George Chapman has retained to this day the considerable reputation he achieved in his own lifetime. Playwright, poet, translator, he is still considered an exceptionally important figure in the English Renaissance. His plays, particularly, were adapted for the stage throughout the Restoration, and, though his reputation dipped during most of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth saw a marked revival of interest in Chapman's works, perhaps best summed up in John Keats's well-known sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" (1816).

Chapman was born in Hitchin (as an allusion in Euthymiæ Raptus; or the Teares of Peace [1609] has it), a town in Hertfordshire some thirty miles from London. He was the second son of Thomas Chapman and Joan Nodes, the daughter of George and Margaret Grimeston Nodes and a cousin to Edward Grimeston the translator. Of his early life little is known except that he attended Oxford in 1574 and...