The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet 1578-1653

By: Bernard Capp

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Hardcover | 20 October 1994

At a Glance

Hardcover
228 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
14.7 x 22.2 x 2.0

Hardcover

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This is the first full study of a self-educated popular writer who carved out a pioneering role for himself as a `media celebrity' and became a national institution. Taylor chronicled his adventurous life and passed judgement on his age in a stream of shrewd and witty pamphlets, poems, and essays. His writings allow us to piece together the world of a London waterman over the space of forty years, from the reign of James I to the aftermath of the civil war. His ready wit, restless ambition and bonhomie soon made him a well-known figure in the Jacobean literary world and at the royal court. Claiming the fictitious office of `the King's Water-Poet', he fashioned a way of life that straddled the elite and popular worlds. Taylor published his thoughts - always trenchant - on everything from politics to needlework, from poetry to inland navigation, from religion and social criticism to bawdy jests. He was a more complex and contradictory figure than is often asumed: both hedonist and moralist, a cavalier and staunch Anglican with a puritanical taste for sermons and for armed struggle against the popish antichrist. He embodies many of the contradictions of a world that was soon to be, all to literally, at war with itself.

Industry Reviews

`Clearly written and tightly organised, it provides a model of sound argument based on an impressive range of reading...this short but thoughtful book makes a distinctive contribution to the social and cultural history of early modern England' Sixteenth Century Journal `Bernard Capp's informative new book analyzes the life and writings of one seventeenth-century "Amphibium," ... Taylor emerges from Capp's lucid, richly detailed study as a man who strove to create an identity for himself by negotiating the divided and distinguished worlds of early modern English society and culture. Literary scholars will be most interested by Capp's account of Taylor's struggle to gain respect as an author.' Marjorie Swann, University of Kansas, Albion, Winter '95

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