George Chapman (1560-1634) was an English poet and dramatist, also noted for his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (which inspired Keats's sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'). Chapman, who is thought to have served as a soldier in his youth, began to write plays for the Admiral's Men in the 1590s; his earlier works include the comedy An Humorous Day's Mirth (1597), which influenced Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (1598). Most of Chapman's surviving plays date from the first decade of the 17th century, the tragedy Bussy D'Ambois (1604) and its sequel The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1610) being usually considered his best work. In 1605, in collaboration with Ben Jonson and John Marston, Chapman wrote Eastward Ho!, a play that King James I found so offensive to his fellow Scots that he had Chapman and Marston imprisoned for their part in it. Nonetheless, it has proved to be Chapman's most frequently revived work.
