59-) English Literature
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George Chapman
George Chapman (Hitchin, Hertfordshire, c. 1559 –
London, 12 May 1634) was an English dramatist, translator and poet, whose
translation of Homer long remained the standard English version. He was a
classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism . William Minto
speculated that Chapman is the unnamed Rival Poet of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Chapman is seen as an anticipator of the metaphysical poets of the 17th
century. He is best remembered for his translations of Homer's Iliad and
Odyssey, and the Homeric Batrachomyomachia.
Playwright,
poet, and translator George Chapman was an important figure in the English
Renaissance. His plays, particularly, were adapted for the stage throughout the
Restoration, and, though his reputation dipped during most of the 18th century,
the 19th saw a marked revival of interest in his works, perhaps best summed up
in John Keats’s well-known sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”
(1816).
Life and work
Chapman
was born in Hitchin (as an allusion in Euthymiæ Raptus; or the Teares of Peace
[1609] has it), a town in Hertfordshire some 30 miles from London. He was the
second son of Thomas Chapman and Joan Nodes, the daughter of George and
Margaret Grimeston Nodes and a cousin to Edward Grimeston the translator. Of
his early life little is known except that he attended Oxford University in
1574 and left before earning a degree. There is conjecture that he studied at
Oxford but did not take a degree, though no reliable evidence affirms this.
Very little is known about Chapman's early life, but Mark Eccles uncovered
records that reveal much about Chapman's difficulties and expectations. Upon
Anthony Wood’s testimony, Chapman was a person of “most reverend aspect,
religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet,” one who excelled
in Latin and Greek but not in logic and philosophy. We know that from at least
1583 through 1585 he was in the household of Sir Ralph Sadler, who was employed
by both Queen Elizabeth and William Cecil, Lord Burghley. There is evidence to
suggest that Chapman served in the military campaigns in the Low Countries in
1591 and 1592 and that he had returned to London before 1594.
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 to 1583, as he dedicates all his Homerical translations to
him.
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).
Chapman
spent the early 1590s abroad, and saw military action in the Low Countries
fighting under renowned English general Sir Francis Vere. 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 Philip Sidney's Astrophil 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: Robert Devereux,
Second Earl of Essex, and the Prince of Wales, Prince Henry both met their ends
prematurely. The former was executed for treason by Elizabeth I in 1601, and
the latter died of typhoid fever at the age of eighteen in 1612. Chapman's
resultant poverty did not diminish his ability or his standing among his fellow
Elizabethan poets and dramatists.
If
one can isolate a central passion in Chapman’s life and works, it would be the
central project of Renaissance Christian humanism: an attempt to make
literature (among the other disciplines) an instrument for both an upright
private ethics and a benevolent and just public policy. In more parochial terms
the project intended as well to establish a national literature powerful enough
to rival the Latin and the Greek. In his poetic canon, including his Homeric
translations, Chapman constantly aims at converting Greek and Latin poetry
(classical as well as contemporary) to native English and claims as well an
attempt to surpass his predecessors. If Chapman consistently borrows from other
works (a practice hardly unknown in the period), he likewise consistently
experiments with his borrowings, and that experimentation shows in his poems as
well as in his plays. Since Algernon Charles Swinburne’s essay in 1875, Chapman
(until recently) has been taken as one of the most difficult and obscure poets
in the Renaissance, a kind of moralist whose thought manifests itself in moral
imperatives tortuously crammed into his dramatic or poetic works. Contemporary
criticism, however, has sought to redeem Chapman from the reputation for
pedantry and obscurity (largely a product of late-19th-and early-20th-century
scholarship) and to take him as he was seen by his contemporaries, a learned
translator, a novel poet, and a very successful dramatist.
Chapman’s
first published work was The Shadow of Night (1594), composed of two hymns, one
to Night and one to Cynthia. They are modeled on Greek hymns of Proclus,
Callimachus, and the Orphic hymns, even though they have a large number of
borrowings and echoes from contemporary literature. Chapman may have found some
of the Orphic hymns in Aldus’s edition of Hero and Leander (1517), which he later
used for his adaptation of that poem (1598). The Shadow of Night is, in
essence, a heroic poem laced with lamentations by the supplicant poet for the
loss of true knowledge, learning, and virtue in the world, a subject Chapman
incessantly returned to throughout his career. A reader needs to observe that
complaints about the vanity of the world and the prostitution of learning were
commonplaces of the age. The pronounced defensive posture of many literati
assumed an attack by a society convinced, for religious or political reasons,
of the vanity of art. The Shadow of Night is only partly allegorical, as in the
tale of Euthimya (whose name means “Cheerfulness”) and the hunt (or chase of
the passions) in “Cynthiam,” and despite its reputation for obscurity, it
displays throughout a quite remarkable and clear handling of syntax within some
powerful pentameter couplets. We should take it as part of a whole program, in
this instance, of Chapman’s attempt to domesticate the Greek hymn, which can be
noted clearly in the interpolated tale of the English victory over Alessandro
Farnese, Duke of Parma, at Nymeghen (1590). The two poems are followed by
glosses, a habit Chapman continued from his early work through his final
edition of Homer late in his life. The poem thus clearly stakes a claim for its
author’s promise as a legitimate, as opposed to a popular, poet: the mode, the
imitations, the borrowings, the glosses all proclaim a serious and accomplished
poet worthy of serious patronage. Edmund Spenser, we should recall, started his
career in exactly the same way 15 years earlier. The work has been notable in
modern criticism (it had no subsequent edition in the Renaissance) for the
theory, now largely discredited, that it reveals “a school of night” to which
William Shakespeare supposedly responded in satiric portions of his Love’s
Labour’s Lost (1598). Part of that theory makes Chapman the rival poet
mentioned in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 86.
Ovid’s
Banquet of Sense followed The Shadow of Night in 1595, the same year that Chapman
joined the Admiral’s Men, Philip Henslowe’s company of actors playing at the
Rose Theatre. In addition to the title poem of 117 nine-line stanzas, Ovid’s
Banquet of Sense includes some commendatory verses (one by Sir John Davies),
the 10 sonnets of “A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy,” “The Amorous Zodiac”
(translated from the French poem by Gilles Durant, 1587), and “The Amorous
Contention of Phillis and Flora,” followed by some of its Latin original. The
two translations are not by Chapman. The title poem depicts Ovid feasting each
of his five senses as he watches Corinna in her bath. The poem is an
extraordinary comic tour de force in the popular mode of Ovidian erotic poetry,
and it remains a mini masterpiece, a reductio ad absurdum of the conventions of
contemporary erotic poems. Chapman grafts onto the old trope of the banquet of
sense all the possibilities of that fashionable mode: its eroticized Platonism,
its faculty psychology, its innumerable strategies of seduction and pleas for
mercy, its aggressive self-justifications. Ovid, even in the highest flights of
his erotic fantasy, feasts on his own poetry. He gets little or nothing from
Corinna. The poem was popular enough to see another edition as late as 1639,
though its reputation in the 20th century rests on viewing it as a masterful
explication of Neoplatonic love and, in essence, a semiserious philosophical
and consciously obscurantist poem. Such a view badly underestimates a poem that
is in fact a burlesque.
Chapman’s
earliest drama, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, was produced in 1596, the year
after Ovid’s Banquet of Sense appeared, and had been through at least 22
productions before it was published in 1598. Even though the play as printed is
heavily cut, one can follow easily the machinations and wooings of Irus the
beggar and some fine touches of social satire throughout.
Hero
and Leander, one of the best-known poems of its era, appeared in 1598 as well
and is the first poem in which Chapman directly courts a noble patron, in this
case the wife of Sir Thomas Walsingham, a cousin of his better-known
contemporary Sir Francis. Throughout his career, Chapman’s quest for patronage
would prove both painful and vain, but there could scarcely be a more
propitious beginning. Though in his dedication he somewhat disingenuously calls
his poem a trifle (and promises matter of more substance later), we should
recognize some claims to distinction. After all, he wryly notes, “He who shuns
trifles must shun the world.” Christopher Marlowe’s portion of the poem had
been an instant success and, in Abraham Fraunce’s words, “in every man’s
mouth.” Marlowe’s 334-line poem, published early in 1598, was republished later
the same year, now divided into two sestiads (after Hero’s town Sestos), with
four new sestiads by Chapman. Chapman’s completion was published with Marlowe’s
fragment in all subsequent editions. The poem is based on the Hero and Leander
of Musaeus, a fifth-century poet who may have written from Alexandria. The
Greek text of his poem was one of the first published by the famous Aldine
press of Venice in 1494. Musaeus’s Hero and Leander is one of several
late-Greek epic poems intentionally un-Homeric, often focusing on minor
mythological figures, subjects, and themes distinctly unclassical. They often
aim at high pathos in a poetic style at once intricate, hyperbolic, and even,
on occasion, bombastic. The great Latin exemplar for the Renaissance was the
enormously popular Rape of Proserpina of Claudian (circa 400). There were many
editions to follow in the 16th century as well as adaptations of the poem by
major poets all over Europe, including Hans Sachs. The adaptation by Marlowe
and Chapman expands considerably upon the original (which both certainly knew),
all the while observing its possibilities and suggestions. There are, for
example, the characteristic epic similes, epic digressions in the tales of
Mercury and Teras, battles or disputes with the gods, and jocular or satiric
asides by the narrator-poet. Both poets preserve as well all the obsessions of
their original: the focus on Hero’s torch, the division between Sestos and
Abydos, the manic insistence on secrecy, the elaborate manipulation of the
imagery of light and dark and day and night, the compounding of paradox,
especially in Hero being Venus’s Nun. Hero and Leander is an exceptionally
elaborate, brilliant, and often-comic story of the seduction of Hero by
Leander, their marriage and its consummation, and their tragic deaths at the
hands of the gods. The poem was tremendously popular, echoed in scores of
contemporary works, and printed in at least seven editions by 1637. While
Marlowe’s portion has always been praised, Chapman’s continuation has, in this
century at least, been maligned for what has been taken to be its intrusive
moral commentary. Yet such expansions, as other scholars see them, are both
functional and appropriate to the original text. Chapman later translated
Musaeus’s Hero and Leander in 1616 and dedicated it to Inigo Jones. Unlike his
earlier adaptation, Chapman’s is one of the most judicious and accurate (as
well as one of the shortest) of the several translations in the period. He
clearly used the Greek of the Aldine text (1494 and many subsequent editions),
frequently consulting the Latin translation that was published with it.
Chapman’s
most successful bid for noble patronage (and, as it turned out, the most
unfortunate and bitter) began with his first translations of Homer in 1598: his
Seven Books of the Iliad, translations in fourteeners of books 1, 2, and 7–11;
and Achilles Shield, a partial translation of book 18 of the Iliad in
decasyllabic couplets. Both were dedicated to the brilliant Robert Devereux,
second Earl of Essex. Whether Chapman actually benefited from this work at the
time we do not know. Essex might have been either pleased or embarrassed that
the plight of Achilles in book 18 was made a direct analogy to his own
circumstances in Chapman’s dedicatory epistle. The rest of Chapman’s Iliad was
not to appear until 1609, with another, royal patron.
Chapman’s
attention turned almost exclusively to drama for the next ten years. A Humorous
Day’s Mirth was published in 1599, though it had been notably popular since
1597, when it was performed by the Admiral’s Men, perhaps because it was one of
the “new plays of humors,” a comedy of humors.
Chapman
left Henslowe’s company sometime in 1600, a year marked as well by his
imprisonment for debt at the hands of a notorious usurer, John Wolfall. Chapman
joined the Children of the Chapel (the Children of St. Paul’s), a company
performing at the Blackfriars Theatre, and continued writing for this company
until 1609. The company could scarcely have greater luck, for in 1603 or 1604
it produced Chapman’s first and best-known tragedy, Bussy D’Ambois, which was
published in 1607. It enjoyed a remarkable popularity well into the
Restoration. Bussy, the colossally self-confident and fearless courtier, after
having offended various powers at the French court, succeeds in becoming a
favorite of King Henry III. He is undone, however, after a sexual intrigue with
Tamyra, the count of Montsurry’s wife. The duke of Guise and Montsurry plot
against Bussy and, by stabbing and torturing Tamyra, succeed in luring him to
his death. The play was clearly a smashing success, with five issues or
editions by 1657, a revival by Nathan Field for the Whitefriars in 1610,
performances by the King’s Men (Shakespeare’s old company) in 1634 and 1638,
and a notably successful rewrite by Thomas D’Urfey for the Theatre Royal in
Drury Lane, published in 1691. Despite John Dryden’s unappreciative remarks in
the preface to his Spanish Friar (1681), the play has remained exceptionally
popular into the 20th century, having been published in a large number of
editions.
The
Children of St. Paul’s also performed Chapman’s now-lost The Old Joiner of
Aldgate in February of 1603. From all evidence a farce based on contemporary
gossip, the play is the first that got Chapman in trouble with local
authorities (a relative commonplace for London playwrights). On this occasion
he was interrogated in a slander suit but was not arrested. Chapman may also
have been the “second Pen” mentioned in the preface to Ben Jonson’s Sejanus his
Fall, performed in 1603 and published in 1605. That “Pen” or hand is credited
with “a good share” of Jonson’s play. Henslowe’s diary does in fact attribute
to Chapman “ii actes of a Tragedie of Bengemens [that is, Jonson’s] plotte.”
Our
first sure record of a performance of Chapman’s play All Fools is on New Year’s
Day of 1605 at the Blackfriars. All Fools is a far more sophisticated, high
comedy than Chapman’s earlier plays in the genre. The lines glitter with wit,
the characterization is fascinating, and the plot is masterfully handled,
involving a whole series of intrigue and types: a jealous husband, a jealous
father, a courtier, a wayward son, and Reynoldo the trickster. Chapman may have
been pleased about the quiet success of All Fools in 1605, for while he had
faced minor difficulties with the production of the Old Joiner, in 1603, he
could never have forseen the storm that broke over Eastward Ho upon its
publication and performance in 1605. A collaborative effort of Chapman, Ben
Jonson, and John Marston, the play is a reply to Thomas Dekker and John
Webster’s Westward Ho, performed in 1604 and published in 1607. Both are London
City comedies filled with character types and deceptions, as well as with
contemporary news, ballads, songs, and plays. There are, for example, at least
five allusions to Hamlet in Eastward Ho. The cause célèbre of the play,
however, was a pointed gibe at the large number of Scots newly arrived in
England (at James I’s accession). The offending lines were immediately canceled
from the first quarto, and Chapman and Jonson were imprisoned straightway.
Apparently King James himself, according to Jonson’s later testimony, had been
told of the outrage and ordered the arrest. They were released some weeks
later, after a whole series of letters and petitions. Though city comedies were
extremely popular in the theater, the notoriety of Eastward Ho, its relation to
Westward Ho, and its exceptional comedy made it an instant, and perhaps to its
authors an unwelcome, hit. One response was another play by Dekker and Webster,
Northward Ho (acted in late 1605 and published in 1607), in which Chapman is
gently satirized as the genial scholar Bellamont, a man witty enough to help
unravel a plot to discredit a friend’s wife and to escape a trick designed to
make a fool of him. There were three editions of Eastward Ho in 1605,
simultaneous with its production at Blackfriars. The play was revived—offending
passage omitted, of course—for a 1614 production at Whitehall before Princess
Elizabeth and King James himself. The play retained its popularity well into
the late 18th century. Chapman followed Eastward Ho with two other comedies,
Monsieur D’Olive (performed at Blackfriars in late 1604 or early 1605 and
published in 1606) and Sir Giles Goosecap (performed in 1603, published in
1606). The plot of Monsieur D’Olive, which involves a series of benevolent
deceptions by Vandome, and the subplot, centered on D’Olive (a scurrilous
satirist and perfect burlesque of a courtier), never do meet in what must be
described as an entertaining, though imperfect, comedy. The parody of
courtliness in D’Olive has some fine touches, especially in his extended
panegyric on tobacco in Act 2.
Sir
Giles Goosecap, published anonymously in 1606, is probably Chapman’s. It is
clearly a comedy of humors, where the plot is markedly secondary to the
examination of such characters as Foulweather, Rudesby, and the foolish, if
benign, Sir Giles himself. The main plot, adapted from the first three sections
of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseide, focuses on Clarence, a studious and
pure lover of Eugenia. The delay in publication of Sir Giles Goosecap is a
likely result of censorship. Contemporary evidence strongly suggests that there
were objections to the play and that the principal characters, especially Lady
Furnivall, are satiric portraits of contemporary figures.
The
Gentleman Usher, performed in 1601 or 1602 and published in 1606, is a play
very different from Chapman’s earlier efforts. With a typically complex plot,
centered about Vincentio’s love for Margaret (rewarded at the end), but with a
pronounced attention to the dramatic possibilities of language, the play comes
near to being a comedy of manners or, in the high pathos of some speeches,
almost a tragicomedy. Stock comic characters remain, to be sure, as well as a
series of standard deceptions. But acts four and five shift markedly to a
comic/pathetic mode: the appearance of a real and dangerous villain, a real
danger of death, the high pathos in the disfigurement of Margaret, and the
final reconciliation. Although we have little evidence of the play’s success,
it does mark Chapman’s first attempt at tragicomedy. The second is The Widow’s
Tears, composed circa 1605 and published in 1612. There are primarily two sets
of lovers in the play, Tharsalio, the cynical former servant who woos and wins
his former mistress, Eudora, and Lysander, who puts his faithful wife, Cynthia,
to cruel test of her fidelity. Cynthia does succumb to a seduction by her
disguised husband, but, upon discovering his plot, turns the tables on him.
This play shares with The Gentlemen Usher a focus on plot rather than (stock)
character, avoids for the most part either satire or parody, and revels in
incidents more appropriate to tragedy than comedy.
Chapman
delayed the sequel to Bussy D’Ambois (The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois) until 1610
or 1611, when it was produced at the new Whitefriars by Nathan Field’s new
company, the Queen’s Revels. Chapman’s second tragedy came four years after the
singular success of Bussy D’Ambois: two plays combined as one, The Conspiracy
and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, composed in early 1608 and published the
same year. The Byron plays mark a considerable departure from dramatic
trappings of Senecan drama—the blood, revenge, grotesqueries, and ghosts—of the
Bussy plays. The focus in the Byron plays is unremittingly on the hero and his
brand of virtuous Marlovian virtu. While these plays interest us as a new
direction in Chapman’s tragedies, they also interest us for the furor they
aroused. They were based on a recent controversy—the treason and execution of
Charles de Gontant, Baron de Biron, courtier to Henry IV of Navarre. The French
ambassador to court, Antoine Lefèvre de la Boderie, protested the production
and arranged to have three of the actors jailed. Chapman apparently escaped and
later sought refuge with Ludovick Stuart, Duke of Lennox. The offending scene,
soon struck by the master of the revels, portrays the queen of France
indelicately dressing down and boxing the ears of the king’s mistress, Madame
Henriette D’Entragues, Marquise de Verneuil. There is as well the interview
between Byron and Queen Elizabeth in act four that also came under the hand of
the censors. As a consequence, act four of the Conspiracy, where a report of
the interview with the queen is now reported secondhand, is badly mangled, as
are acts one and two of the Tragedy. The censors apparently felt comfortable in
allowing only one scene of act two in the Tragedy to remain, the masque where
Queen Marie de Médicis (as Chastity) and the king’s mistress (appropriately
playing Liberality) are reconciled. The Conspiracy traces the seduction of the
proud and pliant Duke of Byron to a conspiracy against King Henry IV of Navarre
and his ultimate capitulation to the king’s power. The Tragedy finds Byron in
yet another plot and again called to court to confess his treason. He first
refuses, then appears to protest his innocence, convinced the king will never
condemn one so valuable to the state. Act five wholly focuses on Byron, caught
between Christian resignation and Herculean fury until he is finally executed.
The
year 1609 seemed to promise the beginning of the end of Chapman’s recurring
money troubles. He had received a promise from the young Henry, Prince of
Wales, of an annuity and the princely sum of three hundred pounds for his
translation of Homer. He had revised his Seven Books of 1598 and added books
three, four, five, six, and 12 for his Homer Prince of Poets (1609). This
portion of The Iliad Chapman renders in a supple and innovative
fourteen-syllable line, a verse form often taken as appropriate to the
hexameter line of the classical epic by some Renaissance translators. His
epistle dedicatory, partly a panegyric on Henry and partly a piece of literary
criticism, is directed “To the High Borne Prince of Men, Henry.” Here Chapman
enunciates views common in contemporary literary criticism: the usefulness
(nay, the necessity) of poetry to princes (especially the heroic poetry of
Homer) and the request for the prince to protect and advance the sacred
vocation of poets. This epistle is followed by another, “To the Reader.” Both
stand as a defense of poetry, the former more generalized, the latter very
detailed. In the second, Chapman directly defends his native English as a
language fully capable of catching the nuances of Homer’s Greek, even superior
to other modern languages. He defends as well his “Pariphrases,” his expansions
on the original in his own translation, as both judicious and necessary.
Indeed, those who translate word-by-word are quite wrong because a translation
must be guided by a perception of Homer’s complete invention, the scope and
direction of the epic as a whole. It is here that we may discover not only
Chapman the translator, but Chapman the dramatist, taking as his guide the
coherence of character and plot for his rendering of individual lines and
words. The epistle concludes with a remarkably vivid and accomplished attack on
his detractors.
Euthymiæ
Raptus; or the Tears of Peace, also 1609, is likewise dedicated to Henry,
beginning and ending with notable references to Chapman’s Homer. The poem is of
a piece with other “complaints” or lamentations of the period. Homer appears to
the poet and introduces him to the allegorical figure Peace, whose tears are
complaints about the degradation of Learning and the elevation of power and
ambition in the world. This subject, about which Chapman wrote constantly in
nearly all the prefaces and epistles to his works, might well stand as a
constant thematic idea throughout his life and work.
Yet
no thematic can account for Chapman’s continued success on the popular stage.
Even while finishing his translation of the Iliad, his May Day (1611) and The
Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613) were being produced in 1611. Both are in
notable, popular modes. The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois is Chapman’s attempt at
the venerable revenge tragedy, focusing on the character of Clermont D’Ambois,
a reluctant avenger who avoids both fury and haste, ever mindful of the tension
between private revenge and public law. There is, of course, the ghost of Bussy
to demand revenge, but Clermont is more comfortable in echoing Epictetus on the
vanity of ambition and wealth than plotting deaths. He dies at the end not by
the machinations of villains, but from grief at the loss of an ally and at the
prospect of living in a world devoid of justice. May Day is a typical comedy of
disguise and deception, multiple sets of lovers in multiple assignations, with
the braggart soldier, the unapproachable lady, the bawdy maid (Temperance), the
gull (Innocentio), and the witty intriguer (Lodovico). Chapman is consciously
following the current hits of the day, providing not only a good deal of music
and dance (even a masque) in the concluding act, but a large number of direct
echoes from his contemporary playwrights.
Chapman
entered The Iliads of Homer in the Stationers’ Register in April 1611.
Dedicated again to Prince Henry, this edition comprises all 24 books of the
epic, including entirely new versions of books one and two, some minor
revisions of three to 12 (from the earlier editions), plus the new books, 13 to
24. Chapman added yet another “Preface to the Reader” (in prose) and a brief
essay, “Of Homer.” The latter is the typical and epideictic minibiography of
most late-medieval or Renaissance translations. The preface is of a piece with
his earlier preface of 1609: another defense of his paraphrases and/or
circumlocutions on historical and critical grounds, a response to the charge
that he translated Homer out of Latin solely and not his Greek, and a promise
to go on to a translation of the Odyssey. For the first time the text appears
with a full, critical apparatus: marginal glosses and comments throughout and
ten commentaries (“Commentarius”). The commentaries are justifications of
various renderings of the Greek and quibbles with earlier translators. The
volume concludes with a brief prose comment and a prayer. This comment is
notable for the astonishing claim that Chapman rendered the last 12 books of
the Iliad in “lesse than fifteene weekes.”
The
volume appeared with an exceptionally handsome engraved title page and all the
critical apparatus worthy of so great a poet and so beneficent a patron. Any of
Chapman’s expectations, however, were soon dashed at the death of Henry, Prince
of Wales, in 1612 at the age of 18. Though Chapman was to dun the court with
letters pleading for the rewards Henry had promised, nothing was forthcoming.
Even the production of The Memorable Masque for the nuptials of Princess
Elizabeth and Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in 1613 would not avail. The
masque was commissioned by the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn and performed
before King James in February. It was designed by Inigo Jones and written by
Chapman. The published version (also 1613) includes a prose account of the
great procession to Whitehall, a description of the set, and some stage
directions as well as the “argument” or plot of the piece: Honour, presented
like a goddess, meets Plutus (Riches) who is reformed by his love of Honour.
Capriccio, a man of wit, has a dialogue with Plutus before he presents his (rather
clumsy) antemasque. The celebration follows with songs and dances, and the
volume concludes with a hymn to Hymen and an epithalamion. It has been
speculated that Chapman had a hand in several masques, especially late in his
career. This speculation is based largely, perhaps, on the strength of Ben
Jonson’s testimony that besides himself, only Chapman “could make a masque.”
But The Memorable Masque is the only specimen we have.
Chapman’s
direct response to Prince Henry’s death was his Epicede or Funerall Song in
late 1612. The lament on Henry was vastly expanded when Chapman added to it, at
line 354, an adaptation/translation of Angelo Poliziano’s Elegia sive Epicedion
(1546). Chapman’s poem appears to have been the first in a steady stream of
elegies by, among others, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, John Donne, George
Herbert, and John Heywood. The volume concludes with an extended description of
the funeral itself. The loss of his patron did not deter Chapman from his
project of publishing all of Homer in English. It did, however, send him in
search of other patrons, where he discovered yet more misfortunes.
One
of these attempts, perhaps, was Chapman’s elegy on the death of William, Lord
Russell, in 1613, Eugenia: Or True Nobilities Trance (1614). The poem is at
once an elegy, a satiric complaint about the world, and a heroic poem. The
sister of Fame, Eugenia, falls into a trance upon Russell’s death, is revived
by news of Russell’s son and heir, and thence begins the four “vigils” or
speeches. Another was undoubtedly The Whole Works of Homer (1616?), with the
previously published Iliads (its unsold sheets included here) and the new
translation of the twenty-four books of The Odyssey in decasyllabic couplets.
In some copies there is a separate title page to The Odyssey, suggesting that
part of the volume was published separately for special patrons or friends. It
is certain, however, that books 13 to 24 are from the press of a different, and
distinctly inferior, printer. It was entered in the Stationers’ Register on
November 2, 1614 and probably appeared sometime between 1614 and 1616. The
Register also lists Chapman’s Odyssey on that date, and it is likely that the
first 12 books were printed as a New Year’s gift for Robert Carr, Earl of
Somerset, to whom the whole volume is dedicated. This epistle to Somerset,
newly appointed lord chamberlain, includes perhaps Chapman’s clearest statement
on how he understood the two epics in distinctly moral terms:
And
that your Lordship may in his Face take view of his Mind, the first word of his
Iliads is menin, wrath; the first word of his Odysses, andra, Man—contracting
in either word his each worke’s Proposition. In one, Predominant Perturbation;
in the other, over-ruling Wisedome; in one, the Bodie’s fervour and fashion of
outward Fortitude to all possible height of Heroicall Action; in the other, the
Mind’s inward, constant and unconquerd Empire, unbroken, unalterd with any most
insolent and tyrannous infliction.
The
epistle is also notable for its explicit defense of poetry, where Chapman takes
poetry as the soul of truth inhabiting a body of fiction. As such, poetry
teaches not only the most profound and useful matters but always extols virtue
and condemns vice. Some of these views appear again in the marginalia to the
volume (though the commentaries disappear), where apologiae for certain
renderings, often with abundant philological rationales, are mixed with moral
readings of the passage in question. These glosses become very sparse in the
final 12 books of The Odyssey.
Chapman’s
choice of 10-syllable couplets for his translation forces a far more involved
syntax than did the fourteeners he championed as appropriate for the Homer of
his Iliads. This form and the haphazard printing of books 13 to 24 often make
for some difficult reading. Yet even these defects and his sometimes radical
departure from Homer’s Greek (as well as from his favorite Latin text and
commentary of Jean de Sponde [Spondanus]) do not finally destroy either the
vigor or the originality of his work.
There
can be little doubt that Chapman rushed to complete the volume and made special
efforts to present it to Somerset. Chapman, unfortunately, could scarcely have
made a worse choice to replace Henry as the recipient of his Homer. The
unfortunate relationship between Somerset and Chapman began somewhat earlier in
1614 when Chapman, on March 16, registered and then published his Andromeda
Liberata or the Nuptials of Perseus and Andromeda. The poem is dedicated to
Somerset and Lady Frances Howard and was intended to celebrate their marriage.
Despite the fact that Chapman borrows liberally from Comes’s Mythologia, from
Marsilio Ficino, and from Plutarch for the poem, it is clear that the public
took the poem as a very personal, contemporary allegory. In the poem Cepheus,
profoundly disturbed by the appearance of a monstrous whale sent by Neptune to
ravage his kingdom, consults an oracle. He discovers the curse can be removed
if he exposes his daughter Andromeda to the monster. Cepheus complies and
chains Andromeda to a rock. Perseus discovers her, falls in love, kills the
monster, and marries her. Though Chapman is clear about some of the allegorical
and mythological equivalents in the tale, many apparently saw a clear allusion
to the sensational divorce proceedings brought by Lady Frances against her
former husband, Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex. Lady Frances, who
testified that she was in fact a virgin and that the earl was impotent, won an
annulment of the marriage in 1613. Three months later, Lady Frances married
Somerset. The allegorical equivalents seemed plain: Somerset as Perseus had
freed Frances as Andromeda from the rock Essex. Chapman immediately responded
to the furor over his poem with A Free and Offenseless Justification of
Andromeda Liberata (1614), a fascinating essay on the nature of allegory,
which, of course, denied the public construction that brought so much notoriety
to the poem. It is of some note to Chapman that matters for Somerset and Lady
Frances only got worse. In 1615 it was discovered, and later proved in an
extraordinary trial in 1616, that Lady Frances had arranged the murder of the
go-between in her affair with Somerset, Thomas Overbury, the noted character
writer. Though Frances confessed and Somerset maintained his innocence, both
were convicted and sent to the Tower until 1622. Chapman remained faithful to
Somerset, however, dedicating to him both his Pro Vere in 1622 and his
concluding volume of Homer, The Crown of All Homer’s Works around 1624. Between
the Overbury affair and that last volume of Homer, Chapman published his
translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days. The Georgicks of Hesiod (1618) is
replete with glosses, commendatory verses by Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson,
and a dedication to Sir Francis Bacon. Chapman’s text here is Philipp
Melanchthon’s Greek text of Hesiod (1532) as well as a Latin rendering by
Spondanus (1606). Chapman returns to the 10-syllable couplets he used in his
Odyssey.
The
Crown of All Homer’s Works effectively concludes Chapman’s life as a public
poet, and one may sense something profoundly elegiac in it. The volume includes
the mock epic Batrachomyomachia (the battle of the frogs and mice), 32 Homeric
hymns, 16 miscellaneous poems, and, finally, Chapman’s own apologia for the
whole project with its justly famous first line, “The Worke that I was borne to
doe is done.”
Despite
the fact that scholars sense some diminution of Chapman’s powers in this his
last volume of poetry, the translation of Batrachomyomachia is very deft and,
if one may say, very English. The welter of Greek names for the frogs and mice
are given in highly comic and contemporary renderings (as “Bacon-flitch
gnawer”), and on almost every occasion Chapman finds English equivalents for
the abundant Greek nouns. This is not the case in the Hymns, where decorum
would demand a more reticent approach to Englishing . Throughout the volume
there is a grace and clarity in his rhymed couplets in spite of the fact that
he occasionally bungles the Greek.
Even
a cursory survey of Chapman’s poetry reveals his consistent preference for
heroic verse both in his own English poems and in his translations (even in his
sources, borrowings, and tragedies, it should be added). Even though some have
seen in this a self-identification of a heroic Chapman with his poetic
forebears in heroic poetry (indeed, the handsome title page of the
Batrachomyomachia shows Chapman beneath a look-alike Homer), the better
explanation might aim at two other causes: the search for patronage, and the
humanist dogma that takes heroic poetry as the crown of a serious poetic
vocation. Indeed, Chapman remained sensitive about this all his professional
life, especially since his heroic poetry required a thorough knowledge of
Greek. His final apologia appears at the end of the volume in the elegant
87-line poem defending his ability against the scholars of the schools:
And
what’s all their skill but vast varied reading?
As
if brode-beaten High-waies had the leading
To
Truths abstract, and narrow Path and Pit,
Found
in no walke of any worldly wit.
And
without Truth, all’s only sleight of hand,
Or
our Law-learning in a Forraine land,
Embroderie
spent on Cobwebs, Braggart show,
Of
men that all things learn and nothing know.
There
were two plays that remained to be published, though both were undoubtedly
written and produced earlier, Caesar and Pompey of 1631 and The Tragedy of
Chabot in 1639. For the former, the source of historical information is
Plutarch’s Lives (Shakespeare’s favorite) and, occasionally, some of his
Moralia. The hero was the perennial favorite, Cato, the heroic voice for proper
and rational choice, and the action centers on the contest of Julius Caesar and
Pompey for power. The real interest of the play occurs after the battle of
Pharsalia, when Cato declares his preference for justice and a free death
rather than tyranny and servitude. He stabs himself and, in a typically
Jacobean turn, plucks out his entrails before anyone can save him. Caesar
enters, condemns Pompey’s murderers, and in a final paean to Cato’s just life,
orders a magnificent tomb to be erected.
The
Tragedy of Chabot, written in collaboration with James Shirley, was licensed in
1635 (the year after Chapman’s death) for production at the Phoenix Theatre in
Drury Lane. Most would place its composition sometime between 1611 and 1625.
Chabot, an absolutely just and loyal servant of Francis I, is accused of
defrauding the treasury. His proud and uncompromising protestations of loyalty
infuriate the king, who orders that Chabot be tried by Chancellor Poyet. The
trial is outrageously manipulated, the charges fabricated, the conviction
coerced, and the minor sentence altered. With the intercession of the queen,
Francis calls Chabot to him and offers him a pardon. In an astonishing scene,
Chabot heroically refuses and submits that he cannot accept a pardon for
something he has not done. The king, repenting his test of his absolute
authority on a subject whose true conscience is his own authority, convenes a
second trial, in which the treachery of the first is revealed and Poyet
dismissed. Chabot, cleared but stricken to the heart with the injustice of it
all, dies.
There
are in fact few of Chapman’s plays that, according to evidence, were not
popular. It was not uncommon for later publishers to attach Chapman’s name to
plays he never wrote, hoping to benefit from his fame. This accounts, in some
cases, to several plays ascribed to Chapman that are not his: Charlemagne or
the Distracted Emperor, The Ball, The Tragedy of Alphonsus Emperor of Germany,
The Revenge for Honour, Two Italian Gentlemenand, The Disguises.
Chapman
is likely to have written plays or collaborated in others we no longer have.
Sometime after 1623 he may have been responsible, along with Richard Brome, for
the now-lost Christianetta. Henslowe’s diary has indications that Chapman’s
hand was involved in several plays now unknown: “The ylle of A Womon,” “the
ffount of new facianes,” “the world Rones A Whelles” or “all fooles but the
foolle” (perhaps All Fools), and a “pastrall tragedie.”
George
Chapman died in May of 1634. Of the last 20 years of his life we know next to
nothing. There have been suggestions of contributions to other masques or
plays, but we have no evidence of them. We do know, however, that Inigo Jones
(the most famous architect and stage designer of his time) designed a Roman
monument for Chapman which was to bear the inscription, “Georgis Chapmanus,
poeta Homericus, Philosophers verus, (etsi Christianus poeta).” He is buried in
the churchyard of St. Giles in the Fields.
It
is a matter of some note, in assessing Chapman’s achievement, that nearly all
modern commentators on his work have been essentially hostile to it: condemning
him for his borrowings, for the supposed heterodox ethical or religious views
in his fictions, and generally denouncing him for either conscious obscurity or
simply bungling sense across the canon of his works. In almost all of these
views, the works of Shakespeare and his other contemporaries are always the
standard for comparison. The fact of Chapman’s evident success argues quite a
different story. He was recognized among his contemporaries as one of the best
dramatists of the age, as an accomplished poet of striking powers in both
popular and elite modes, and as a rare and accomplished scholar. The reputation
of his Homer has survived any number of rivals (Alexander Pope not the least
among them) even into our own century. Even though he was not successful in
becoming financially comfortable, in choosing patrons, or even in marriage (his
negotiations with a well-to-do widow came to naught), his work stands as equal
to any number of his better-known contemporaries.
Chapman
died in London, having lived his latter years in poverty and debt. He was
buried at St Giles in the Fields. A monument to him designed by Inigo Jones
marked his tomb, and stands today inside the church.
Plays
The
Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596) , An Humorous Day's Mirth (1597)
Charleymayne ,
or the Distracted Emperor (1600) , Sir Giles Goosecap (1601)
Bussy
D'Ambois (1603), Caesar and Pompey (1604) , All Fools (1604) , Eastward Hoe
(1605) , Monsieur D'Olive (1605) , The Widow's Tears (1605)
The
Gentleman Usher (1606) , The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron
(1608) . May Day (1609) ,The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1610)
The
Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France (1612) , Rollo Duke of Normandy (1612), The
Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn (1613)
Comedies
By
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 Scottish
courtiers who formed the retinue of the new king James I; this landed Chapman
and Jonson in jail at the suit of Sir James Murray of Cockpool, the king's
"rascal[ly]" Groom of the Stool.[4] Various of their letters to the
king and noblemen survive in a manuscript in the Folger Library known as the
Dobell MS, and published by AR 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 broke down, perhaps
as a result of Jonson's public feud with Inigo Jones. 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; it
was found in documents collected after his death.
Tragedies
Chapman's 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
(1610[5]) and The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France (published 1639). The
two Byron plays were banned from the stage—although, when the Court left
London, the plays were performed in their original and unexpurgated forms by
the Children of the Chapel.[6] 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
(written 1604, published 1631), although "politically astute", can be
regarded as his most modest achievement in the genre.
Other plays
Chapman
wrote The Old Joiner of Aldgate, performed by the Children of Paul's between
January and February 1603 – a play which caused some controversy due to the
similarities between the content of the play and ongoing legal proceedings
between one John Flaskett (a local book binder) and Agnes How (to whom Flaskett
was betrothed). The play was purchased from Chapman by Thomas Woodford &
Edward Pearce for 20 marks (a considerable amount for such a work at the time)
and resulted in a legal case that went before the Star Chamber.
Chapman
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.
According to Kenneth Muir, The Masque of the Twelve Months, performed on
Twelfth Night 1619 and first printed by John Payne Collier in 1848 with no
author's name attached, is also ascribed to Chapman.
Chapman's
authorship has been argued in connection with a number of other anonymous plays
of his era.[10] 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.
Poet and translator
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 (in sonnets 78–86), although conjecture places him as one in a large
field of possibilities.
From
1598 he published his translation of the Iliad in instalments. In 1616 the
complete Iliad and Odyssey appeared in The Whole Works of Homer, the first
complete English translation, which until Pope's was the most popular in the
English language and was the way most English speakers encountered these poems.
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 often
extends and elaborates on Homer's original contents to add descriptive detail
or moral and philosophical interpretation and emphasis.
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
translation of Homer was admired by Alexander Pope for "a daring fiery
spirit that animates his translation, which is something like what one might
imagine Homer himself would have writ", though he also disapproved of
Chapman's roughness and inaccuracy. John Keats expressed a fervent admiration
of Chapman's Homeric authenticity in his famous poem "On First Looking
into Chapman's Homer". Chapman also drew attention from Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and T. S. Eliot.
Homage
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 knows
What
life and death is: there's not any law
Exceeds
his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That
he should stoop to any other law.
The
Irish playwright Oscar Wilde quoted the same verse in his part fiction, part
literary criticism, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.".
The
English poet John 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 novel of The Flashman
Papers series 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.
Quotes
This section is a candidate for copying over to
Wikiquote using the Transwiki process.
See also: English translations of Homer § Chapman
From All Fooles, II.1.170-178, by George Chapman:
I could have written as good prose and verse
As the most beggarly poet of 'em all,
Either Accrostique, Exordion,
Epithalamions, Satyres, Epigrams,
Sonnets in Doozens, or your Quatorzanies,
In any rhyme, Masculine, Feminine,
Or Sdrucciola, or cooplets, Blancke Verse:
Y'are but bench-whistlers now a dayes to them
That were in our times....
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