Michael Drayton, Literary History and Historians in Verse

Abstract

In or around 1621, Michael Drayton penned his well-known assessment of fellow poet Samuel Daniel, whom he described as ‘too much Historian in verse’. This article investigates that dismissal, arguing that behind it lies a long-standing and consistent literary position. Drayton's vision was of a literature that combined both poetry and history. That vision had been presented first in the Heroicall Epistles of 1597, which opened by responding directly to Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond. The Epistles were innovative in applying the structure of Ovid's Heroides to the vernacular tradition of the Mirror for Magistrates. As a result, Drayton highlighted a newly explicit interaction between literary and historical texts. More dangerously, he also presented individual epistles as moral counsel for his patrons. These qualities made the Epistles an enormous popular success. Yet they are also likely to have caused offence, above all to the dedicatee of the first set of letters: Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Setting wider literary trends alongside Drayton's personal experience of patronage, this article offers a new perspective on the development and decline of history in verse.