Hero and Leander and Other Poems

George Chapman had a reputation in his own time for being a learned writer. On the payroll of the Elizabethan impresario, Philip Henslowe, he wrote for the Admiral's Men and was imprisoned with Ben Jonson for supposedly seditious theater. He translated the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer and completed Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe. Chapman's works are full of humanist scholarship from classical sources, while his tragedies are mostly based on contemporary French history. In Bussy d'Ambois (1607), the best known of this series, the hero is the aspiring, stoic man who is doomed to extinction in a crass world. Chapman's comedies, which are much more lighthearted, experiment in the comedy of "humours" that Jonson was to perfect. The plays are mostly written for the boy companies.