George Chapman’s ‘Old Lesson in Philosophy’: A New Source for Ovid’s Banquet of Sense

This article presents a hitherto unknown, key source for George Chapman’s epyllion, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) and pursues the new reading of the poem enabled by this discovery. The poem is pervasively indebted to Joachim Curaeus’ De sensu et sensibilibus, Libellus Physicus (1567). This treatise on the senses and the soul disseminated a strand of natural philosophy which reconciled Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism, making Peripatetic cognition through the senses the gateway to Platonic ascent. Curaeus’ concordism opened a new vista for Chapman, changing his philosophical outlook forever. It also inspired his 1595 epyllion, in which he extends Neoplatonic Aristotelianism to account for poetic frenzy. Ovid was associated by the Neoplatonists with furor poeticus. Ovid’s Banquet is a philosophical narration of the moment when Ovid’s experience of embodied love fills him with the longing that will make him an immortal poet. Chapman’s ‘Ovidian’ erotic epyllion is thus a witty and strikingly ambitious contribution to early modern poetics. It offers a philosophical provocation in the form of a theory that brings eternal poetry within the domain of the early modern science of the soul, and an aesthetic provocation in transforming the conceptual repertory of that science into the stuff of English poetry.