George Chapman: A Critical Study by Millar MacLure (review)

HUMANITIES 417 and yet not thereby wholly negated. But we are not shown how the final act fits this thesis, and I personally, at least, am not convinced. The chapter on Measure for Measure offers some of the best detailed commentary on the first two acts I have read, but the fact that so many people feel let down by the play's second part is not really faced. We are told that the development of the play's theme is clear, but the puzzle about the sudden shift in mood and idiom in III. i. after the high serious tone of the interviews involving Isabella, Angelo, Claudio, and the Duke, remains. The Duke's Gower-like sententiae are inadequate to counter the aat prose of crafty manipulations by which the final tempering of justice by mercy, both a measure for measure and a mercy beyond measure, are ensured. The basic problem for us in the play is not Isabella, who is very young and who learns a great deal in the course of the action, but the Duke and the tone of the resolution. But no book on Shakespeare will satisfy its readers throughout in its interpretations . In this one there is so much that is thoughtful and presented with charm that it should be given a favourite place on one's shelf. C F. D. HOENIGER) In Millar MacLure's George Chapman: A Critical Study CUniversity of Toronto Press, pp. x, 241, $6.50) we have, at last, a good book on Chapman 's writings. There may be two reasons why)t has not been done before: the first, to which Professor MacLure alludes with unnecessary modesty, that One doesn't know enough; the second, a common doubt whether, in the end, Chapman would have proved worth it. I suspect that this, too, has worried Mr. MacLure, because on his last page he remarks "As I read over what I have written about him, I am struck by how much of it is qualification, reduction." In reading this book I had occasionally been struck by the same thing; but struck, too, by the fact that this seemed to occur most in the introductory chapter, and in final paragraphs, as though detailed critical attention had somehow led the author to higher praise than he had intended. Qualification is no doubt always necessary, but reduction much less often. The crying need has been, not so much for more knowledge, but for the sustained application of critical intelligence to the works themselves, taken as the whole which they so patently are. The thing to be known is the difficult, strange, paradoxical poems and plays that Chapman wrote; and that knowledge can only be acquired with patience and unusually aexible and complex critical thought. The difficulty is to say what is needed without becoming 418 LETTERS IN CANADA prolix, and whilst I admire Mr. MacLure's economy, I find him most satisfying where he has allowed himself most leisure, and so actually wish the book had been longer. This is not at all to decry the essential learning that Mr. MacLure obViously does possess, nOr the labours of his predecessors, which have made it comparatively easy to acquire. Much of what is most valuable has been written in France, with a curious mixture of learning and hostility, so that one might be forgiven for supposing the original motive was only that Chapman happened to be an English writer who treated French history. M. Schoell's invaluable study of his use of Renaissance commonplaces seems to have been sustained by a desire to prove his unoriginality; and though M. Jacquot's sympathies are broader, his critical discussion was relatively slight and often slighting. In England and America Schoell's work has been corrected and extended; but most serious discussion has been devoted to the tragedies. For the Homer, where most of the work has come from classicists, the stress has been on problems of translation theory, and the extent of Chapman's knowledge of Greek. It seems to me that this background has had its effect On Professor MacLure's book: he does not need to elaborate on the sources of Chapman's...