Choice Review

Huntington (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) offers a striking new approach to the early works of George Chapman. He elucidates the elegant obscurities of the Elizabethan poet by way of the lambent sociological generalizations of Pierre Bourdieu. Hitherto the difficulty of Chapman's verse has been met through readings that find moral orthodoxy, or Platonic ideality, in the hard lines. Huntington locates the explanation elsewhere, in a covert pun: line-by-line obscurity evokes the "resentment," the "social anger," that Chapman felt as an obscure (that is, poor, unaristocratic) Elizabethan. This is a tricky argument to make: it seeks to find in a difficult corpus of poetry "evidence of an intense but muted poetic struggle" in which Chapman pursues "a strategy of playing at the edge of offense [that] is invisible so long as it succeeds." But the detailed readings of ambiguities in the verse prove impressive, especially with Shadow of Night and "Ovids Banquet of Sence." Useful also is the contrast Huntington draws between the aristocratic cult of elegance in Philip Sidney and the commoner poet's ostentatious difficulty. Students of Chapman in particular, and of late Elizabethan poetry in general, will have to pay attention to Huntington's forceful study. Graduates, faculty, and the occasional upper-division undergraduate scholar. E. D. Hill Mount Holyoke College