See s.v. Jonson.
GEORGE CHAPMAN (c. 1560–1634).
Chapman was born in 1559 or 1560 near Hitchin in Hertfordshire. Anthony Wood believed him to have been at Oxford, and possibly also at Cambridge, but neither residence can be verified. It is conjectured that residence at Hitchin and soldiering in the Low Countries may have helped to fill the long period before his first appearance as a writer, unless indeed the isolated translation Fedele and Fortunio (1584) is his, with The Shadow of Night (1594). This shows him a member of the philosophical circle of which the centre was Thomas Harriot. The suggestion of W. Minto that he was the ‘rival poet’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets is elaborated by Acheson, who believes that Shakespeare drew him as Holophernes and as Thersites, and accepted by Robertson; it would be more plausible if any relation between the Earl of Southampton and Chapman, earlier than a stray dedication shared with many others in 1609, could be established. By 1596, and possibly earlier, Chapman was in Henslowe’s pay as a writer for the Admiral’s. His plays, which proved popular, included, besides the extant Blind Beggar of Alexandria and Humorous Day’s Mirth, five others, of which some and perhaps all have vanished. These were The Isle of a Woman, afterwards called The Fount of New Fashions (May–Oct. 1598), The World Runs on Wheels, afterwards called All Fools but the Fool (Jan.–July 1599), Four Kings (Oct. 1598–Jan. 1599), a ‘tragedy of Bengemens plotte’ (Oct.–Jan. 1598; cf. s.v. Jonson) and a pastoral tragedy (July 1599). His reputation both for tragedy and for comedy was established when Meres wrote his Palladis Tamia in 1598. During 1599 Chapman disappears from Henslowe’s diary, and in 1600 or soon after began his series of plays for the Chapel, afterwards Queen’s Revels, children. This lasted until 1608, when his first indiscretion of Eastward Ho! (1605), in reply to which he was caricatured as Bellamont in Dekker and Webster’s Northward Ho!, was followed by a second in Byron. He now probably dropped his connexion with the stage, at any rate for many years. After completing Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in 1598, he had begun his series of Homeric translations, and these Prince Henry, to whom he had been appointed sewer in ordinary at the beginning of James’s reign, now bade him pursue, with the promise of £300, to which on his death-bed in 1612 he added another of a life-pension. These James failed to redeem, and Chapman also lost his place as sewer. His correspondence contains complaints of poverty, probably of this or a later date, and indications of an attempt, with funds supplied by a brother, to mend his fortunes by marriage with a widow. He found a new patron in the Earl of Somerset, wrote one of the masks for the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, and went on with Homer, completing his task in 1624. He lived until 12 May 1634, and his tomb by Inigo Jones still stands at St. Giles-in-the-Fields. In his later years he seems to have touched up some of his dramatic work and possibly to have lent a hand to the younger dramatist Shirley. Jonson told Drummond in 1619 that ‘next himself, only Fletcher and Chapman could make a mask’, and that ‘Chapman and Fletcher were loved of him’ (Laing, 4, 12), and some of Jonson’s extant letters appear to confirm the kindly relations which these phrases suggest. But a fragment of invective against Jonson left by Chapman on his death-bed suggests that they did not endure for ever.
Collections
1873. [R. H. Shepherd.] The Comedies and Tragedies of George Chapman. 3 vols. (Pearson reprints). [Omits Eastward Ho!]
1874–5. R. H. Shepherd. The Works of George Chapman. 3 vols. [With Swinburne’s essay. Includes The Second Maiden’s Tragedy and Two Wise Men and All the Rest Fools.]
1895. W. L. Phelps. The Best Plays of George Chapman (Mermaid Series). [All Fools, the two Bussy and the two Byron plays.]
1910–14. T. M. Parrott. The Plays and Poems of George Chapman. 3 vols. [Includes Sir Giles Goosecap, The Ball, Alphonsus Emperor of Germany, and Revenge for Honour. The Poems not yet issued.]
Dissertations: F. Bodenstedt, C. in seinem Verhältniss zu Shakespeare (1865, Jahrbuch, i. 300); A. C. Swinburne, G. C.: A Critical Essay (1875); E. Koeppel, Quellen-Studien zu den Dramen G. C.’s, &c. (1897, Quellen und Forschungen, lxxxii); B. Dobell, Newly discovered Documents of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Periods (1901, Ath. i. 369, 403, 433, 465); A. Acheson, Shakespeare and the Rival Poet (1903); E. E. Stoll, On the Dates of some of C.’s Plays (1905, M. L. N. xx. 206); T. M. Parrott, Notes on the Text of C.’s Plays (1907, Anglia, xxx. 349, 501); F. L. Schoell, Chapman as a Comic Writer (1911, Paris diss., unprinted, but used by Parrott); J. M. Robertson, Shakespeare and C. (1917).
PLAYS