Chapman, George - Gilles D. Monsarrat (essay date 1984)
Gilles D. Monsarrat (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: Monsarrat, Gilles D. “George Chapman: Necessity and Suicide.” In Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature Collection Études Anglaises, Vol. 86, pp. 189-221. Paris: Didier-Érudition, 1984.
[In the essay below, Monsarrat maintains that while Chapman created a “full-fledged Stoic” in Clermont in The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, there is little evidence to suggest that the playwright utilized Stoic philosophy in any other of his dramatic works.]
George Chapman's early poems and plays do not reveal any interest in Stoic philosophy. The Shadow of Night (1594) was born of the cult of melancholy, a most unstoic attitude. Sacred Night is a “house of mourning” into which the poet invites his readers to “weepe, weepe [their] soules, into felicitie” with him.1 Though Chapman claims in “Hymnus in Noctem” that “Sweete Peaces richest...
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