ave 'drops of their blood like a
heavenly familiar,' and in another place sportively invited 'nimble and
aspiring wits' to join him in consecrating their endeavours to 'sacred
night.' There is really no connection between Shakespeare's theory of
the supernatural and nocturnal sources of his rival's influence and
Chapman's trite allusion to the current faith in the power of 'nightly
familiars' over men's minds and lives, or Chapman's invitation to his
literary comrades to honour Night with him. It is supererogatory to
assume that Shakespeare had Chapman's phrases in his mind when alluding
to superstitions which were universally acknowledged. It could be as
easily argued on like grounds that Shakespeare was drawing on other
authors. Nash in his prose tract called independently _The Terrors of
the Night_, which was also printed in 1594, described the nocturnal
habits of 'familiars' more explicitly than Chapman. The publisher Thomas
Thorpe, in dedicating in 1600 Marlowe's translation of Lucan (bk. i.) to
his friend Edward Blount, humorously referred to the same topic when he
reminded Blount that 'this spirit [_i.e._ Marlowe], whose ghost or genius
is to be seen walk the Churchyard [of St. Paul's] in at the least three
or four sheets . . . was sometime a _familiar_ of your own.' On the
strength of these quotations, and accepting Professor Minto's line of
argument, Nash, Thorpe, or Blount, whose 'familiar' is declared to have
been no less a personage than Marlowe, has as good a claim as Chapman to
be the rival poet of Shakespeare's sonnets. A second and equally
impotent argument in Chapman's favour has been suggested. Chapman in the
preface to his translation of the _Iliads_ (1611 ) denounces without
mentioning any name 'a certain envious windsucker that hovers up and
down, laboriously engrossing all the air with his luxurious ambition, and
buzzing into every ear my detraction.' It is suggested that Chapman here
retaliated on Shakespeare for his references to him as his rival in the
sonnets; but it is out of the question that Chapman, were he the rival,
should have termed those high compliments 'detraction.' There is no
ground for identifying Chapman's 'windsucker' with Shakespeare (cf.
Wyndham, p. 255). The strongest point in favour of the theory of
Chapman's identity with the rival poet lies in the fact that each of the
two sections of his poem _The Shadow of the Night_ (1594) is styled a
'hymn,' and Shakespeare in