Samuel Daniel
Poet and historian · United Kingdom · On the map · Writers · Lived 1562 to 1619 · aged 57
Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) was an English poet, playwright and historian in the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean eras. He was an innovator in a wide range of literary genres.
Samuel Daniel is read about 26 times a day, in 17 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 6 July 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
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Photos 9
John Florio, engraving by William Hole, 1611. Daniel became friends with Florio at Oxford in the 1580s and decades later contributed a dedicatory verse to Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays.
Portrait of Daniel's patron, Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, by Nicholas Hilliard, c. 1590. Daniel dedicated Delia and The Tragedy of Cleopatra to the Countess.
The Great Picture, a triptych commissioned in 1646 by Anne Clifford and attributed to Jan van Belcamp (1610-1653). It depicts Clifford as a girl at left and as a mature woman at right. The left panel includes a portrait of her childhood tutor, Samuel Daniel.
Memorial to Samuel Daniel at St George's Church, Beckington in Somerset
Frontispiece engraving for The Civil Wars (1609) by Thomas CocksonAbout this person
His best-known works are the sonnet cycle Delia, the epic poem The Civil Wars Between the Houses of Lancaster and York, the dialogue in verse Musophilus, and the essay on English poetry A Defence of Rhyme. He was considered one of the preeminent authors of his time, and his works had a significant influence on contemporary writers, including William Shakespeare. Daniel's writings continued to influence authors for centuries after his death, especially the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. C. S. Lewis called Daniel "the most interesting man of letters" whom the sixteenth century produced in England. George Eliot quoted from Musophilus, “Why should our pride make such a stir to be …”, uncredited, in Middlemarch
