George Chapman
born 1559?, Hitchin, Hertfordshire, Eng.
died May 12, 1634, London
English poet and dramatist, whose translation of
Homer long remained the standard English
version.
Chapman attended the University of Oxford but
took no degree. By 1585 he was working in London
for the wealthy commoner Sir Ralph Sadler and
probably traveled to the Low Countries at this
time. His first work was The Shadow of Night . .
. Two Poeticall Hymnes (1593), followed in 1595
by Ovids Banquet of Sence. Both philosophize on
the value of an ordered life. His poem in praise
of Sir Walter Raleigh, De Guiana, Carmen Epicum
(“An Epic Poem about Guiana,” 1596), is typical
of his preoccupation with the virtues of the
warrior-hero, the character that dominates most
of his plays.
The first books of his translation of the
Iliad appeared in 1598. It was completed in
1611, and his version of the Odyssey appeared in
1616. Chapman’s Homer contains passages of great
power and beauty and inspired the sonnet of John
Keats “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
(1815).
Chapman’s conclusion to Christopher Marlowe’s
unfinished poem Hero and Leander (1598)
emphasized the necessity for control and wisdom.
Euthymiae Raptus; or the Teares of Peace (1609),
Chapman’s major poem, is a dialogue between the
poet and the Lady Peace, who is mourning over
the chaos caused by man’s valuing worldly
objects above integrity and wisdom.
Chapman was imprisoned with Ben Jonson and
John Marston in 1605 for writing Eastward Ho, a
play that James I, the king of Great Britain,
found offensive to his fellow Scots. Of
Chapman’s dramatic works, about a dozen plays
survive, chief of which are his tragedies: Bussy
d’Ambois (1607), The Conspiracie, and Tragedie
of Charles Duke of Byron . . . (1608), and The
Widdowes Teares (1612).
