ABSTRACT
He could include from this glorious reign only the wretched conspiracy of Richard Earl of Cambridge, and that he treated summarily with incredible feebleness. But recognizing the poetic possibilities of the period Daniel began his Fourth Book [Text V] by raising the King's ghost to lament the lack of an English epic on himself and other English warriors of his age:
o what eternall matter here is found! Whence new immortailliads might proceed (6)
(cries the ghost, and) o that our times had had some sacred wight Whose wordes as happie as our swordes had bin To have prepar'd for us Tropheis aright Of undecaying frames t'have rested in. (8)
Writing a few years after Daniel Shakespeare was also conscious of the need for 'a Muse of fire, that would ascend I The
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.
