Samuel Daniel

Samuel Daniel (1562 – 14 October 1619) was an English poet and historian.

Daniel was born near Taunton in Somerset, the son of a music-master. He was the brother of lutenist and composer John Danyel. Their sister, whose name is unknown, may have married Daniel's friend John Florio. In 1579, Daniel was admitted to Magdalen Hall (now known as Hertford College) at Oxford University, where he remained for about three years and afterwards devoted himself to the study of poetry and philosophy. A "Samuel Daniel" is recorded in 1586 as being the servant of Edward Stafford, the Baron of Stafford and the English ambassador in France. This is probably the same person as the poet.

He was first encouraged and, by his own account, taught in verse, by the Countess of Pembroke, whose honour he was never weary of proclaiming. He had entered her household as tutor to her son, Lord Herbert. His first known work, a translation of Paulus Jovius, to which some original matter is appended, was printed in 1585.

His first known volume of verse is dated 1592; it contains the cycle of sonnets addressed to "Delia" and a romance called The Complaint of Rosamond. Twenty-seven of the sonnets had already been printed at the end of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella without the author's consent. Several editions of Delia appeared in 1592, and they were very frequently reprinted during Daniel's lifetime. Dedicated to "The Right Honourable the Lady Mary Countess of Pembroke", we learn that Delia lived on the banks of the River Avon—not Shakespeare's, but the one which flowed through "where Delia has her seat" at Wilton in Wiltshire—and that the sonnets to her were inspired by her memory when the poet was in Italy. To an edition of Delia and Rosamond, in 1594, was added the tragedy of Cleopatra, written in classical style, in alternately rhyming heroic verse, with choral interludes. The First Four Books of the Civil Wars, a historical poem on the subject of the Wars of the Roses, in ottava rima, appeared in 1595.

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