Samuel Daniel's Letter to Sir Thomas Egerton

Abstract

There is every reason to suppose that the letters of the poet Samuel Daniel, had they survived in greater numbers, would have illuminated considerably the poetics and perhaps even the politics of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. We have only to consider Daniel's career for a moment to realize just how important and numerous his contacts at court were. As a poet and courtier, he received the patronage and attention of the Pembroke family, the Essex circle, the earls of Salisbury and Somerset, and the ladies Bedford and Cumberland, and he was a privileged member of Queen Anne's personal household. As a scholar and historian, he was the intimate of Camden and certain of the Jacobean antiquarians, and he seems to have been on close terms with Cotton as well.' In some ways, perhaps because his social position was more clearly defined, he was closer to the noble, the rich and the great than even Donne,' and one could wish that a good selection of his private letters had come down to us. The loss of one set of correspondence is particularly unfortunate: in this, pace Jonson, Daniel is reported to have exchanged ideas with Fulke Greville about reforming the English court masque.3 To the disappointingly short list of Daniel's letters in total less than ten we may now add beyond all doubt the one addressed to Sir Thomas Egerton, and written around 1603. The text of this letter has been in print for almost two centuries, but scholars have been wary about accepting it as genuine since the letter itself could not be traced. In this journal in 1965, however, Cecil Seronsy disposed of the prevailing suspicion that the letter was yet another Collier forgery, and he argued, convincingly, that although the original document had not been traced, all the surviving evidence suggested that the text published in the late eighteenth century (by a descendant of Egerton) was an authentic one.4It is now possible to confirm that Seronsy's judgment was correct, for the autograph manuscript has been located among the papers in the possession of the Duke of Sutherland. The letter, a single sheet measuring 300 mm by 150 mm is written and signed in ink in Daniel's distinctive and attractive Italian court hand.5 On one side of the sheet, which has on it the remnants of a broken seal, Daniel has addressed the letter: