Benefiting from the Book: The Oxford Edition of Samuel Daniel

Abstract

It was Samuel Daniel himself, in his mid-forties, who declared that man is a tree whose fruit ripens late.[1] This, we should recall, is from a writer who, despite the encouragement and practical assistance of royal and aristocratic patrons, friends, and readers, never quite ripened fully enough to complete his most ambitious projects, the epic poem, The Civil Wars, and his history, written in prose, of medieval English kings.[2] Perhaps there is a warning in this for Daniel's modern editors, five of whom since the last war (in Oxford, Cambridge, London, Cornell, and New York) have given up (or barely started) the task of preparing a full scale scholarly edition of the poems and plays. One editor lost his books, working papers, and collations, indeed everything in a terrible house fire, while another received such a cool response from the reviewers of the one major Daniel volume he did manage to finish that neither he nor his publisher could summon the necessary conviction to press on. Yet another editor, although he drew together the best private collection of Daniel's early editions and established sound principles for the shape and detail needed in the modern scholarly edition, first lost his sight in one eye and then lost the energy and commitment to the duller (but, he acknowledged) essential bibliographical tasks to be undertaken for this edition (among them, collation for stop-press corrections, and page-by-page examination of the hundreds of Daniel books that have survived). Only stubbornness and pride (to be personal for a moment) and an enduring sense (as the late John Buxton, the last of these editors, put it) that Samuel Daniel really is the last major Elizabethan poet still to be edited, have saved me, several times over, from the same decision to give up editing his work. The one thing I am not prepared to lose, I suppose, is face. In truth, very large editorial projects like this one do need collaboration and different forms of expertise to get them finished, or at least to get them finished in a lifetime. I am relieved to say, however, that the Oxford edition is now well advanced in every area. The progress report that follows will be of interest, I hope, especially to those people who have helped me to reach this last, if not quite final stage of the work.[3] The history of editing and not editing Daniel begins much earlier than the twentieth century. In April 1856, for example, the barrister, scholar, and editor William Hazlitt the younger (1811-93), the son of William Hazlitt the poet and critic, wrote a short letter from his home in Chelsea to Mr John Morris of Belvedere in the City of Bath: Sir, Having in contemplation a new edition of the Plays & Poems of Samuel Daniel, & having been informed that about a year since, a selection from Daniel's writings was published at Bath under your superintendence, I am induced to take the liberty of inquiring whether you are at present aware of any quarter, in which a copy of your edition could be procured, as I am very desirous of looking over it. Morris's was a limited edition, so he could not or perhaps would not send Hazlitt the copy he was fishing for. A few days later, though, Hazlitt did write him a polite thank you note, and he added, just a little grandly, 'I have in my possession a copy of the edition of 1718, which formerly belonged to my fathers' [sic] very old friend Charles Lamb. It has MSS notes by himself & by S T Coleridge & I doubt not that I shall find it useful. Should you be acquainted with any farther facts touching the works or personal history of S.D. you wd perhaps not object to communicate them to me.'[4] There is no sign that Hazlitt ever got anything of interest from John Morris, and he certainly did not produce any edition of Daniel, but his copy of the anonymous two-volume edition, The Poetical Works of Mr Samuel Daniel (1718), which was Charles Lamb's copy with Coleridge's notes, has fortunately survived in the Houghton Library at Harvard. …