Daniel’s Imperial Survey

Abstract

Chapter 2 contrasts Spenser’s affinity for the miniature with Samuel Daniel’s denigration of it. In his laureate poems, Daniel attempted to undermine the cheap county maps that provided an alternative geographic imaginary to James I’s royal unification of England with Scotland. To do so, he borrowed from the language of the survey, a privileged testing-ground for translating the national topography into a broadly comprehensible set of signifiers. Daniel’s chapbooks the Panegyrike Congratulatorie (1603) and the 1607 Funerall Poem both reject the egalitarian principles of practical surveying to instead map for James a magisterial imperial state. This interpretation offers a corrective to existing scholarship on the poet as a populist nationalist by arguing that his works articulated a deeply hierarchical view of the realm. I contrast Daniel’s geographical elitism with John Norden’s accessible pocket-sized guides and surveying manuals circulating in the commonwealth culture of the Inns of Court.