ABSTRACT

by Kelly Anne Quinn

Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto

This thesis studies the major poetic works and critical writings of the Elizabethan and Jacobean writer Samuel Daniel. Daniel was lauded by his contemporaries as one of the finest writers of the age. He is now often considered as a secondary figure to Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser, but in fact he was more often a pioneer than a follower, and his literary innovations had a pronounced impact on the literary development of the period. This thesis seeks a better understanding of this important and influential writer by examining his poetics, as they are manifested both in his practice and in his theory. Daniel’s attitudes towards poetry are critically engaged; although he establishes himself early in his career as a technical virtuoso, his subsequent works explore, in varied ways, both the power and the limitations of poetic writing.

The thesis begins with a consideration of the 1592 sonnet sequence Delia, paying particular attention to its motifs of repetition and transformation. These motifs exemplify the poetic concerns that are the heart and purpose of the sequence. The technical excellence of Delia is followed by questions about the relationship between text and reader in Delia’s companion piece The Complaint of Rosamond. This poem examines the fate of poetry when subject to the interpretation of readers, demonstrating the vulnerability of both authors and their texts. Daniel’s most ambitious poetic work, The Civil Wars, published between 1595 and 1609, ostensibly marks a transition from a focus on love to a focus on war, but, continuing with the absorption of Delia and Rosamond with ideas about poetry, The Civil Wars engages in debates about the relative values of poetry and history. Daniel explicitly champions history in verse over poetry, but in fact, often relies on poetic techniques in his epic. Musophilus (1599), a dialogue in verse, and the prose treatise A Defence of Ryme (1603) provide Daniel an opportunity to express his poetic attitudes more fully and directly. In these works, Daniel both develops his concerns about poetry and establishes the importance of a nationalist, humanist, and historically sensitive poetics.