Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/290

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

hall, belike not worth begging', there may conceivably be an allusion to attempts to preserve the Porter's Hall theatre from destruction in the latter year. In any case, Daborne is not likely to have written the play after he took orders.

Doubtful and Lost Plays

The Henslowe correspondence appears to show Daborne as engaged between 17 April 1613 and 2 April 1614 on the following plays:

(a) Machiavel and the Devil (17 April-c. 25 June 1613), possibly, according to Fleay and Greg, Henslowe, ii. 152, based on the old Machiavel revived by Strange's men in 1592.

(b) The Arraignment of London, probably identical with The Bellman of London (5 June-9 Dec. 1613), with Cyril Tourneur, possibly, as Greg, Henslowe Papers, 75, suggests, based on Dekker's tract, The Bellman of London (1608).

(c) An unnamed play with Field, Massinger, and Fletcher, the subject of undated correspondence (Henslowe Papers, 65 and possibly 70, 84) and possibly also of dated letters of July 1613 (H. P. 74).

(d) The Owl (9 Dec. 1613-28 March 1614). A comedy of this name is in Archer's list of 1656, but Greg, Masques, xcv, thinks that Jonson's Mask of Owls may be meant.

(e) The She Saint (2 April 1614).

Daborne has been suggested as a contributor to the Cupid's Revenge, Faithful Friends, Honest Man's Fortune, Thierry and Theodoret, and later plays of the Beaumont (q.v.) and Fletcher series, and attempts have been made to identify more than one of these with (c) above.


SAMUEL DANIEL (c. 1563-1619).

Daniel was born in Somerset, probably near Taunton, about 1563. His father is said to have been John Daniel, a musician; he certainly had a brother John, of the same profession. In 1579 he entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, but took no degree. He visited France about January 1585 and sent an account of political affairs from the Rue St. Jacques to Walsingham in the following March (S. P. F. xix. 388). His first work was a translation of the Imprese of Paulus Jovius (1585). In 1586 he served Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in Paris, and as a young man visited Italy. He was domesticated at Wilton, and under the patronage of Mary, Lady Pembroke, wrote his sonnets to Delia, the publication of which, partial in 1591 and complete in 1592, gave him a considerable reputation as a poet. The attempt of Fleay, i. 86, to identify Delia with Elizabeth Carey, daughter of Sir George Carey, afterwards Lord Hunsdon, breaks down. Nashe in The Terrors of the Night (1594, ed. McKerrow, i. 342) calls her a 'second Delia', and obviously the first was not, as Fleay suggests, Queen Elizabeth, but the heroine of the sonnets. Delia dwelt on an Avon, but the fact that in 1602 Lord Hunsdon took the waters at Bath does not give him a seat on the Avon there. Lady Pembroke's Octavia (q.v.) inspired Daniel's book-drama Cleopatra (1594). Other