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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Musophilus (talk | contribs) at 23:43, 30 January 2024 (→Editing Wikipedia Article on Samuel Daniel (2021): Reply). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Article in serious need of revision (2012)

The problems with this article are numerous, and it should at least receive some kind of warning for inaccuracy or stub until it is revised. Starting with the division into Early and Later Life, the article lacks structure. More problematically, its style is colloquial ("not Shakespeare's Avon" - WTF), and it presents pure conjecture as fact ("Shakespeare was one of the friends allowed to visit him" ! where does that come from?). Moreover, it cites and quotes from other works without giving due reference. Who is "Fuller"? Where does Coleridge praise Daniel? All this - I guess - is due to the material taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica, but since it also incorporates up-to-date references, and does never warn (i.e., "Hugh, writing in 1911 thought that, ..."), this article is hardly usable at all. Someone with knowledge on Daniel should revise this. Meanwhile, I've added a link to the better material on poetryfoundation.com biography. grovel (talk) 13:59, 14 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • I received my PhD from The University of Birmingham, having studied Samuel Daniel, and I'm sorry to say that I agree with your assessment. The best information currently out there on Daniel is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), which has an excellent article on Daniel by John Pitcher, the world's expert on Daniel. In the next couple of years, Pitcher is supposed to be publishing the first two volumes of a complete works of Daniel. That should help quite a bit. As I progress through my PhD (I just started) I intend to edit this article based on my dissertation. For now, I'll just leave it alone.
  • If there are any other Daniel enthusiasts who follow this page, please let me know. Perhaps we can find a forum for having discussions about Daniel. In my view he was a major poet of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period who should be as well known as Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson. Musophilus (talk) 19:44, 23 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. I am also a PhD student of English Renaissance literature and Daniel was not the first English poet to use terza rima. Wyatt had used it for his satires some 50 years prior. And of course the Countess of Pembroke herself, in her translation of Petrarch's Trionfi, i.e. Triumph of Death. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jorgebenjor (talk • contribs) 23:03, 28 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Can the PhD students answer Grovel's questions about the authority for saying Shakespeare visited Daniel and who Fuller is? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.112.126.125 (talk) 14:55, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Fuller is Thomas Fuller, who published in 1662 a History of the Worthies of England. An interesting and enjoyable, but not very reliable, source. The story about Shakespeare visiting Daniel is most likely apocryphal. I have not found any reliable source for it and the earliest reference I have found to it is in an 1899 article in Archaeological Journal by Albert Harthshorne, "Samuel Daniel and Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery". Musophilus (talk) 04:04, 27 October 2017 (UTC) Musophilus[reply]

Editing Wikipedia Article on Samuel Daniel (2021)

I have completely rewritten this article on Samuel Daniel, as the prior one was incomplete and inaccurate. I hope that no one minds, but if anyone is missing something that was in the prior article, let me know and I will try to put it back. I kept a copy of the article as it existed before I started editing it. In any case, please do feel free to offer me feedback on the article and suggestions for changes/corrections. Or feel free to just go make revisions yourself. This is my first time writing a Wikipedia article, so I am very open to feedback. Musophilus (talk) 20:15, 23 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • @Musophilus: I was going to link Foster, but my scan indicates p. 371, rather than p. 361 as in the article. My sense is that this is just a typo in the article's citation, in which case I'll go ahead and put the link into the ref and fix the page in the citation. But I wanted to double-check with you in case this is, say, an alternative edition problem. Phil wink (talk) 18:17, 24 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Really nice job! HoneyWest4 (talk) 13:46, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! Musophilus (talk) 23:43, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Linking sources

Musophilus: As you've probably noticed, I've linked a few of your references to scans at JSTOR and Internet Archive. For a few of your references, I've only found scans of a different edition of the source. For example, I've found IA scans of Duncan-Jones's edition of Sonnets in the 1997 and 2001 printings (which I am aware have slightly different content from your cited edition). My suggestion is that I collect these "questionable edition" links here on the talk page, then you evaluate if they're suitable for the citations you require, and if so, move them back to the main space. Now, you've already located reliable sources and cited them properly, so you're under absolutely no obligation to play my little game. But if you're willing, I think the article will be a little more useful to any reader who might wish to follow your tracks, or to read further. Cheers. Phil wink (talk) 23:23, 25 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Phil wink, I think your suggestion is a fine one. If you find a scanned version you can either post it here and I will make sure to resolve any differences, or just go ahead and put the link into the article and note your change what you've done. Again, I'll make sure to resolve any differences. Thanks for the suggestion. In future I will try to do a more thorough search for online scans (ones that do not infringe copyright issues) that will make my articles/edits more useful.Musophilus (talk) 00:16, 26 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I've put my initial finds below, and expect to add more soon. I've not only added links, but also updated publication info/isbn/oclc as appropriate to the linked edition. Of course, if you're willing to double-check my work on that, 4 eyes are better than 2. I've begun each entry with a note showing the change of years between your original and my linked edition; this note of course is just for your benefit, and should not be brought over to the main space. I have not verified pages, since you'll have to review the content anyway. If you have any doubt about the suitability of any of these new references you should of course reject them, or demand that I fix whatever's wrong. Better that readers fail to get a link than that your work is compromised.
Phil wink, I adopted your version of Duncan-Jones, which worked fine. Even same pagination. I also took the Eliot, though the pages had to change. But I'm afraid the alternate version of Forker really won't work. It's a completely different edition, with very different commentary, and does not include the full discussion of Shakespeare's sources. I'll poke around and see if I can find a version of the later Arden edition available online and use that if I can. Thanks again for the thorough review.Musophilus (talk) 03:06, 26 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I've now gone through the entire bibliography as it currently exists (doing lookups at Internet Archive and JSTOR, and occasionally WorldCat), so I believe that Gill (2000/2011) below will be the final potentially altered edition you'll have to review. Thanks. Phil wink (talk) 16:19, 27 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for all your work on searching out these online editions available. I've not been a big user of archive.org and did not realize they had so much available there. Now, knowing that they do, I will be sure to see whether some version of my sources are available there.Musophilus (talk) 18:52, 27 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • [2010-->1997 (first ed)] Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ed. (1997). Shakespeare's Sonnets. Arden Shakespeare. ISBN 0-17-443473-1. OCLC 1112912593.
  • [1986-->1933 (first ed) rpt 1959] Eliot, T.S. (1933). The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. London: Faber and Faber. pp. 29–44. OCLC 855921947.
  • [2002-->1998] Forker, Charles R., ed. (1998). King Richard II. London: The Athlone Press. ISBN 0-485-81002-6. OCLC 906744572.

PDFs of Samuel Daniel's publications though 1623

As becomes clear in the article, there is an interesting and complex relationship between Daniel's works and his publications. The main article, I believe, presents the correct frame, that is, listing and describing the works. However, in case, either here or in a future article, the publications should need more elucidation, below are all the publications through 1623 that I found at Internet Archive. Obviously, this list is very partial. I intended to supplement these with Google Books, but found no additional books there. Phil wink (talk) 03:53, 29 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

In addition to the items posted above, the list included at The Online Books Page, which is linked in the External Links list in the article, includes alternate copies of facsimiles of some of the items in the list (especially those available at Penn) and a number of HTML versions available at EEBO TCP.Musophilus (talk) 12:06, 29 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Brackets around [the sixteenth]

@Phil wink: I am confused by your change to the lead section, especially the aspect that ends up leaving brackets around [the sixteenth]. First off, I had put in the year and title of the C.S.Lewis book for a number of reasons. Stylistically, I thought that the opening section flowed better by putting something in between the names "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth" and "C.S. Lewis", so that it looked less like a list of the three of them together. If one is reading quickly, in the current version I believe it does come across as one continuous list. Additionally, I wanted to make clear that the Lewis quote was from the 20th century (not everyone knows who Lewis is and for those who do, not everyone knows when he wrote) and to make clear that the quote came from a book of criticism on English Literature. Many people do not know that Lewis wrote literary criticism and they associate him, of course, mostly with his fantasy series. In any case, those are stylistic issues and if you believe that taking the title and year out make the lead section more user friendly or more conforming to WP guidelines, I'm happy to let that stand.

More importantly, I do not think it is correct to show the sentence as you have shown it: C.S. Lewis called Daniel "the most interesting man of letters whom [the sixteenth] century produced in England." The actual original quote from Lewis is: "the most interesting man of letters whom that century produced in England." If we do not put back the title of the book, which makes clear that he is referring to the sixteenth century, then I think the sentence should read using one of the choices below:

  • C.S. Lewis called Daniel "the most interesting man of letters whom that [the sixteenth] century produced in England."
  • C.S. Lewis called Daniel "the most interesting man of letters whom" the sixteenth "century produced in England."

As the concluding sentence of the lead paragraph, I see this as a fairly important sentence. So I would like to leave it as clear and uncluttered as possible. My preference is to put back the name of the book (and year) and leave it as it was. If that is considered awkward for some reason, my next favorite choice is the second one I've shown above. Although a bit cluttered with extra quotation marks, it does not include the brackets that look quite awkward to me and I think are daunting to the average reader, almost warning them that this is going to be a complicated, obscure, and obtuse article (which, unfortunately by necessity, in some ways it is).

Thoughts?

Looks like we're approaching this from different perspectives; I understand your arguments, but they're not especially persuasive to me, and I expect the reverse will be true. If that's the case (barring third party input, which I don't expect), then I'd defer to you as the expert and by far chief contributor.
Regarding my second edit: at that time, the sentence included "the sixteenth" without any indication of editorial intervention, so it constituted a misquote that shouldn't stand. But what should stand?
  1. I removed the source information because, in a very brief and high-level intro, I found it strange to spend 8% of the text on bibliographic information of a book not written by the article's subject. The quote is valuable, as showing notability; I felt that foregrounding a specific book that will be unknown and unimportant to most readers would not burnish that notability. Then (we both agree) if that deletion is made, the quote itself needs intervention.
  2. My chosen intervention -- replacing "that" with "[the sixteenth]" -- seems so natural to me, it's hard to know what argument to make for it. As a reader, the second choice above -- splitting the quote in 2 -- makes this simple sentence somewhat difficult to parse on the first go-through, and makes me wonder what the hell was going on with the original quote. Like, is this hiding the fact the Lewis actually wrote "...whom that talentless and boring century produced..."? The first choice above -- supplementing "that" rather than replacing it -- is at least easily comprehensible; but once an intervention is decided, I just don't see a point in keeping "that" which renders the resulting sentence needlessly more complex. Also, in my experience, it is simply standard practice in cases like this to replace rather than supplement. Indeed WP:Manual of Style#Original wording backs me up here with an example that is exactly congruent. Now, there's a limit to how much I can lean on the MOS, because this is given as an example of good practice, not as an exclusive method of practice.
I fear my argument cleaves pretty close to "what you did is weird, and what I did is normal", which is a bit ungenerous and which, if you knew me better, you'd find risible on its face. But there it is. I'll leave the decision up to you. Don't worry; I'm not an edit warrior. Cheers. Phil wink (talk) 14:06, 29 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Take a look and see what you think of my latest version. To me it is the most readable and is not technically wrong, although the second half of the sentence is much closer to a quote than a paraphrase. I like the way it emphasizes the aspect of the quote that I am really referring to. If you're uncomfortable with the second half being so close to a quote but not including quotation marks, I'll turn it into a paraphrase. I actually started doign that, but I really liked Lewis's wording.Musophilus (talk) 17:45, 29 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Masques

Currently, the Works section seems pretty inclusive, but I notice it does not include The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses or Tethys' Festival, which to me seem notable enough to list, especially since they are pieces that were actually produced. NB: they both in fact already have WP entries, which I've now linked. Phil wink (talk) 18:04, 30 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for catching that. I was hesitant to make the list any longer, but I agree with your assessment.Musophilus (talk) 18:38, 30 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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