George Chapman: A Critical Study

George Campman (1559-1634) is one of the most important literary figures of the English Renaissance. A powerful personality, melancholy and witty, his style by turns obscure and elegant, he attempted almost every genre of poetry practised in his day: mythological narrative, philosophical poem, panegyric, elegy, comedy, tragedy, masque, and translation from the classics.

This book is the first full-length critical study in English of all his works, poems, plays, and translations, considered in detail in relation to their genres, and in terms of Chapman's intellectual and aesthetic development. The major non-dramatic poems, the tragedies (which have often been the subject of critical comment) and "Chapman's Homer" receive the largest share of attention, but the comedies, in which Chapman was a stylish innovator, and the minor translations are also discussed at length, and an attempt is made to place Chapman among his great contemporaries.

In tracing the relationship between Chapman's art and his aesthetic, moral, and intellectual notions, Professor MacLure has made a valuable contribution to the study of Renaissance thought and literature, and introduced an unusual poetic personality to readers who knows Chapman only in fragments or by allusion.