Let you my mouth for honor’s farewell give:
That, in this office, weake my limmes may growe
Fainting on you, and fourth my soule may flowe.
As the deviations are confined to details, it is not necessary to repeat the account of the tragedy as a whole. These extracts will show that Garnier’s Marc Antoine was presented to the English public in a worthy dress; and the adequacy of the workmanship, the appeal to cultivated taste, the prestige of the great Countess as “Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,” her personal reputation among literary men, procured it immediate welcome and lasting acceptance. Fifteen years after its first publication it had passed through five editions, and must have been a familiar book to Elizabethan readers who cared for such wares. Moreover, it directly evoked an original English play that followed in part the same pattern and treated in part the same theme.
In 1594 appeared the Cleopatra of Samuel Daniel, dedicated to Lady Pembroke with very handsome acknowledgments of the stimulus he had received from her example and with much modest deprecation of the supplement he offered. His muse, he asserts, would not have digressed from the humble task of praising Delia,
had not thy well graced Antony
(Who all alone, having remained long)
Requir’d his Cleopatra’s company.
These words suggest that it was not written at once after the Countess’s translation: on the other hand there can have been no very long delay, as it was entered for publication in October, 1593. The first complete and authorised edition of Delia along with the Complaint of Rosamond, which Daniel does not mention, had been given to the world in 1592; and we may assume from his own words that the Cleopatra was the next venture of the young author just entering his thirties, and ambitious of a graver kind of fame than he had won by these amatorious exercises. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with the result, and perhaps from the outset his self-disparagement was not very genuine. His play was reprinted seven times before his death, and these editions show one complete revision and one thorough recast of the text. Poets are not wont to spend such pains on works that they do not value. The truth is that Daniel’s Cleopatra may take its place beside his subsequent Philotas among the best original Senecan tragedies that Elizabethan England produced. Its claims, of course, are almost exclusively literary and hardly at all theatrical, though some of the changes in the final version of 1607 seem meant to give a little mobility to the slow-paced scenes. But from first to last it depends on the elegiac and rhetorical qualities that characterise the whole school, and in its undivided attention to them recalls rather Jodelle’s Cléopatre Captive than Garnier’s Marc Antoine. The resemblance to the earlier drama is perhaps not accidental. The situation is precisely the same, for the story begins after the death of Antony, and concludes with the account of Cleopatra’s suicide. Thus, despite Daniel’s statement, his play is not in any true sense a sequel to the one which the Countess had rendered, nor is it the case, as his words insinuate, that in the Antonius Cleopatra still delayed to join her beloved: on the contrary we take leave of her as she is about to expire upon his corpse. So though his patroness’s translation may very well have suggested to him his heroine, it could not possibly prescribe to him his argument. And surely after Garnier had shown the more excellent way of treating the subject so as to include both the lovers, this truncated section of the history would not spontaneously occur to any dramatist as the material most proper for his needs. It seems more than likely that Daniel was acquainted with Jodelle’s play, and that the precedent it furnished, determined him in his not very happy selection of the final episode to the exclusion of all that went before. A careful comparison of the two Cleopatras supports this view. No doubt in general treatment they differ widely, and most of the coincidences in detail are due to both authors having exploited Plutarch’s narrative. But this is not true of all. There are some traits that are not to be accounted for by their common pedigree, but by direct transmission from the one to the other. Thus, to mention the most striking, in Jodelle Seleucus is made to express penitence for exposing the Queen’s misstatement about her treasure. There is no authority for this: yet in Daniel the new motif reappears. Of course it is not merely repeated without modification. In Jodelle it is to the chorus that the culprit unbosoms himself; in Daniel it is to Rodon, the false governor who has betrayed Caesarion, and who similarly and no less fictitiously is represented as full of remorse for his more heinous treason. But imitators frequently try in this fashion to vary or heighten the effect by duplicating the rôles they borrow; and Daniel has done so in a second instance, when he happened to get his suggestion from Garnier. In the Marc Antoine, as we saw, there is the sententious but quite superfluous figure of the philosopher Philostratus; Daniel retains him without giving him more to do, but places by his side the figure of the equally sententious and superfluous philosopher Arius. In Rodon we have just such another example of gemination. It is safe to say that the contrite Seleucus comes straight from the pages of Jodelle; and his presence, if there were any doubt, serves to establish Daniel’s connection with the first French Senecan in the vernacular.
But the Countess’s protégé differs from her not only in reverting to an elder model: he distinctly improves on her practice by substituting for her blank verse his own quatrains. The author of the Defence of Ryme showed a right instinct in this. Blank verse is doubtless the better dramatic measure, but these pseudo-Senecan pieces were lyric rather than dramatic, and it was not the most suitable for them. The justice of Daniel’s method is proved by its success. He not only carried the experiment successfully through for himself, which might have been a tour de force on the part of the “well-languaged” poet, but he imposed his metre on successors who were less skilled in managing it, like Sir William Alexander.