Chapman.
The date of the birth (near Hitchin) of George Chapman, conjecturally placed in 1559, is unknown. He was at Oxford in 1574. The exactness of his scholarship must not be estimated by his translation of Homer; translations, whether in prose or verse, did not then aim at precision. In 1594 he published "The Shadow of Night," containing verses which have been used to support the theory that he was the poet concerning whose favour Shakespeare expresses uneasiness in his Sonnets. He wrote a conclusion to Marlowe's "Hero and Leander"; attempted the luscious (which did not suit his genius), in Ovid's "Banquet of Sense"; celebrated Henry, Prince of Wales, in "The Tears of Peace," is mentioned as a dramatist by Meres in 1598, and in that year published his version of "Seven Books of the 'Iliad'" (not the first seven), while he finished his "Iliad" in 1611, his "Odyssey," some years later.
Thanks mainly to the perfect sonnet of Keats, Chapman's Homer is the work by which his memory is kept green except among special students of the Elizabethan drama. To have made Homer "common coin" was a great benefit to the English public, that had known only the mediaeval romances based on Ionian (700 b.c.), Athenian, and Roman perversions of the poet. The "Iliad" he did into "fourteeners," a jigging old measure,—[1] "a splendid swinging metre," says Saintsbury, "better able than any other English metre to cope with the body as well as the rhythm of the English hexameter". Tastes differ! Here are four lines ("Iliad" XV, 596-600). The poet speaks of Zeus,
For Hector's glory still he stood, and ever went about
To make him cast the fleet such fire as never should go out;
Heard Thetis' foul petition, and wished in any wise
The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes.
"The last line alone would suffice to exhibit Chapman's own splendour at his best," says a critic, and this may be the best of Chapman. But it does not express the meaning of Homer, who says nothing about the "foulness" of the prayer of Thetis, and whose Zeus does not desire to satiate his eyes with "the splendour of the burning ships," but to see one ship set on fire; as, on that signal, he intends to cause the instant rout of the Trojans. It will be observed that Chapman here compresses four Greek hexameters into four English "fourteeners"; and that the movement of his verse is as rapid as the nature of the "fourteener" permits. He is, however, rugged and obscure and overloads the simplicity of Homer with Elizabethan conceits of his own invention. The "Odyssey" he rendered into heroic couplets with a free movement, and, had he been more sparing of his own conceits, the version would be more satisfactory. Unhappily no English measure represents the Homeric hexameter.
In 1604-5, Chapman with Marston was imprisoned for a very faint piece of satire on the Scots, in "Eastward Ho"; and Ben Jonson, who had been no partner to the passage, as a collaborator in tie play magnanimously insisted on sharing the punishment.
Chapman's comedy, "All Fools" opens with an imitation of a play of Terence (followed by Molière in "L'École des Pères"). We have the sensible and indulgent, and the severe and deceived father. But the plot becomes painfully involved, and jokes on cuckolds are no longer so delightful as they were for two centuries to English taste. His other comedies are not below the level of his contemporaries, excluding Shakespeare and Jonson.
Among Chapman's plays on contemporary French history, the two on Bussy d'Amboise vary much from "Byron's' (Biron's) Conspiracy," and "The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron". "Bussy d'Ambois" has all the faults of fustian, obscurity, bloodshed, torture exercised on the stage, and great palpable ghosts. A friar is the go-between of le brave Bussy and Madame de Monsoreau, Chapman's "Tamyra, Countess of Mountsurry". He appears and disappears through a trap door, and when he dies "Umbra Friar" (the ghost of the holy man), "keeps on the business still". Mountsurry (Monsoreau) too, disguised as the friar, is very busy. A magician summons Behemoth, a monstrous fiend with whom Joan of Arc was accused of being too familiar. Tamyra is stabbed frequently on the stage, to make her write a letter inviting Bussy to a fatal tryst; and next, being tortured, she complies and writes in her own blood. Bussy is overpowered by numbers and slain. Charles Lamb admired a long description of a duel between six minions of Henry III, three on each side. The Nuntius (the messenger), a looker-on, tells how Bussy charged his foe exactly as, in his youth, the Nuntius had seen a unicorn charge an Armenian jeweller, and
Nailed him with his rich antler to a tree.
In "The Revenge of Bussy" his ghost enters and dances with the ghosts of the Duc de Guise, the Cardinal, and Châtillon. The lookers-on are surprised, believing the Guises to be alive and well, when Aumale enters with the news that both have just teen assassinated! The "Revenge" contains some very noble passages of reflection, in which Chapman always shines, and some reminiscences of Homer. The ghosts, though "affable familiar sprites," might be excused by the example of Seneca's tragedies. Dryden found in "Bussy d'Ambois" "a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense," but not all of the poetry is false. There are, indeed, in Chapman's blank verse, passages of exquisite beauty and charm: praise which cannot be denied to passages in the works of all his contemporaries in dramatic writing.