About

There is a pressing need for a website devoted to the Elizabethan writer Samuel Daniel and his brother, the lute composer John Danyel. This much became clear in the two-day conference on Daniel in the Royal College of Music in London in September 2015. Daniel is well-known as a poet, but he was also a distinguished dramatist, critic and translator and a historian of the first order. His brother John wrote music and songs that are considered second only to John Dowland’s very best pieces.

The quality and complexity of Daniel’s work was rediscovered in the twentieth century, along with a large number of new poems, manuscripts and life documents. In the course of establishing a definitive text of Daniel’s poems and plays (for the OUP multi volume original spelling critical edition), John Pitcher has found a great deal of evidence about Daniel’s central place in the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts and elite society.

The aim of the website is threefold: to gather into one place a working resource that in time will catalogue all that’s known about the Daniel brothers; to provide an up to date bibliography of scholarly writing on the brothers, continuing, supplementing and correcting the existing bibliographies; and to provide a platform for large past, current and new projects associated with the brothers.

Pitcher will supply most of the existing materials on the Daniel brothers, and will work with other Daniel scholars to oversee the bibliographies and new research. Chris Stamatakis will be in charge of the bibliographies. Special new sections—on Danyel’s music, and Daniel and the French and Italians—will be managed by specialists. Yasmin Arshad was the main organizer of the Daniel Conference in 2015. Her own work on Daniel and Lady Anne Clifford, and on mounting the production of Cleopatra, provide her with the experience to coordinate the different activities on this website.

This is an ambitious project, and the contents for this site are currently being worked on. The project is generously supported by UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, the UCL English Department, and UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. The site has been built by Laura Martinez as part of her MA in Digital Humanities work placement.