George Chapman As Minor Poet

 

Life

George Chapman was born about 1559, probably in at near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England. he was died on 12 May 1634. he was an English dramatist, translator and English poet and whose translation of Homer long remained the standard English version. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman has been speculated to be the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's sonnets by William Minto,  and as an anticipator of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century.

Education

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.

Family 

His father, Thomas Chapman, was a local landowner, his mother Joan was the daughter of George Nodes,   On his mother’s side, Chapman was related to Edward Grimeston, whose family served the English government in France and who wrote A General Inventory of the History of France (1607). The Grimeston relationship probably nurtured Chapman’s interest in France and why most of his tragedies are based on French history.

Chapman “was observed to be most excellent in the Latin and Greek tongues,” but his contemporaries did not consider him much of a classicist.  and indeed his work is closer in style to the Elizabethan manner than to the Greek.

  

Work 

Chapman’s first published work was the long 1594 poem The Shadow of the Night,  and the completion of Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished poem Hero and Leander (1598), Chapman’s major work was for the London stage. He became a dramatist at about the age of forty, at first writing for Philip Henslowe,  He wrote comedies and tragedies for other companies such as the Children of the Chapel, later called the Children of the Revels. 

Chapman is best remembered for his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the Homeric Batrachomyomachia. 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. The Iliad is an epic poem written by the Greek poet Homer. It tells the story of the last year of the Trojan War fought between the city of Troy and the Greeks. 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).

It follows the Greek hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his journey home after the Trojan War. After the war itself, which lasted ten years, his journey lasts for ten additional years, during which time he encounters many perils and all his crewmates are killed.

The Tragedy of Bussy D'Ambois (1603–1607) is a Jacobean stage play written by George Chapman. Classified as either a tragedy or "contemporary history," Bussy D'Ambois is widely considered Chapman's greatest play, and is the earliest in a series of plays that Chapman wrote about the French political scene in his era, including the sequel The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, the two-part. 

Though he wrote mainly tragedies after the turn of the century, Chapman continued to write comedies, including The Gentleman Usher (1606), Monsieur D’Olive (1606), May- Day (1611), and The Widow’s Tears (1612), The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, All Fools. 

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.

The last is the most serious of his comedies, presenting a society beset by chaos and corruption, quite the antithesis of the Homeric virtues Chapman celebrates in his translations, but similar to the world he presents in the tragedies. He also wrote one noteworthy play in collaboration. Eastward Ho (1605), written with Jonson and John Marston. 

His first tragedy, Bussy D’Ambois, is a melodrama of the Elizabethan  probably was written about 1604,  Queen Elizabeth I died. One of at least four tragedies he wrote based on French history. 

Some critics believe that a key aspect of his development as a tragedian is the progressive exclusion from his plays of elements that did not advance his ethical goals. He no longer was active as a playwright and may have been too preoccupied by financial and legal difficulties to engage in literary work.

Death 

 He died on 12 May 1634 in London and was buried in St. Giles-in-the-Fields. having lived his latter years in poverty and debt. Inigo Jones, the architect who designed masques (court entertainments) by Chapman, did a Roman-style monument. marked his tomb, and stands today inside the church.

By the end of the 1590s, Chapman had become a successful playwright. he correctly has been described as the most deliberately didactic tragic playwright of his time.