The Banquet of the Common Sense: George Chapman’s Anti-Epyllion

Scholars have read Ouids Banquet of Sence (1595) most often within George Chap-man’s corpus of poems, and have taken it as an example of Chapman’s idiosyncratic poetics. Some scholars have acknowledged the poem’s kinship with the “epyllion,” or erotic verse narrative, represented by Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, but its relationship to this fashionable genre remains largely undefined. This essay demonstrates that Ouids Banquet directly engages the epyllion vogue, attacking the abuses of culture that Chapman found in the genre, and mimicking its stylistic faults as symptoms of these abuses. Chapman diagnoses two abuses common to English epyllia of the period: the removal of poetic narrative and performance from public occasions, and the exploiting of rhetorical education for private ends. Attention to this critique in Ouids Banquet illuminates the genre of the English epyllion and clarifies some controversial aspects of Chapman’s poetics, especially his view of the relationship between poetry and rhetoric.