George Chapman Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on George Chapman

George Chapman was the most intellectually ambitious of the English Renaissance dramatists, the one with the highest claims for the philosophical dignity and importance of his work. His nearest rival was his friend and sometime collaborator Ben Jonson; and, like Jonson, he based much of his claim to seriousness on his study and use of the wisdom of classical antiquity, with much overt display of scholarship. Praise of humanist learning and scorn for the unlearned many are unflagging themes in Chapman's poems and prefaces, their urgency informed by a conviction that such knowledge itself entails a certain ethical disposition. His Euthymiæ Raptus offers the fullest statement:

 
     this is Learning; To haue skill to throwe
 
Reignes on your bodies powres, that nothing knowe;
 
And fill the soules powers, so with act, and art,
 
That she can curbe the bodies angrie part;
 
All perturbations; all affects that stray
 
From their one obiect; which is to obay
 
Her Soueraigne Empire.

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