SOURCE: Bement, Peter. “The Stoicism of Chapman's Clermont D'Ambois.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 12, no. 2 (spring 1972): 345-57.

In the following essay, Bement considers how Chapman manipulated the two principal divergent ideals of Stoicism—namely, action versus contemplation—in the character of Clermont to create a “heroic reformer” who performs “nobly and virtuously what is normally understood to be a violent and bloody action in the midst of a vicious world.”

There is in all of George Chapman's work a high moral idealism coupled with an overwhelming sense of the world's hostility to true virtue. In poems like The Shadow of Night, this makes itself felt as a dedication to the other-worldly ideals of neoplatonic mysticism and a retired life of study, contemplation rather than action. But Chapman seems nonetheless to have been fascinated by the world of action and the public men who inhabit it, and in his...