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By Root 21503 0

to the Shadow of Night (1594), his poem to Thomas Harriot, and his Tears of Peace, and compare their mental attitude and verbal characteristics with the "Chrisoganus" and "Peace" passages of Histriomastix, Chapman's authorship of the latter will become apparent. The following parallels from four of Chapman's poems are convincing, and they can be extended indefinitely:

Histriomastix—

"Have always borne themselves in Godlike State

With lofty foreheade higher than the stars."

De Guiana, Carmen Epicum—

"Whose forehead knocks against the roof of stars."

Histriomastix—

"Consume whole groves and standing fields of corn

In thy wild rage and make the proud earth groan."

The Shadow of Night—

"Convert the violent courses of thy floods,

Remove whole fields of corn and highest woods."

Histriomastix—

"Whose glory which thy solid virtues won

Shall honour Europe while there shines a sun."

Poem to Harriot—

"When thy true wisdom by thy learning won

Shall honour learning while there shines a sun."

Chapman in several instances in this play echoes Greene's slurs against Shakespeare and, in the same manner as Peele in the Honour of the Garter, repeats the actual phrases and epithets used by Greene and Nashe.

Histriomastix—

"I scorn a scoffing fool about my throne—

An artless idiot (that like Æsop's daw

Plumes fairer feathered birds)."

These lines evince Chapman's knowledge of Nashe's phrase "idiot art-master," and of Greene's "upstart crow beautified with our feathers," and clearly pertain to the play in its earlier form (1593) when Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (published late in 1592) was still a new publication. In fact, it is not improbable that Nashe collaborated with Chapman in the early form of this play.

Again when Chapman writes the following lines:

Histriomastix—

"O age, when every Scriveners boy shall dippe

Profaning quills into Thessalies spring;

When every artist prentice that hath read

The pleasant pantry of conceipts shall dare

To write as confident as Hercules;

When every ballad-monger boldly writes," etc.

It is apparent that he again echoes Nashe's and Greene's attacks upon Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, all of which, however, he appears to have thought (as have later critics) were directed against Shakespeare.

The lines quoted above evidently reflect Chapman's knowledge of Nashe's preface to Greene's Menaphon in the expressions "Scriveners boy," "artist prentice," and "ballad-monger," while the words

"shall dippe

Profaning quills into Thessalies spring"

refer to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and the lines from Ovid with which he heads that poem.

In 1593 when, as I have indicated, Histriomastix in its early form was written, Shakespeare had published Venus and Adonis and dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton. In the composition of this poem Shakespeare undoubtedly worked from Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. He prefixed to the poem two lines from Ovid's fifteenth Elegy:

"Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo

Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua";

which are rendered in Marlowe's translation:

"Let base conceited wits admire vile things,

Fair Phœbus lead me to the Muses springs."

In The Shadow of Night, published in the following year, Chapman again resents the fact that one of Shakespeare's "small Latin and less Greek" should invade the classical preserves of the scholars for his poetical and dramatic subjects:

"Then you that exercise the virgin court

Of peaceful Thespia, my muse consort,

Making her drunken with Gorgonean dews,

And therewith all your ecstasies infuse,

That she may reach the topless starry brows

Of steep Olympus, crown'd with freshest boughs

Of Daphnean laurel, and the praises sing

Of mighty Cynthia: truly figuring

(As she is Hecate) her sovereign kind,

And in her force, the forces of the mind:

An argument to ravish and refine

An earthly soul and make it more devine.

Sing then with all, her palace brightness bright,

The dazzle-sun perfection of her light;

Circling her face with glories, sing the walks,

Where in her heavenly magic