"Who to himself is law, no law doth need, offends no law, and is a king indeed." -- George Chapman
George Chapman (c. 1559 – 12 May 1634) was an English dramatist, translator, and poet. He was a classical scholar, and his work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman has been identified as the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Minto, and as an anticipator of the Metaphysical Poets. Chapman is best remembered for his translations of Homer's Iliad,Odyssey, and Batrachomyomachia.
"Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.""An Englishman, being flattered, is a lamb; threatened, a lion.""And let a scholar all earth's volumes carry, he will be but a walking dictionary: a mere articulate clock.""Be free all worthy spirits, and stretch yourselves, for greatness and for height.""Extremes, though contrary, have the like effects. Extreme heat kills, and so extreme cold: extreme love breeds satiety, and so extreme hatred; and too violent rigor tempts chastity, as does too much license.""Flatterers look like friends, as wolves like dogs.""For one heat, all know, doth drive out another, One passion doth expel another still.""He that shuns trifles must shun the world.""I am ashamed the law is such an ass.""Ignorance is the mother of admiration.""Let no man under value the price of a virtuous woman's counsel.""Promise is most given when the least is said.""Pure innovation is more gross than error.""They're only truly great who are truly good.""We inherit nothing truly, but what our actions make us worthy of.""Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools."
Chapman was born at Hitchin in Hertfordshire. There is conjecture that he studied at Oxford but did not take a degree, though no reliable evidence affirms this. We know very little about Chapman's early life, but Mark Eccles uncovered records that reveal much about Chapman's difficulties and expectations. In 1585 Chapman was approached in a friendly fashion by John Wolfall, Sr., who offered to supply a bond of surety for a loan to furnish Chapman money "for his proper use in Attendance upon the then Right Honorable Sir Rafe Sadler Knight." Chapman's courtly ambitions led him into a trap. He apparently never received any money, but he would be plagued for many years by the papers he had signed. Wolfall had the poet arrested for debt in 1600, and when in 1608 Wolfall's son, having inherited his father's papers, sued yet again, Chapman's only resort was to petition the Court of Chancery for equity. As Sadler died in 1587 this gives Chapman little time to have trained under him, it seems more likely that he was in Sadler's household from 1577-83 as he dedicates all his Homerical translations to Sadler. He spent the early 1590s abroad, possibly seeing military action in the Low Countries. His earliest published works were the obscure philosophical poems The Shadow of Night (1594) and Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595). The latter has been taken as a response to the erotic poems of the age such as Phillip Sydney's Astrophel and Stella and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. Chapman's life was troubled by debt and his inability to find a patron whose fortunes did not decline. Chapman's erstwhile patrons Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex and the Prince of Wales, Prince Henry, each met their ends prematurely; the former was executed for treason by Elizabeth I (1601), and the latter died of typhoid fever at the age of eighteen (1612). Chapman's resultant poverty did not diminish his ability or his standing among his fellow Elizabethan poets and dramatists.
Chapman died in London, having lived his latter years in poverty and debt.
ComediesBy the end of the 1590s, Chapman had become a successful playwright, working for Philip Henslowe and later for the Children of the Chapel. Among his comedies are The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596; printed 1598), An Humorous Day's Mirth (1597; printed 1599), All Fools (printed 1605), Monsieur D'Olive (1605; printed 1606), The Gentleman Usher (printed 1606) May Day (printed 1611), and The Widow's Tears (printed 1612). His plays show a willingness to experiment with dramatic form: An Humorous Day's Mirth was one of the first plays to be written in the style of 'humours comedy' which Ben Jonson later used in Every Man in his Humour and Every Man Out of his Humour. With The Widow's Tears he was also one of the first writers to meld comedy with more serious themes, creating the tragicomedy later made famous by Beaumont and Fletcher.
He also wrote one noteworthy play in collaboration. Eastward Ho (1605), written with Jonson and John Marston, contained satirical references to the Scots which landed Chapman and Jonson in jail. Various of their letters to the king and other nobleman survive in a manuscript in the Folger Library known as the Dobell MS, and published by A.R. Braunmuller as A Seventeenth Century Letterbook. In the letters, both men renounced the offending line, implying that Marston was responsible for the injurious remark. Jonson's 'Conversations With Drummond' refers to the imprisonment, and suggests there was a possibility that both authors would have their 'ears and noses slit' as a punishment, but this may have been Jonson elaborating on the story in retrospect.
Chapman's friendship with Jonson, however, broke down, perhaps as a result of Jonson's public feud with Inigo Jones, and some satiric, scathing lines, written sometime after the burning of Jonson's desk and papers, provide evidence of the rift. The poem lampooning Jonson's aggressive behaviour and self-believed superiority remained unpublished during Chapman's lifetime, and exists only in documents collected after his death.
TragediesHis greatest tragedies took their subject matter from recent French history, the French ambassador taking offence on at least one occasion. These include Bussy D'Ambois (1607), The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1613) and The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France (published 1639). The two Byron plays were banned from the stage—though when the Court left London the plays were performed in their original and unexpurgated forms by the Children of the Chapel. The French ambassador probably took offence to a scene which portrays Henry IV's wife and mistress arguing and physically fighting. On publication, the offending material was excised, and Chapman refers to the play in his dedication to Sir Thomas Walsingham as 'poore dismembered Poems'. His only work of classical tragedy, Caesar and Pompey (ca. 1613?) is generally regarded as his most modest achievement in the genre.
Other playsChapman wrote one of the most successful masques of the Jacobean era, The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, performed on 15 February 1613.
Chapman's authorship has been argued in connection with a number of anonymous plays of his era. F. G. Fleay proposed that his first play was The Disguises. He has been put forward as the author, in whole or in part, of Sir Giles Goosecap,Two Wise Men And All The Rest Fools,The Fountain Of New Fashions, and The Second Maiden's Tragedy.Of these, only 'Sir Gyles Goosecap' is generally accepted by scholars to have been written by Chapman (The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies, with Sir Giles Goosecap, edited by Allan Holaday, University of Illinois Press, 1987).
In 1654, bookseller Richard Marriot published the play Revenge for Honour as the work of Chapman. Scholars have rejected the attribution; the play may have been written by Henry Glapthorne. Alphonsus Emperor of Germany (also printed 1654) is generally considered another false Chapman attribution.
The lost plays The Fatal Love and A Yorkshire Gentlewoman And Her Son were assigned to Chapman in Stationers' Register entries in 1660. Both of these plays were among the ones destroyed in the famous kitchen burnings by John Warburton's cook. The lost play Christianetta (registered 1640) may have been a collaboration between Chapman and Richard Brome, or a revision by Brome of a Chapman work.
Other poems by Chapman include: De Guiana, Carmen Epicum (1596), on the exploits of Sir Walter Raleigh; a continuation of Christopher Marlowe's unfinished Hero and Leander (1598); and Euthymiae Raptus; or the Tears of Peace (1609). Some have considered Chapman to be the "rival poet" of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
From 1598 he published his translation of the Iliad in installments. (Shakespeare apparently was able to learn enough about the content of the "Iliad," whether directly from Chapman's translation, or from an acquaintance with what Chapman was working on acquired otherwise, to enable him to put forth "Troilus and Cressida" in 1601-2; that play is remarkable for interweaving the Iliadic story of the deaths of Patroclus and Hector with the quite un-Iliadic story of love betrayed as told first in English by Geoffrey Chaucer in his masterpiece "Troilus and Criseyde.") In 1616 the complete Iliad and Odyssey appeared in The Whole Works of Homer, the first complete English translation. The endeavour was to have been profitable: his patron, Prince Henry, had promised him £300 on its completion plus a pension. However, Henry died in 1612 and his household neglected the commitment, leaving Chapman without either a patron or an income. In an extant letter, Chapman petitions for the money owed him; his petition was ineffective. Chapman's translation of the Odyssey is written in iambic pentameter, whereas his Iliad is written in iambic heptameter. (The Greek original is in dactylic hexameter.) Chapman's translation of Homer was much admired by John Keats, notably in his famous poem On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, and also drew attention from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T. S. Eliot.
Chapman also translated the Homeric Hymns, the Georgics of Virgil, The Works of Hesiod (1618, dedicated to Francis Bacon), the Hero and Leander of Musaeus (1618), and the Fifth Satire of Juvenal (1624).
Chapman's poetry, though not widely influential on the subsequent development of English poetry, did have a noteworthy effect on the work of T. S. Eliot.
In Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, The Revolt of Islam, Shelley quotes a verse of Chapman's as homage within his dedication "to Mary__ __", presumably his wife Mary Shelley:
There is no danger to a man, that knowsWhat life and death is: there's not any lawExceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawfulThat he should stoop to any other law.
Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, quoted the same verse in his part fiction, part literary criticism, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.".
The English poet Keats wrote "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" for his friend Charles Cowden Clarke in October 1816. The poem begins "Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold" and is much quoted. For example, P.G. Wodehouse in his review of the first Flashman novel that came to his attention: "Now I understand what that ‘when a new planet swims into his ken’ excitement is all about." Arthur Ransome uses two references from it in his children's books, the Swallows and Amazons series.
Chapman, George. The Tragedies, with Sir Gyles Goosecappe. Ed. Allan Holaday. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987. vol. 2 of The Plays of George Chapman. 2 vols. 1970-87.
---. The Comedies. Ed. Allan Holaday. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970. vol. 1 of The Plays of George Chapman. 2 vols. 1970-87.
---. The Plays of George Chapman. Ed. Thomas Marc Parrott. 1910. New-York: Russell & Russell, 1961.
---. George Chapman, Plays and Poems. Ed. Jonathan Hudston. London: Penguin Books, 1998.
---. Bussy D'Ambois. Ed. Nicholas Brooke. The Revels Plays. London: Methuen, 1964.
---. Bussy D'Ambois. Ed. Robert J. Lordi. Regents Renaissance Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964.
---. Bussy D'Ambois. Ed. Maurice Evans. New Mermaids. London: Ernst Benn Limited, 1965.
---. Bussy D’Amboise. Ed. and trans. Jean Jacquot. Collection bilingue des classiques étrangers. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1960.
---. The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron. Ed. George Ray. Renaissance Drama. New-York: Garland Publishing, 1979.
---. The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron. Ed. John Margeson. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988.
---. The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois. Introd. David P. Willbern. Menston: The Scolar Press Limited, 1968.
---. The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois. Ed. Robert J. Lordi. Salzburg Studies in English Literature. Jacobean Drama Studies 75. Salzbourg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977.
---. The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois in Four Revenge Tragedies. Ed. Katharine Eisaman Maus. Oxford English Drama. Oxford: OUP, 1995.
---. The Tragedie of Chabot Admirall of France. Ed. Ezra Lehman. Philology and Literature 10. Philadelphia: Publications of the University of Philadelphia, 1906.
---. The Gentleman Usher. Ed. John Hazel Smith. Regents Renaissance Drama Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.
---. The Poems of George Chapman. Ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett. New-York: Modern Language Association of America, 1941.
---. Ouids Banquet of Sence. A Coronet for his Mistresse Philosophie, and his Amorous Zodiacke. With a Translation of a Latine Coppie, Written by a Fryer, Anno Dom. 1400. London: I. R. for Richard Smith, 1595. Menston: The Scolar Press Limited, 1970.
Chapman, George, trans. The Works of George Chapman: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Ed. Richard Herne Shepherd. London: Chatto & Windus, 1875.
---. Chapman's Homer: The Iliad. Ed. Allardyce Nicoll. Bollingen Series 41. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.
---. Chapman's Homer: The Odyssey. Ed. Allardyce Nicoll. Bollingen Series 41. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
---. George Chapman's Minor Translations: A Critical Edition of His Renderings of Musæus, Hesiod and Juvenal. Ed. Richard Corballis. Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Jacobean Drama Studies, 98. Salzbourg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1984.
---. Homer's Batrachomyomachia, Hymns and Epigrams, Hesiod's Works and Days, Musæus' Hero and Leander, Juvenal's Fifth Satire. Ed. Richard Hooper. London: John Russel Smith, 1858.
Chapman, George, Benjamin Jonson et John Marston. Eastward Hoe. Ed. Julia Hamlet Harris. Yale Sudies in English 73. New Haven: Yale UP, 1926.
---. Eastward Ho. Ed. R. W. Van Fossen. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1979.
