end to end. "Night" having summoned her son to delight the Court with a pageant, Somnus calls up a vision, and Iris, the heavenly messenger, is seen upon the mountain at the other end of the hall; she descends, and proceeds the whole length of the apartment to the Temple of Peace, where she summons the Sibyl and announces the approaching vision. The three Graces then appear upon the mountain-top, and are followed by the twelve goddesses; as they descend, music arises from satyrs who flit among the rocks and trees; and while the goddesses, with the queen, as Juno, at their head, slowly march to the Temple of Peace to present their offerings, the Graces sing. As the goddesses return they pause in the body of the hall, and perform a courtly dance-at first alone, and then in company with nobles whom they select from the royal party. Finally Iris announces the withdrawal of the vision, and, after lingering upon earth to dance once more, the goddesses ascend to their celestial home. This is one of four royal masques produced by Daniel, who was ultimately to be superseded in such work by Ben Jonson. The "Queenes Arcadia," called a pas Arcadia." toral tragi-comedy, was acted in another of "Queenes Wolsey's splendid halls. On the last day of the royal visit to Oxford, this adaptation of Guarini's "Pastor Fido" was represented at Christ's Church, and was pronounced "indeed very excellent and some parts exactly acted." It was printed in 1606. Tethys "Tethys Festival, or the Queenes Wake," was an entertainment for the creation of Henry Prince of Wales, then aged seventeen, as Knight of the Bath. It was acted by the best-known ladies of the Court, on June 5th, 1610, and was printed that year together with the whole "order and solemnitie of the creation." was considered highly successful. It should have been; for the Tritons and Naiads, the silks, and gold fringes and silver lace, together with the elaborate scenery by Inigo Jones, cost £1,636! It On February 3, 1613-14, at the queen's palace of Somerset House in the Strand, the best of Daniel's masques, "Hymens Trivmph," was acted. It was for "her Maiesties "Hymen's Triumph." magnificent intertainement of the Kings most excellent Maiestie, being at the Nuptials of the Lord Roxborough." An eye-witness states that "The entertainment was great, and cost the queen, they say, £3,000;" yet the annual deficit was then, historians tell us, about £100,000! It is added that "the pastorall by Samuel Daniel was solemn and dull, but perhaps better to be read than represented." That this is so may be gathered from the fact that Lamb chose his representative selection from this work, and that Coleridge, when he said, "Read Daniel, the admirable Daniel," specially mentioned the "Triumph of Hymen." Daniel, like Drayton, frequently corrected and collected his verse. He felt, he says, that it was the only inheritance that he should leave after him, and wrote "I may pull downe, raise and re-edifie, It is the building of my life." The first of these editions issued after the accession of James was that of 1605: "Certaine small poems lately printed." This contained one new poem, "Vllisses and the Daniel's Syren," and the tragedy of "Philotas," the latter being one of the two tragedies written by him. These are only remarkable for their close adherence to the style of Seneca, of which they are our only two exact examples. Both strictly preserve the unities of time and place, and each Act is introduced by a chorus. "Cleopatra. "Cleopatra," first published in 1594, was never acted, and was only written in deference to the expressed wish of the Countess of Pembroke as a companion to her play called "Antony " “Who all alone hauing remained long, Required his Cleopatras company." It represents the last few hours of the Egyptian queen's life at Alexandria, her death not being represented, but narrated by a "Nuntius." The comparison of such a play with Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra "-written, probably, two years after that of Daniel was published-would forcibly bring out the contrast between the Senecan tragedy as adopted in the classical French drama and that of England. "Philotas" was acted, and brought temporary "Philotas." trouble upon its author. It deals with a con spiracy against Alexander the Great in Persia, for which Philotas was tortured and put to death; and it pleased the minds of some to see in this an allusion to the recent rebellion of Essex. Daniel, therefore, wrote an apology for his play, as well as a lengthy letter on the subject to Lord Mountjoy, upon whose death in April, 1606, he afterwards produced some verse. Sensitive, ambitious for fame, and feeling at times that his reputation as a writer was not all that he desired, there is a plaintive note in Daniel's verse. At the age of forty-five, in the lines to Prince Henry prefixed to "Philotas" he declared "Yeeres hath done this wrong To make me write too much, and liue too long And all our labours are without successe For either favour or our vertue failes." Yet two years later, when he had become Groom of the Privy Chamber, he wrote in happier vein in the interesting lines before "Certain small workes "I know I shall be read among the rest So long as men speake English, and so long In his advancing years he betook himself to another form of honest industry, and, Fuller says, "turned husbandman." He rented the "Ridge," a farm near Beckington, in Wilts; there he did his latest literary work, and there he died, aged fifty-seven, in October, 1619. At Beckington Church he lies buried. It is in his sonnets alone that Daniel is really great, and Malone truly traced in him the "master" of Shakespeare as a sonnet-writer. In diction, imagery, and in the form of the sonnet-three alternately rhyming quatrains and a couplet -the resemblance is close. Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends" had been mentioned by Meres in 1598,"* and the opening sonnet of "The Passionate Pilgrim," published next year, was that afterwards numbered cxxxviii. in the collected edition issued in 1609. It speaks of the falsity of the lady of his love, and describes himself as already old at thirty-five. Another sonnet, also first published in this volume, is the interesting poem cxliv.— Shakespeare's Sonnets. "Two loves I have of comfort and despair, The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill." This has all the appearance of being written in the spirit of allegory prevalent at that day, and suggests an idea similar to that embodied by Plato in his illustration of the human soul with its black and white-winged steeds, or that represented by Marlowe in the good and bad angels that attend upon the fate of Faustus. All probability concurs to make us think that these were two of the sonnets referred to by Meres in the previous year; and the fact that they, and possibly others of a similar character, were circulated in 1598 and printed in 1599 tells heavily against their referring to any real facts, and supports the contention-which I consider the true one-that these two poems, as well as the *E. W." x. 368. whole group from cxxvii.-clii., of which they form so striking andtypical a portion, are as much works of pure imagination as we know sonnets clv. and clvi. to be. The 156 sonnets appeared in 1609 as "Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted. At London. By G. Eld for T. T., and are to be solde by William Apsley. 1609." The dedication signed by T. T., was addressed "To the onlie Begetter of these insuing Sonnets M. W. H." They fall naturally into three divisions, the last of which contains only two poems (clv. and clvi.); and these are but variations upon a theme derived ultimately from a Greek source.* Sonnets i.-cxxvi. form a connected series, dealing with a real or imaginary love for a man; while sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are disjecta membra referring to the passion for a "dark lady." † The first hundred and twenty-six sonnets tell a sufficiently clear story, and there can be no doubt that they, and the whole body of sonnets, were purposely arranged as they now stand. The suggested revised arrangements by writers like Bodenstedt, F. V. Hugo, and Stengel are quite futile. It must be noted, however, that even the first sequence is not perfect. Sonnet cxv. distinctly refers to a non-existent. sonnet-or sonnets-which had declared that the poet could not love his friend more dearly "Those lines that I before have writ do lie, Even those that said I could not love you dearer." No such statement is made in the existing sonnets, and * Herr Hertzberg, in the Jahrbuch of the German Shak. Soc., 1878, pp. 158-62, showed that these were founded on a poem by Marianus, a Byzantine Greek of probably 400-500 A.D. There were several Latin translations during the sixteenth century. † Mr. Tyler, who, like some other students, believes in the reality of this "dark lady," has endeavoured to identify her with a Mrs. Mary Fitton. (See Bibliography, under Shakespeare, “Sonnets.”) |