The Divine Poem of Musaeus. First of All Books. Translated According to the Original

Marlowe’s adaptation

Chapman’s continuation of Marlowe’s poem

While George Chapman’s continuation of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander was published in 1598, he was not finished with it. In 1616, he published The Divine Poem of Musaeus. First of All Books, Translated According to the Original. The title makes it clear that we are not dealing with an adaptation this time, but of a ‘proper’ translation of a text which should be considered “First of All Books”. Although a few Continental scholars had highlighted the impossibility that the Musaeus who had written Hero and Leander was the same Musaeus who was said to have been Orpheus’ contemporary, Chapman perpetuated the view that Hero and Leander were the first lovers ever to be described in literary history. Like Marlowe, he based himself on the Aldine edition. But Chapman is quick to differentiate his work from Marlowe’s, as he writes in the dedicatory epistle to the Reader: do not “headlong presuppose[e] it all one, or no part matchable, with that partly excellent poem of Master Marlowe” (italics mine). “The missed character of this assessment nicely conveys Chapman’s attitude, both his recognition of Marlowe’s poetic excellence and his disapproval of the way in which Marlowe employed his skill” (Waddington 1983, 48).

  The text is articulated as follows: a dedication (A3r-A6r) to his friend, the great scaenographer and architect Inigo Jones, who had recently been appointed Surveyor-General of the King’s Works. Then, after the dedicatory epistle to the reader (A7r-B3v), we encounter a short biography of Musaeus (B4r-B5v) said to be taken from a book belonging to William Gager, a copy of Diogenes Laertius’ prologue to his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, and then a brief description of Sestos, Abydos, and of the Hellespont (B5v-B8v). The text of the poem begins, elegantly written in iambic pentameter couplets, with the occasional triplet typographically signalled by curly brackets. The text contains some numbers in normal brackets which refer to the critical annotations of the author which are appended to the poem. Chapman’s translation is generally literal (considering the metrical restraints due to the use of rhyme etc.), although he often expands Musaeus’ Greek and tends to exoticise it. For instance, Miriam Jacobson notes that Musaeus's adjective “fragrant” for Hero becomes “ruby-colour’d maid” (2014, 175).    

Works Cited

Jacobson, Miriam. 2014. Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Waddington, Raymond B. 1983. “Visual Rhetoric: Chapman and the Extended Poem”. English Literary Renaissance 13 (1): 36-57.

Braden, Gordon. 1978. “The Divine Poem of Musaeus”. In Id., The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies, 55-153, 263-69. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Donno, Elizabeth Story, ed. 1963. Elizabethan Minor Epics. New York: Columbia University Press.  

Waddington, Raymond B. 1983. “Visual Rhetoric: Chapman and the Extended Poem”. English Literary Renaissance 13 (1): 36-57.

The book (USTC no. 3007357) was entered into the Stationers’ Register on the 27 July 1616: “Master William Jaggard . Entred for his Copie vnder the hands of master Tavernor andboth the wardens a booke called Musæws of Hero and Leander translated accordinge to the Originall by George Chap”. It is  a tiny book in trigesimo-secundo (32°) format, consisting of 126 pages. Only one witness is extant: Bodleian Library (Arch. G g.5). The Annotations (H1v-H8r) aim at explaining some issues concerning the translation from Greek to English, but it is remarkable that several Greek words contain various mistakes (compare the diplomatic and the modernised editions). I thank Dr Marco Duranti for his assistance in this matter.  

Aldine Edition (c. 1497)