All fooles - 1907 Author:George Chapman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: introduction After the great names of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe, that of Chapman is perhaps the best known among Elizabethan poets. But Chapman's fame... more » to-day depends almost entirely upon his translation of the Iliad and Odyssey. That noble work in which for the first time " deep-browed Homer'' spoke in English accents, although temporarily superseded by Pope's version, has never quite lost its hold upon English readers. Chapman's dramas, on the other hand, although repeatedly praised by his contemporaries, seem even in his day to have been little read ; of all the plays published under his name only two, Bussy D'Ambois and The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Biron, ever attained a second edition. Dryden's slashing attack on the style of Bussy is well known, and in the century that followed Dry den, Chapman's plays seem to have been almost entirely forgotten. With the dawn of romantic criticism in England attention was drawn to their merits by Lamb and Hazlitt, but it was not until 1873 that a collected edition of the plays appeared in the form of a so-called facsimile reprint. Up to that time Chapman's dramas, with the exception of an occasional reprint in various collections of old plays, were practically inaccessible to English readers.1 Lowell, forexample, when writing his interesting comment on Chapman in Conversations on Some of the Old English Poets (1845), had never seen a copy of The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Biron. 1 Eastward Ho and The Widow's Tears were included in Dodsley's Old flays in 1744 ; All Fools was added in 1780. Bussy, The reprint of 1873 was followed in 1874-5 by ce first edition of the complete works of Chapman. It included three plays, Eastward Ho, Chaiot, and The Ball, which had been omitted in the reprint. The first two of these, though writte...« less