Ambition, Rank and Poetry in 1590s England.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Humanities Research Association

Ambition, Rank and Poetry in 1590s England. By JOHN HUNTINGTON. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2001. ix+194 pp. $35. ISBN 0-252-02628-4.

John Huntington says that his book 'aspires to the simple goal of making us conscious of how awareness of social rank and its economic and political consequences, its privileges and handicaps, motivates nonartistic poets in the 1590s, and thereby conditions the meanings of their poems'. As this long opening sentence may suggest, though the 'goal' is simple, the approach to it is certainly not; and the material to which that approach is applied is remarkably diverse. Huntington makes the early work of George Chapman his central focus, and it is here, in later chapters, that he is most cogent and original. He makes a claim for Chapman as uniquely...

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