The Poetry of Sir John Davies

Abstract

THERE is no justification at present for calling attention to Sir John 1 Davies as a neglected poet, or for claiming any higher position for him than he now enjoys. As the author of Nosce teipsum he has always had a certain repute, and more recently Orchestra has come into prominence as an aid to the exposition of the Elizabethan world picture. We are in no danger of overlooking Davies or of mistaking his stature: the danger is that we may mistake the kind of poet that he was. The isolation of Orchestra and Nosce teipsum from the rest of his work is tending to place Davies' poetry in a false perspective, and even to promote the misinterpretation of these two poems themselves. When he published the last edition of his verse in I 622, Davies had completed sixteen years as solicitor-general for Ireland, had sat as a member of the House of Commons, and was shortly to be appointed chief justice. The poems themselves, however, had been written a quarter of a century earlier, in his days as a courtier and a law-student, before he settled down to a serious career. Davies was not a professional poet, nor did he continue to write verse beyond his early thirties. Perhaps the best way of coming to terms with his work is to approach it through the poems excluded from the I622 collection. Davies' earliest writing is to be found in the Epigrammes published along with Marlowe's translation of Ovids Elegies, and ordered to be burnt by the decree of the archbishop of Canterbury on June I, 1599. The Epigrammes belong to Davies' period at the Middle Temple in the early nineties, topical allusions stamping several of them as written about I 594.1 Defining an epigram as that