Chapman's early poems in a fully annotated, modern-spelling text that attends both to their readability and to the full scope of their classical and humanist learning. Its comprehensive introduction, notes and commentary situate the poems in their Elizabethan literary context and offer insights into Chapman's poetics of difficulty, his original style, his innovative treatment of genre, his creative transformation of sources and his daring intellectual ambitions. Chapman's sometimes mysterious yet often dazzling verse makes up a lively, inventive corpus that will appeal to scholars, students and adventurous readers.