Unwresting the Past: The Poetics and Politics of Samuel Daniel's 1595 Civil Wars

Abstract

abstract:This essay reads the 1595 edition of Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars in the context of the unsettled succession and its impact on the career of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Daniel rejected the imitative logic of monarchical-republican historiography in favor of a rhetorical strategy that rendered the past less "real" than notional. He reconfigured Sidneian categories of understanding and structures of feeling, and redeployed figures of speech—prosopopeia and prosopographia—designated as carriers of energeia, to replace reading for imitation with a historiographical poetics that diffuses agency while retaining moral responsibility.