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Chapman's reference to the ‘Italian Duke’ (Poems, 38) and extended description of the siege of Nijmegen (ibid., 38–9) suggest both a knowledge of Alexander Farnese and experience of a July 1591 military engagement.

Chapman, George (1559/60–1634), poet and playwright, was the second son of Thomas Chapman, a yeoman and copyholder of Hitchin, Hertfordshire, and of Joan (d. 1566), the daughter of George Nodes, who was in charge of Henry VIII's hunting dogs, and Margaret Grimeston, a cousin of Edward Grimeston, the historian. Joan Chapman died when Chapman was six or seven years old. He had three sisters and one elder brother; indeed, the situation of younger brother was to plague the writer for much of his working life. This is particularly evident in the nature of Chapman's inheritance from his father—only £100 and two silver spoons.
Early years
Chapman spent his early adulthood, at least from 1583 onwards, in the household of Sir Ralph Sadler. Besides his seat at Standon Hall, Sadler owned a manor house at Temple Dinsley in the Hitchin area and Duchy House in the Strand, London. Part confirmation for the Sadler connection comes in the form of an inscription by Chapman in the Inner Temple Library copy of his The Crown of All Homer's Works (1624?): here, the writer praises Ralph Sadler, the eldest grandson of his former employer.

Whatever material support Chapman received at the hands of the Sadler family did not prevent him from experiencing financial hardship. On 12 July 1585 he entered into bonds with two brokers, John Wolfall and Richard Adams. The agreement stipulated that Chapman was to be lent various sums, upon forfeit of £100. As later accounts of the transaction indicate, however, it is doubtful if any money was ever actually received. The brokers' bond may indicate that Chapman had come to London by this time. (If this was the case, Chapman may have been connected with the inns of court, although there is no direct evidence for this other than his dramatic associations with John Marston, who was a student at the Middle Temple, and his poetic dedications to Matthew Roydon, who studied at Thavies Inn.) Certainly, service to the Sadlers seems to have been over by 1587. Such a theory finds support in the fact that Chapman, between 1585 and 1594, was abroad. He was admitted to the hospital in Middelburg (in the Netherlands) in 1586, having fought under Captain Robert Sidney. A military connection is supported, too, in ‘Hymnus in Cynthiam’, part of The Shadow of Night (1594): Chapman's reference to the ‘Italian Duke’ (Poems, 38) and extended description of the siege of Nijmegen (ibid., 38–9) suggest both a knowledge of Alexander Farnese and experience of a July 1591 military engagement. The actual siege of Nijmegen was only briefly represented in Edward Grimeston's A Generall Historie of the Netherlands, one of Chapman's sources.

Chapman's early works, one critical argument has maintained, mark him out as a member of a philosophical and scientific group (the so-called ‘School of Night’) headed by Sir Walter Ralegh and the earl of Northumberland. Certainly, Chapman enjoyed exchanges with men who moved in aristocratic literary circles; however, the existence of a clearly defined group with shared preoccupations cannot be supported.

In several poems Chapman addresses Matthew Roydon, a contemporary mathematician and one of Ralegh's associates. The Shadow of Night (1594), a collection of two separate poems, shows Chapman modelling himself as a type of Prometheus: ‘savage vulgar men’, he writes, will, through his verse, ‘mend their mindes’ (Poems, 23). The dedication singles out ‘sweet Mat[t]hew’ Roydon, a ‘DEARE AND MOST WORTHY FRIEND’, and expresses satisfaction at hearing of the ‘deepe searching’ of the earl of ‘Northumberland’ (ibid., 19). Roydon's name occurs again in the epistle to Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595). In this Neoplatonic work of moral symbolism and philosophical idealism, in which the soul is ravished by beauty, Chapman elevates the ‘serching spirits’ that Roydon embodies above the ‘prophane multitude’ (ibid., 49). None of these statements, however, points to a firmly established congregation of writers and patrons. Clearly, there are areas of contact between Chapman and Roydon—both were ensnared by the Wolfall family and both were acquainted with Peter Bales, who won a writing competition presided over by Chapman in 1595—but such moments of overlap do not necessarily extend to a larger network of regular meetings and discussions. All that can be suggested is that, at some point, Chapman may have been introduced to the earl through Roydon's agency.

The case for a close relation between Chapman and Ralegh is similarly difficult to maintain. In 1596 Chapman produced De Guiana, a plea to Queen Elizabeth to recognize Ralegh's ‘discovery’ and to provide funds for Guianan colonization. It could be argued that the poem demonstrates a connection to Ralegh that had a form of patronage as its basis. However, since the work was published as a preface to A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana by Lawrence Keymis, who travelled with Ralegh and moved in his financial orbit, it might also be claimed that it was Keymis, rather than Chapman, who was soliciting attention. In short, there is no independent evidence of a continuing Chapman–Ralegh allegiance.

With a greater regularity than other figures of the period, it is Christopher Marlowe who has been linked to Ralegh, Northumberland, and their ilk. But fraternization between Marlowe and Chapman is less easy to prove. Of course, Chapman completed Marlowe's Hero and Leander in 1598, dedicating the work to Lady Walsingham, who, with her husband, was one of Marlowe's benefactors. The preface to the poem, however, speaks only of ‘the first Author, divine Musaeus’ (Poems, 132) and is strangely vague about Marlowe, suggesting that the two poets may not even have known each other. Furthermore, although links were made between Marlowe and Roydon at this time, such as in one of Thomas Kyd's 1593 letters to Sir John Puckering, the lord keeper (BL, Harley MS 6848, fol. 154r), Chapman's name is obvious by its absence. Once again, the existence of a Chapman–Marlowe literary intimacy seems tenuous at best.

The final member of the so-called ‘School of Night’ was Thomas Harriot, a philosopher and astronomer employed in Ralegh's household. Harriot is tied to both Marlowe and Roydon in one of Kyd's letters from 1593 (BL, Harley MS 6849, fols. 218r–219r); he is also mentioned in connection with Marlowe in a document written by Richard Baines, the government informer (BL, Harley MS 6848, fols. 185r–186r). One can only speculate as to how far the connection between Chapman and Harriot extended. Chapman dedicates the poem Achilles' Shield, a translation of book 18 of the Iliad published in 1598, to Harriot, praising his ‘perfect eye’ and ‘True learning’ (Poems, 382); he also states in the preface to the c.1616 edition of The Whole Works of Homer that he asked Harriot to check his accuracy. On the one hand, it could be argued that Chapman's cultivation of Harriot belonged with a wider philosophical endeavour; on the other hand, and this seems the more plausible interpretation, it seems that Chapman turned to Harriot as a kindred spirit and editorial assistant. No broader conjunction of interests can be inferred from the surviving evidence...

The best known of Chapman's plays, Bussy D'Ambois (composed 1603–4, printed 1607 and 1608), was put on at Paul's Theatre rather than Blackfriars, and marks Chapman's first tragic dramatization of French history. A morally ambiguous soldier protagonist, Bussy is immediately distinctive as ambitious for epic prowess, for a form of power that puts him into conflict with constituted monarchical authority. He is additionally remarkable for abandoning modes of stoic providence and querying his position within the hierarchy. Towards the end he rejects a defining natural design, casting into doubt any sense of a governing teleology. The company that staged the play, the second Paul's Children, closed soon afterwards, probably because there had been official objections to its French political content...

Chapman died in London on 12 May 1634. He was buried in St Giles-in-the-Fields in a tomb designed and paid for by Inigo Jones. There is no evidence of surviving family...
-- Mark Thornton Burnett, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography