Chapman, George - Peter Bement (essay date spring 1972)
Peter Bement (essay date spring 1972)
SOURCE: Bement, Peter. “The Stoicism of Chapman's Clermont D'Ambois.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 12, no. 2 (spring 1972): 345-57.
[In the following essay, Bement considers how Chapman manipulated the two principal divergent ideals of Stoicism—namely, action versus contemplation—in the character of Clermont to create a “heroic reformer” who performs “nobly and virtuously what is normally understood to be a violent and bloody action in the midst of a vicious world.”]
There is in all of George Chapman's work a high moral idealism coupled with an overwhelming sense of the world's hostility to true virtue. In poems like The Shadow of Night, this makes itself felt as a dedication to the other-worldly ideals of neoplatonic mysticism and a retired life of study, contemplation rather than action. But Chapman seems nonetheless to have been fascinated by the world of action...
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