The Sidneian self and refined Eros in Chapmans Ovids Banquet of Sence

Abstract

Sidney in his Apology carefully adapts Plato’s strictures on poetry and shows how, far from being a slavish imitator, the poet can be understood as a creator, akin to the divine creator God. George Chapman follows Sidney closely in this, and he even adopts the term enargeia to emphasise the creator’s ability to imagine a work fully and perfectly prior to its execution. Both poets are concerned with the moral status of poetry and they make use of the artistic concept of ideal form in order to guarantee the poem’s ethical credentials. When Chapman tackles an Ovidian erotic subject, as in Ovids Banquet of Sence, he keeps in mind the heroic Ovid of the Metamorphoses as a foil to the more scurrilous author of the Ars amatoria or the Amores. In the course of his poem Chapman investigates the various senses, in the manner of Ficino in his Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, but unlike Ficino he invests those senses more obviously limited to the body, such as touch, with a dignity similar, if not even superior, to that of sight.