Chapman, George c.1559-1634
English dramatist

Born near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, he began to make a reputation in Elizabethan literary circles with his poems The Shadow of the Night (1594), and in 1595 saw the production of his earliest extant play, the popular comedy The Blind Beggar of Alexandria. His complete translation of The Whole Works of Homer: Prince of Poets, appeared in 1611, after which he set to work on the Odyssey (completed 1616). His Homer is known to many through Keats's poem 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer'. He joined Ben Jonson and John Marston in the composition of Eastward Hoe (1605), in which slighting references to the Scots earned the authors a jail sentence. Other plays include a graceful comedy, The Gentleman Usher (1606), the Tragedie of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), full of fine poetry, The Widow's Tears (1612) and Caesar and Pompey (1631). Two posthumous tragedies (1654), Alphonsus and Revenge for Honour, bear his name, but it is doubtful that he wrote them. The Ball, a comedy, and The Tragedie of Chabot (1639) were the joint work of Chapman and James Shirley. Among his nondramatic works are the epic philosophical poem Euthymiae & Raptus (1609), Petrarch's Seven Penitentiall Psalmes (1612), The Divine Poem of Musaeus (1616) and The Georgicks of Hesiod (1618).

Bibliography: C K Spivack, George Chapman (1967)