Seventeenth-Century Poetry

About this book

When in 1598 Chapman dedicated his Seven Books of the Ihads (Books 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) to the Earl of Essex as the paramount living instance of 'Achilleian virtues', he was known on the one hand as a writer of comedy of humour, and on the other as the author of some ostentatiously obscure poems which associate him with the 'atheistic' intellectuals of the School of Night (the mathematician Matthew Roydon and the astronomer Thomas Harriot, as well as the poets Ralegh and Marlowe, whose Hero and Leander he completed that same year).