Note 135 — IX—THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

Much irrelevance has been introduced into the discussion of Chapman’s claim to be the rival poet. Prof. Minto in his Characteristics of English Poets, p. 291, argued that Chapman was the man mainly because Shakespeare declared his competitor to be taught to write by ‘spirits’—‘his compeers by night’—as well as by ‘an affable familiar ghost’ which gulled him with intelligence at night (lxxxvi. 5 seq.) Professor Minto saw in these phrases allusions to some remarks by Chapman in his Shadows of Night (1594), a poem on Night. There Chapman warned authors in one passage that the spirit of literature will often withhold itself from them unless it have ‘drops of their blood like a heavenly familiar,’ and in another place sportively invited ‘nimble and aspiring wits’ to join him in consecrating their endeavours to ‘sacred night.’ There is really no connection between Shakespeare’s theory of the supernatural and nocturnal sources of his rival’s influence and Chapman’s trite allusion to the current faith in the power of ‘nightly familiars’ over men’s minds and lives, or Chapman’s invitation to his literary comrades to honour Night with him. It is supererogatory to assume that Shakespeare had Chapman’s phrases in his mind when alluding to superstitions which were universally acknowledged. It could be as easily argued on like grounds that Shakespeare was drawing on other authors. Nash in his prose tract called independently The Terrors of the Night, which was also printed in 1594, described the nocturnal habits of ‘familiars’ more explicitly than Chapman. The publisher Thomas Thorpe, in dedicating in 1600 Marlowe’s translation of Lucan (bk. i.) to his friend Edward Blount, humorously referred to the same topic when he reminded Blount that ‘this spirit [i.e. Marlowe], whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the Churchyard [of St. Paul’s] in at the least three or four sheets . . . was sometime a familiar of your own.’ On the strength of these quotations, and accepting Professor Minto’s line of argument, Nash, Thorpe, or Blount, whose ‘familiar’ is declared to have been no less a personage than Marlowe, has as good a claim as Chapman to be the rival poet of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A second and equally impotent argument in Chapman’s favour has been suggested. Chapman in the preface to his translation of the Iliads (1611 ) denounces without mentioning any name ‘a certain envious windsucker that hovers up and down, laboriously engrossing all the air with his luxurious ambition, and buzzing into every ear my detraction.’ It is suggested that Chapman here retaliated on Shakespeare for his references to him as his rival in the sonnets; but it is out of the question that Chapman, were he the rival, should have termed those high compliments ‘detraction.’ There is no ground for identifying Chapman’s ‘windsucker’ with Shakespeare (cf. Wyndham, p. 255). The strongest point in favour of the theory of Chapman’s identity with the rival poet lies in the fact that each of the two sections of his poem The Shadow of the Night (1594) is styled a ‘hymn,’ and Shakespeare in Sonnet lxxxv. 6-7 credits his rival with writing ‘hymns.’ But Drayton, in his Harmonie of the Church, 1591, and Barnes, as we have just seen, both wrote ‘hymns.’ The word was not loosely used in Elizabethan English, as in sixteenth-century French, in the general sense of ‘poem.’