Samuel Daniel, _The Civil Wars_, ed. Michel

An epic poem about what we got used to calling the Wars of the Roses, composed mainly in the 1590s--about 900 ottava rima stanzas in eight (of a projected twelve) books. It wouldn't make most people's summer reading list, but I have had a vague hankering to read this for years. Reading Caleb Crain's Overthrow, in which one of the characters is working on a dissertation on the poem, did the trick for me. This is the summer I read The Civil Wars. 

And it is great. I am baffled why it is not better known, more widely read; not only is it not in print (aside from "on demand" services), but it does not even have a Wikipedia entry. I mean...even City of Dreadful Night has a Wikipedia entry.

It covers many of the same figures and events as Shakespeare's two historical tetralogies, from the deposition of Richard II to Edward the IV's surprise marriage to Elizabeth Woodville (since Daniel's poem is unfinished, we don't get the battle of Tewksbury, the death of Henry VI, or anything at all about the Duke of Gloucester/Richard III). A great deal of the scholarship on Daniel addresses Shakespeare's debt to the early books of Daniel's poem, especially in Richard II and both parts of Henry IV; some of the scholarship argues that the later books of Daniel's poem were influenced by Shakespeare's early plays about Henry VI.

You know what, though? It's a great poem even if you don't get into the weeds of who influenced whom. For one thing, the narrative line could be the archetype for Game of Thrones--a few closely-related families scheming and lying and maneuvering, betraying and making war on each other to seize power.

But beyond that, Daniel has a number of (it seems to me) astute observations on the politics of monarchy. Is having a legitimate but incapable king better or worse than having an illegitimate but capable one? Might one be a good, even saintly man but a terrible king precisely by virtue of one's goodness and saintliness?

Or try this, stanza 31 of the eighth book, the last Daniel completed (the subject of the verb "beholds" is the beleaguered Henry VI):

   Beholds there, what a poore distresséd thing
A King without a people was: and whence
The glory of that Mightinesse doth spring,
That over-spreds (with such a reverence)
This under-world: whence comes this furnishing
And all this splendor of Magnificence:
He sees, what chayre so-ever Monarch sate
Upon, on Earth, the People was the state.

Interesting, no? Not exactly a full-blown statement that the government's power derives from the consent of the governed, but a step in that direction. I need to look around in the more recent Daniel scholarship a bit, because I think Crain's fictional grad student was on to something.