Yet his thought is sometimes too much for him, and he becomes obscure. He packs words as tight as Browning, and the sense is often more difficult to unravel. He is best in the closet drama. 'Cæsar and Pompey,' published in 1631 but never acted, contains some of his finest thoughts.
Chapman also collaborated with other dramatists. 'Eastward Ho,' in 1605, written with Marston and Jonson, is one of the liveliest and best constructed Elizabethan comedies, combining the excellences of the three men without their faults. Some allusion to the Scottish nation offended King James; the authors were confined in Fleet Prison and barely escaped having their ears and noses slit. With Shirley he wrote the comedy 'The Ball' and the tragedy 'Chabot, Admiral of France.'
Chapman wrote comedies to make money, and tragedies because it was the fashion of the day, and he studded these latter with exquisite passages because he was a poet born. But he was above all a scholar with wide and deep learning, not only of the classics but also of the Renaissance literature. From 1613 to 1631 he does not appear to have written for the stage, but was occupied with his translations of Homer, Hesiod, Juvenal, Musæus, Petrarch, and others. In 1614, at the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, was performed in the most lavish manner the 'Memorable Masque of the two Honorable Houses or Inns of Court; the Middle Temple and Lyncoln Inne.' Chapman also completed Marlowe's unfinished 'Hero and Leander.'
His fame however rests on his version of Homer. The first portion appeared in 1598: 'Seven Bookes of the Iliade of Homer, Prince of Poets; Translated according to the Greeke in judgment of his best Commentaries.' In 1611 the Iliad complete appeared, and in 1615 the whole of the Odyssey; though he by no means reproduces Homer faithfully, he approaches nearest to the original in spirit and grandeur. It is a typical product of the English Renaissance, full of vigor and passion, but also of conceit and fancifulness. It lacks the simplicity and the serenity of the Greek, but has caught its nobleness and rapidity. As has been said, "It is what Homer might have written before he came to years of discretion." Yet with all its shortcomings it remains one of the classics of Elizabethan literature. Pope consulted it diligently, and has been accused of at times re-versifying this instead of the Greek. Coleridge said of it:--
