Samuel Daniel's Use of Sources in The Civil Wars

The complex structure and intellectual background of Samuel Daniel's unfinished epic, The Civil Wars, are frequently attested but until now have been only unevenly explored. The subject of The Civil Wars-the deposition of Richard II, and the subsequent intestine wars which afflicted England for much of the fifteenth century-evidently held great interest for late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, as Shakespeare's two historical tetralogies and Sir John Hayward's History of Henry IV, as well as The Civil Wars, amply demonstrate. The task of evaluating Daniel's treatment of his subject is rendered especially difficult by two factors: the various stages of revision to the poem, documented in the extant manuscripts and the several printed editions between 1595 and 1609, and the poet's use of numerous source documents in producing the "matter" of The Civil Wars.¹ While most critics of the poem are aware of both these factors, it is not uncommon even for the most judicious commentaries on The Civil Wars to be negligent or, at best, inconsistent in taking them into account. Thus Henry A. Kelly's summary of the poem, which for the most part carefully distinguishes between three different printed editions and the manuscript of books 1-2, errs in implying that there is no fresh statement of providentialism in editions of The Civil Wars after 1595, and despite his concern elsewhere in the same book to evaluate other sixteenth-century accounts of Richard II's deposition, has scarcely a sentence on Daniel's selection or interpretation of source material.² Comparably, Richard McCoy's section on The Civil Wars in The Rites of Knighthood acknowledges Daniel's use of chronicle sources, but in his discussion of the poem he makes no reference to any source other than Lucan's Pharsalia.³ Omissions such as these matter. Critics who fail to take account of Daniel's extensive revisions to The Civil Wars are apt to attribute to the poem a consistency-or, to put it less generously, a static tone and quality-which the sheer length of time over which it was composed might at least call into question. Failure to read The Civil Wars against its sources also creates a seriously misleading impression. Without reference to the sources, it becomes difficult to assess the extent and significance of Daniel's historiographical innovations. Alternatively, Daniel may be given misplaced credit for aspects of the narrative which largely reproduce the received opinion of his time. The historical and ideological positioning of The Civil Wars becomes obscured.

The revisions to The Civil Wars are already available to interested readers in the endnotes to Laurence Michel's edition of the poem.⁴ Michel's edition, however, is rather less consistent in annotating Daniel's use of sources, and his introductory discussion of the issue is brief and inadequate.⁵ This article, based on a careful reading of all texts of The Civil Wars against its main source documents, begins the task of mapping out the main patterns and anomalies in Daniel's use of sources. It should be stressed at the outset that this survey makes no claim to be exhaustive. It focuses strictly on one category among the sources, the chronicle histories, excluding from consideration the more ideological sources such as Machiavelli, Bodin and Le Roy.⁶ It also largely excludes Daniel's use of Lucan's Pharsalia, which I have discussed elsewhere.⁷ It does, however, refer to Shakespeare in a few instances where Shakespeare's history plays seem likely to have influenced Daniel's portrayal of events.⁸ Moreover, as I will argue, a more informed understanding of Daniel's use of the chronicles will also help to clarify the vexed issue of the relationship between The Civil Wars and Shakespeare's second historical tetralogy, and will thus cast light on Shakespeare's historiography as well as Daniel's.⁹

The tradition of obscuring Daniel's use of sources in The Civil Wars begins with Daniel himself. His one explicit discussion of the subject occurs in the 1609 edition of the...