George Chapman

Abstract

George Chapman was born in Hertfordshire, the son of a small landowner, and was probably educated at Oxford. From 1582 until at least 1591 he served as a soldier in Holland. By 1594 he had settled in London, and during the next four years wrote several long poems, including a continuation of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. He then became a professional playwright, composing tragedies and comedies for the public theatres and masques for the court; his plays were admired by Shakespeare (and later by T. S. Eliot, who described Chapman as ‘potentially the greatest artist’ of the Elizabethan dramatists). His most famous work is his translation of Homer, which was published at intervals between 1598 and 1616. Chapman’s Homer is more remarkable for its vigour than for its faithfulness to Homer’s Greek, and has always been admired more by poets than by classical scholars; in common with many Renaissance translators, Chapman was more concerned to recreate a great poem in English than to translate the original poem literally. Keats immortalised Chapman’s translation in his sonnet ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’. The extract printed here is taken from Chapman’s translation of the Odyssey, Book 9, in which Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops.