Andromeda Liberata

In 1612, George Chapman lost his patron, Prince Henry, and needed to seek favour somewhere else. He turned to James I’s favourite, Sir Robert Carr, who, the following year, obtained the earldom of Somerset, was appointed Treasurer of Scotland, and, on 26 December, married Frances Howard. Their marriage brought about the greatest scandal of the 1610s at the Jacobean court, with the imprisonment and poisoning (on 14 September 1613) of Sir Thomas Overbury, Carr’s secretary, who had tried to dissuade Carr from marrying Frances. For political reasons, Frances had been married at a young age to Robert Devereux,  3^rd Earl of Essex, but, falling in love with Carr, had maintained that her marriage had never been consummated because of Essex’s sexual impotence. The king personally intervened in the matter and permitted the nuptials between Carr and Howard. The trial for murder, incriminating Carr, Howard, and her waiting woman, Anne Turner, would not start until October 1615. In the meantime, Chapman had published Andromeda Liberata in praise of the Carr-Howard union, a poem which has been described as “the most nauseating of all these tributes” (Finkelpearl 1995: 349). The allegory is apparent: the beautiful and chaste Andromeda figures Howard, chained to a barren rock (Essex) and attacked by the whale symbolising slander and vulgar opinion; Perseus (Carr), described as Jupiter’s minion (the king’s favourite), rescues and marries her. Chapman’s poem was so criticised that he felt obliged to publish a defence of his work, A Free and Offenceless Justification of a Lately Published and Most Maliciously Misinterpreted Poem Entitled Andromeda Liberata (1614). This text was printed by the same Laurence L’Isle (or Lawrence Lisle) who had printed Andromeda Liberata and who profited from the Overbury scandal by publishing both Overbury’s poems and Chapman’s defence of the Somersets (see McIver 1994). Andromeda Liberata got indissolubly entangled with the Overbury affair: in several manuscripts of the poem There was an Old Lad on an Old Pad (poking fun at Essex’s impotence), “the text is given a false ‘imprint’ as: ‘Imprinted in Paul’s churchyard . . . to be sold at the Andromeda Liberata in Turnbull Street’” (Knowles 2015: n.n.; Turnbull Street being a place of prostitution and crime).

  The title page of Andromeda Liberata features an emblem taken from Henry Peacham’s 1612 Minerva Britanna, bearing the motto “Mihi conscia recti”, i.e. [my mind is] aware of what is right/straight. Chapman had used this motto, with a different emblem, for the title page of Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, 1595. Both emblems show a straight stick immersed in water and thereby appearing distorted. “That he would use it for Andromeda Liberata, a poem to which the optical illusion problem has no special applicability, suggests that he had come to regard it as a personal emblem” (Waddington 1983: 46). However, it is not true that the theme of misperception is not important in the poem; it is in fact crucial, because it shows how only the happy few can see through illusion and ascend to the spheres.

   Chapman’s poem can prove a difficult read for several reasons. Firstly, his elitism (many-headed “vulgar opinion” is portrayed as a Leviathan to be vanquished) and his exaltation of the poet’s sublime mission in interpreting hidden truths operate uncomfortably alongside the fulsome panegyric of the Carr-Howard nuptials. Secondly, the platonic frame which he adopts occasionally revels in obscurity and esoterism, a difficulty which is enhanced by an odd use of commas and brackets which can sometimes obstruct or confuse interpretation. Nevertheless, Andromeda Liberata is a very interesting text, because it deploys allegory in an original way, i.e. to refer to a very topical event but at the same time transcend it and convey the author’s beliefs in the prophetic powers of poesy and in the shadowing forth of platonic tenets such as the union of beauty and virtue, and the concordia discors of opposing passions being transmuted into harmony. The allegorical process gains force by reflecting on the customary meaning-making practices of the Jacobean court: masques had made the aristocracy and gentry (evidently Chapman’s intended readership, though not L’Isle’s) familiar with such ‘shadowing-forths’.

  It has been established that the version of the myth adapted by Chapman is Natale Conti’s account in his ever-popular Mythologiae (see Shoell 1926: 195 and Waddington 1966: 36), but the author also weaves in passages from Ficino’s Commentarium in Convivium Platonis (see Clucas 2001) and from “De genio Socratis”, one of Plutarch’s Moralia (probably in Xylander’s Latin translation, see Waddington 1966: 38). The text is preceded by a dedicatory epistle to Carr and Howard written in heroic couplets (¶3r.-¶¶4r.), and a rather flippant letter to the “prejudicate and peremptory reader” (A1r.-v.), in prose like the argument that follows it (A2r.-v.), which is very close to Natale Conti’s “De Andromeda”. The text of the poem itself is in heroic couplets with two triplets (C4r. and v.); it is followed by the Parcae’s epithalamium nicely modelled on ll. 324-76 of Catullus 64 (the epyllion on the wedding of Thetis and Peleus). The last stanza of the poem is not differentiated graphically from the epithalamium (perhaps it was L’Isle’s mistake), but the poem has a proper conclusion in the “Apodosis” (F1r.-v.), also in heroic couplets. 

Works Cited

Clucas, Stephen. 2001. “‘To rauish and refine an earthly soule’: Ficino and the Poetry of George Chapman”. In Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, edited by Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees with Martin Davies, 419-42. Leiden, Boston and Köln: Brill.

Finkelpearl, Philip J. 1995. “The Fairies’ Farewell: The Masque at Coleorton (1618)”. The Review of English Studies 46: 333-51.

Knowles, Paul. 2015. Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (e-book).

McIver, Bruce. 1994. “‘A Wife Now the Widdow’: Lawrence Lisle and the Popularity of the Overburian Characters”. South Atlantic Review 59: 27-44.

Schoell, Franck L. 1926. Études sur l’humanisme continental en Angleterre à la fin de la Renaissance. Paris: Champion.

Waddington, Raymond B. 1983. “Visual Rhetoric: Chapman and the Extended Poem”, English Literary Renaissance 13: 36-57.

— 1966. “Chapman’s Andromeda Liberata: Mythology and Meaning”. PMLA 81: 34-44.

Bartlett, Phyllis Brooks, ed. 1941. The Poems of George Chapman. New York: Russell & Russell.

Clucas, Stephen. 2001. “‘To rauish and refine an earthly soule’: Ficino and the Poetry of George Chapman”. In Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, edited by Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees with Martin Davies, 419-42. Leiden, Boston and Köln: Brill.

Darvill Mills, Janis Jane. 2011. Early Modern Legal Poetics and Morality 1560-1625. PhD diss.: University of Sussex: 179-84.

McIver, Bruce. 1994. “‘A Wife Now the Widdow’: Lawrence Lisle and the Popularity of the Overburian Characters”. South Atlantic Review 59: 27-44.

Schoell, Franck L. 1926. Études sur l’humanisme continental en Angleterre à la fin de la Renaissance. Paris: Champion.

Waddington, Raymond B. 1983. “Visual Rhetoric: Chapman and the Extended Poem”, English Literary Renaissance 13: 36-57.

— 1966. “Chapman’s Andromeda Liberata: Mythology and Meaning”. PMLA 81: 34-44.

According to the USTC, there are thirteen extant witnesses of George Chapman’s Andromeda Liberata (3006205), preserved in the UK and the US. The witness used for this edition is the one preserved at the Huntington Library (call number: 98533) and has been digitised here: https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_andromeda-liberata-or-t_chapman-george_1614. It is a quarto of 52 pages (signatures: ¶4-¶¶4 A2 B-E4 F2). This copy has been cropped, and a few characters in the left and right margins are missing, but these lacunae are negligible as they do not hinder the recognition of the word. ¶2v displays the signature of its one-time owner, the Shakespearean scholar George Steevens (1736-1800), whose hand is also identifiable with the other handwritten note featured in the witness, “This leaf often wanting”, on F1r. This is the case e.g. of the copies preserved at the Newberry Library (Case Y 185 .C3626) and at the Folger Shakespeare Library (Stacks/Vault A). Another witness of note is the copy preserved at the Princeton University Library (call number: 3672.6.312), the title page of which features the signature of Grace Talbot Cavendish (b. 1562). Another contemporary woman who is known to have owned the book is the poet Anne Southwell (1574-1636).

  The title page displays an emblem which had first appeared in Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612), bearing the motto “MIHI CONSCIA RECTI” (see discussion in the Introduction). The text does not use black letter, while the main text of the poem is in italics, with certain names or phrases emphasised in Roman. Verses on ¶¶1r. and v., C4r. and v., D1r. and v. are signalled with inverted commas like commonplace marks, while on pages ¶¶2v., C4r. and v., rhymed triplets are signalled with a curly bracket in the margin. The use of punctuation is occasionally puzzling, even by Elizabethan-Jacobean standards. There are a few ornaments and ornate initials. The cover features the bookplate of Walter Thomas Wallace.