35 Facts About Samuel Daniel

Samuel Daniel was an English poet, playwright and historian in the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean eras.

Samuel Daniel was an innovator in a wide range of literary genres.

Samuel Daniel was considered one of the preeminent authors of his time and his works had a significant influence on contemporary writers, including William Shakespeare.

Samuel Daniel did not complete his degree at Oxford; Anthony a Wood in Athenae Oxonienses states that he "was more prone to easier and smoother studies, than in pecking and hewing at logic".

In 1582, Samuel Daniel contributed a Latin verse to Florio's Giardino di Recreatione.

Samuel Daniel wrote a dedicatory poem that was included in Florio's translation of Michel de Montaigne's Essays in 1603.

Samuel Daniel's first published work was The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius, a translation of an Italian treatise on impresa or emblems by historian Paolo Giovio.

In 1592, Samuel Daniel published the first authorized edition of his own poetic works, the sonnet cycle Delia, and the historical poem The Complaint of Rosamond.

Samuel Daniel joined a group of writers encouraged by Mary Sidney that has come to be referred to as the Wilton Circle, a group that included Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Sir John Davies, and Abraham Fraunce.

Immediately upon the publication of Delia and Rosamond, Samuel Daniel began receiving praise from English poets and scholars, including Thomas Nashe, Thomas Churchyard, and Gabriel Harvey.

From 1592 to 1593, under the patronage of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel completed The Tragedy of Cleopatra, which was published in 1594.

Samuel Daniel was taken in by Charles Blount, Baron Mountjoy, as described in the first edition of Daniel's epic poem about the Wars of the Roses, The First Four Books of the Civil Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York, published in 1595.

Samuel Daniel had worked at Essex's estate, Wanstead, as he wrote the initial version of his poem.

Samuel Daniel included his portrait and volumes of his works in the family triptych she commissioned that has come to be known as The Great Picture.

The Civil Wars was newly dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, likely reflecting Samuel Daniel's elevated stature as one of the leading poets of the day, regarded by some as the successor to Edmund Spenser, who had died in 1599.

Samuel Daniel was called before the Privy Council to defend himself.

Samuel Daniel wrote a funeral poem to his longtime supporter that was printed as A Funeral Poem Upon the Death of the Noble Earl of Devonshire and included in the 1607 edition of Samuel Daniel's Certain Small Works.

The title page of that collection of Samuel Daniel's works was the first to refer to him as "one of the Grooms of the Queen's Majesty's Privy Chamber", an elevated status that he shared with his friend John Florio.

In 1609, Samuel Daniel published his final version of The Civil Wars, a work that now extended to eight books.

Samuel Daniel dedicated the work to Mary Sidney, the patron who had helped first bring him to prominence.

Samuel Daniel spent most of the final decade of his life in semi-retirement, living at a country house in the small hamlet of Ridge in the village of Beckington in Somerset.

Samuel Daniel was said to have lost his place as a groom of the privy chamber to Anne of Denmark in 1618 for visiting a disgraced courtier, Robert Lloyd alias Flood.

The final work that Samuel Daniel wrote was a poem addressed to James Montague, Bishop of Winchester, in 1618.

Samuel Daniel was born a year or two before William Shakespeare and died three years after him.

Evidence of Shakespeare's possible influence on Samuel Daniel's works includes the following:.

Samuel Daniel's writings contributed innovations to a wide range of literary genres, including the sonnet cycle, the complaint, neo-classical drama, the epic, the verse colloquy, the literary essay, and epistolary verse.

Samuel Daniel continued to have admirers for centuries after his death and his works had a significant influence on many other authors.

Henry David Thoreau referred to Samuel Daniel to elucidate his own thoughts in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

Lewis's assessment that Samuel Daniel "thinks in verse", his poetry often employs the more precise language of debate, self-doubt, and deep thought rather than passionate imagery.

In Musophilus, Samuel Daniel described his poetry as "a speaking picture of the mind".

Samuel Daniel exhibited this attitude in his dedicatory verses to Mary Sidney, his poem Letter from Octavia, and especially in his Epistle to Countess of Cumberland.

Samuel Daniel had the humility to admit that he, along with all humans, is fallible and is prone to hold strongly to opinions that will come to be regarded as misguided.

In many of his works, Samuel Daniel expressed a deep regard for the power of written language to reach across cultures and generations.

The last time a thorough edition of the works of Samuel Daniel appeared in print was in the late nineteenth century, in the five-volume Complete Works in Verse and Prose, edited by Alexander Balloch Grosart.

Samuel Daniel is a significant supporting character in the novel Imperfect Alchemist, by Naomi Miller, a fictionalized account of Mary Sidney.