Daniel's sonnet series has been by many regarded as the prototype of
Shakespeare's. It is true that several of Daniel's themes are repeated
in the cycle composed by the greater poet. The ideas of immortality in
verse, the transitoriness of beauty, the assurances of truth, the
humility and the woes of the lover, the pain of separation and the
comfort of night thoughts, shape the mood of both poets. But these
motives are also found in the pages of many other sonneteers of the
time. All these devotees seem to have had a storehouse of poetic
conceits which they held in common, and from which each poet had the
right to draw materials to use in his own way. In fact Shakespeare's
sonnets are full of echoes from the voices of Sidney, Constable, Davies,
Lodge, Watson, Drayton and Barnes, as well as from that mellifluous one
of Daniel; and these poetic conceits were tossed forth in the first
place by the Italian sonnet makers, led by Petrarch. It is evident that
Daniel's _Petrarch_ has been well-thumbed. Wood says that Daniel left
Oxford without a degree because "his geny" was "more prone to easier and
smoother studies than in pecking and hewing at logic," and we may
believe that Italian was one of these smoother studies. His translation
of Paolo Giovi's work on Emblems, which was published in 1585, was
doubtless one fruit of this study, a work that since it took him into
the very realm of the _concetti_, was to be a potent influence upon his
mental growth. The main theme, the cruelty of the Fair, is the same as
that of Petrarch. Daniel follows this master in making the vale echo
with his sighs, in appealing to her hand and cruel bosom for mercy, in
recounting the number of years he has worshipped her and honored her
with sonnets on which he is depending for immortal fame, in upbraiding
her for her devotion to the mirror rather than to him, and for ensnaring
him with the golden net of her hair and transpiercing him with the
darts from her crystalline eyes. In some of Petrarch's nobler flights
Daniel does not follow; the higher teachings of love are not revealed to
him, the step from human to divine he does not take; yet in the main,
the features of the earlier poet re-appear in Daniel's verse, as they do
in most of his fellow-sonneteers, including Shakespeare.
It is also not best to give too much weight to the opinion that
Shakespeare has been over-influenced by Daniel in the adoption of the
quatrain and couplet structure. The whole period from Wyatt to
Shakespeare shows a slow and steady mastery of the native over the
foreign tendency. The change was not a sudden leap on the part of Daniel
and Shakespeare, but a gradual growth occupying a half century and
culminating in the English form. But if we should feel convinced that
Shakespeare's memory was influenced by the sound of Daniel's cadences,
this need not be considered discreditable to Shakespeare. Daniel's lines
are smooth and melodious, and he was perhaps as great a master of the
technique of rhyme as was Shakespeare. If we take the sonnets of both
poets as criterion, the careful Daniel uses twice as many rhyme colours
as Shakespeare, while Shakespeare repeats rhymes twice as often as
Daniel. If double rhymes find less favor with the captious, we admit
that Daniel has a third more than Shakespeare has, but again Shakespeare
uses twice as many rhymes on syllables with secondary stress as does
Daniel, and Shakespeare's bad rhymes are as bad as Daniel's and more
frequent.
Daniel's poetic powers were appreciated to the full in his time. To his
contemporaries he was the "well languaged," the "sharp conceited," one
by whose verse Rosamond was eternised, one who "divinely sonnetted his
Delia." When Judicio in _The Return from Parnassus_ makes his inventory
of poet's qualities, in giving his judgment on Daniel, he evidently has
the _Delia_ in mind.
"Sweet honey-dropping Daniel doth wage
War with the proudest big Italian
That melts his heart in sugared sonnetting."
If Jonson, Daniel's rival as maker of masques for the Court, proclaimed
him a good honest man but no poet, Spenser generously said he surpassed
"all that afore him came;" and scarcely one of the more prominent of his
contemporaries failed to address compliments to him. When Daniel was
gentleman extraordinary and groom of the privy chamber to Anne,
Queen-consort to James I., the Queen is said to have been a "favourer
and encourager of his muse;" and his high social position made it easy
for less favoured aspirants to praise him. But the perspective of time
brings a more balanced judgment. While Lowell finds in the fact that
Daniel was held in high esteem by his contemporaries a proof that noble
diction was appreciated then as now, and while he admits that Daniel
refined our tongue, yet he decided that Daniel had the thinking and
languaging parts of a poet's outfit but lacked the higher creative gift.
We shall find Daniel at his best, not when in prosaic soberness he sings
"... the civil wars, tumultuous broils,
And bloody factions of a mighty land."
not when he is framing stilted tragedies with chorus and declamation in
the grand Senecan manner, not in his complimentary addresses to lords,
ladies and royalty, nor in the classic masques and philosophical
dialogue, but in the less ambitious poems of _Delia_ and _Rosamond_,
especially in such a sonnet as "Care-charmer Sleep," where we come more
near to hearing a human heart beat than in any of the others. It is not
a mighty heart, but it is one that is gentle, tender and pure.
A glance at the life of Daniel gives opportunity for an easy conjecture
as to the personality of the lady honoured under the name of Delia. At
seventeen Daniel was at Oxford, and finished a three years' residence at
Magdalen College in 1582. After a visit to Italy, he became established
at Wilton as tutor to the sons of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. To
those early days at Wilton the poet refers, when in 1603 he dedicates
his _Defense of Rhyme_ to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, his former
pupil. In the introduction to this fine essay Daniel declares that in
regard to his poetic studies he was "first encouraged and framed
thereunto by your most worthy and honourable mother, and received the
first notion for the formal ordering of those compositions at Wilton
which I must ever acknowledge as my best school, and thereof always am
to hold a feeling and grateful memory." At this time the home of the
Herberts at Wilton was a literary centre. The Countess was herself an
industrious author, and the subject of innumerable dedicatory addresses.
She seems to have been as beautiful as she was gracious and gifted. In
the Penshurst picture we see her in extreme youth. The long oval and
delicate chiselling of the Sidney face are expressed in their finest
perfection, and justify the resemblance, found by Spenser, to "her
brother dear." The soft hair is of the same golden-brown as his, the
colour her eldest son inherited, and which Shakespeare is said to have
described in his figure of the marjoram-buds. In the picture by
Gheeraedts at the National Portrait Gallery, painted in 1614, she has
lost little of her youthful beauty, but has added the special graces of
maturity. The hair is still a rich brown. A thoughtful soul sits
brooding behind those attentive eyes--a soul that seems to wish to ask
the universal unanswerable questions, one that has grappled with doubt
and struggled with environing circumstance, but has not yet consented to
be baffled. The face is modern and complex. This accomplished lady
received at Wilton the most distinguished people of her time. Her guests
included Spenser, Raleigh, probably Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Inigo
Jones, Sir John Harrington, Dr. Donne, and many more; and the Countess's
_Pastoral Dialogue in Praise of Astraea_ was probably written in honour
of a visit from the Queen herself. It would perhaps be strange if the
young poet did not surround the personality of this fascinating
patroness with a romantic halo and feel that his poetic fame was linked
with hers. The Delia of the sonnets has all the excellencies that a
sonnet-honoured lady should have, including locks of gold. But the fact
that the poet has slyly changed the word "amber" to "snary" in sonnet
xiv., and "golden" to "sable" in sonnet xxxviii., looks as if he desired
to shield her personality from too blunt a guess. However, many hints
are given; she lives in the "joyful North," in "fair Albion;" she is
"The eternal wonder of our happy Isle."