Beschreibung:

From the Library of Clayre and Jay Michael Haft
Homer
The Whole Works of Homer; Prince of Poetts in his Iliads, and Odysses. Translated according to the Greeke by Geo. Chapman. London: printed for Nathaniell Butter, [1616?]
Folio (279 x 175mm.), engraved general title by William Hole errata list at end of prelims to the Iliad, engraved dedication to Henry Prince of Wales (bound before the Odyssey), letterpress title-page to the Odyssey, woodcut initials and headpieces, contemporary calf, sprinkled edges, lacking portrait of Chapman, prelims to the Iliad misbound, some spotting and soiling, rebacked to style with new endleaves
Chapman wrote his translation in verse, rejecting a verbatim translation on the grounds of fluency and elegance. He added some moral and ethical changes and observations, so that his narrative would display the characters in a somewhat more chivalric and less pagan manner. His translation exerted considerable influence on English literature, providing for the first time in English a comprehensible and accessible version of Homer's epics for non-Greek or Latin readers.
This seems to be the first collected edition of Chapman's Homer, usually dated to around 1616. The two parts were first printed separately in 1611 and 1614, and the sheets from each part were then put together with a general title-page, The Whole Works of Homer. This joint edition was then reissued in 1634, for which the Iliad was for the most part a word for word reprint with different woodcut decorations, while the Odyssey seems to have the same setting of the sheets for the first separate edition and both joint editions.
LITERATURE:STC 13624
PROVENANCE:Christopher Stephenson: pen trial in seventeenth-century hand at margin of Ee1v