Chapman

Chapman, GEORGE, dramatist and translator of Homer, was born near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, about 1559. He is supposed to have studied at Oxford University, and to have afterwards proceeded to Cambridge. From a passage in his earliest poem, The Shadow of Night (1594), it has been somewhat hastily inferred that he served as a volunteer under Sir Francis Vere in the Netherlands. To Lawrence Keymis's Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana (1596) he prefixed a spirited poem, De Guiana, Carmen Epicum. His earliest extant play, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, which has little merit, but was very popular, was produced in February 1595-96, and printed in 1598. The excellent comedy, All Fools, printed in 1605, was probably produced in 1599; and about this time he wrote other plays, which have perished. In 1598 he completed Marlowe's unfinished poem, Hero and Leander. The first of his Homeric translations was Seven Books of the Iliads of Homer (1598). It is a translation of books i. ii. vii.-xi., and is written in rhymed verses of fourteen syllables. The dedicatory epistle to the Earl of Essex admirably illustrates the writer's dignified temper. Later in 1598 he published Achilles' Shield, translated from the eighteenth book of the Iliad. In this translation he used rhymed verses of ten syllables, the metre that he afterwards employed in his rendering of the Odyssey. It was not until 1610 or thereabouts that he published Homer, Prince of Poets: translated according to the Greek in twelve Books of his Iliads, with a fine dedicatory epistle in verse to Prince Henry. The complete translation of The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, in rhymed verses of fourteen syllables, appeared in 1611. In the Preface to the Reader he states that the last twelve books had been translated in less than fifteen weeks. Having finished the Iliad, he set to work on the Odyssey, and in 1616 appeared The Whole Works of Homer, Prince of Poets, in his Iliads and Odysseys, which was followed (about 1624) by The Crowne of all Homer's Works, Batrachomyomachia, or the Battaile of Frogs and Mice: His Hymns and Epigrams. In spite of all harshnesses, obscurities, and conceits, Chapman's translation of Homer is a noble achievement. He was not a profound scholar, and has often missed the sense where a schoolboy could set him right. But the work is instinct with life, full of heat and energy. By his contemporaries—Jonson, Drayton, Daniel, and the rest—it was applauded, and in later days it has never lacked admirers. Pope acknowledged its merits; Coleridge declared that it was such a poem as Homer might have written if he had lived in England in the time of Elizabeth; Lamb admired it enthusiastically; and Keats wrote a famous sonnet in its praise. While he was busy with his Homeric labours, Chapman was also writing for the stage. He joined Jonson and Marston in the composition of Eastward Ho (1605), and in 1606 published a graceful comedy, The Gentleman Usher. In 1607 appeared Bussy d'Ambois: a Tragedie; and The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois followed in 1613. These tragedies contain much inarticulate bombast intermingled with exalted poetry. Heavy and undramatic though they were, they held the stage for many years by reason of their impassioned earnestness. Two other tragedies, The Conspiracie and Tragedie of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), are also undramatic, but abound in fine poetry. Lamb was of opinion that of all the Elizabethan dramatists Chapman came nearest to Shakespeare 'in the descriptive and didactic, in passages which are less purely dramatic.' Chapman's other plays are The May Day (1611), The Widow's Tears (1612), and Cæsar and Pompey (1631). Two posthumous tragedies, published in 1654, Alphonsus and Revenge for Honour, bear his name, but their authorship is uncertain. The Ball, a comedy, and The Tragedie of Chabot were published in 1639 as the joint work of Chapman and Shirley. Among Chapman's non-dramatic works are Enthymia Raptus (1609), Petrarch's Seven Penitential Psalms (1612), The Divine Poem of Musæus (1616), and The Georgicks of Hesiod (1618). Chapman died in the parish of St Giles's in the Fields, 12th May 1634. Wood describes him 'as a person of reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet.' A complete edition of Chapman's works in 3 vols., with an essay by A. C. Swinburne, appeared in 1873-75.