Sir John Davies (1569 – 1626) not to be confused with his contemporaneous poet and namesake, John Davies of Hereford, was an English poet, lawyer, and politician who was appointed Attorney General for Ireland and formulated many of the legal principles that underpinned the British Empire. He was baptised at Tisbury in Wiltshire. His father, Edward, was of Welsh descent, and his mother, Mary, came from a Wiltshire landed family. He was educated at Winchester College for four years, during which he developed an interest in literature. At the age of sixteen he attended Queen’s College, Oxford, where he stayed for just eighteen months, with most historians questioning whether he received a degree. He seems to have sown some wild oats there. As his nineteenth century biographer and editor, Alexander Grosart puts it, I fear that with the death of his lady-mother there ensued a full plunge into the frivolities and gaities of the University and Inns of Court society… He was fast of tongue and ribald of wit, with a dash of provocative sarcasm. Davies spent some time at New Inn after his departure from Oxford and it was at this point that he decided to pursue a career in law.
In 1588 he enrolled in the Middle Temple, where he did well academically, although suffering constant reprimands for his behaviour which eventually cost him his enrolment. In 1594 Davies’s poetry was admired by Queen Elizabeth who wished him to continue his study of law at the Middle Temple. In the following year, his poem, Orchestra, was published. He was called to the bar in July 1595.
In February, 1598, he was disbarred for the offence of entering the dining hall of the Inns in the company of two swordsmen and striking one Richard Martin (a noted wit who had insulted him in public) with a cudgel. Again, Grosart relates Davies came into the Hall with his hat on, armed with a dagger, and attended by two persons with swords. Master Martin was seated at dinner at the Barristers’ Table. Davies pulling a bastinado or cudgel from under his gown, went up to his insulter and struck him repeatedly over the head. The chastisement must have been given with a will; for the bastinado was shivered to pieces—arguing either its softness or the head’s asinine thickness. Having “avenged” himself, Davies returned to the bottom of the Hall, drew one of the swords belonging to his attendants, and flourished it repeatedly over his head, turning his face towards Martin, and then hurrying down the water-steps of the Temple, threw himself into a boat. This extraordinary occurrence happened at the close of 1597 or January of 1598. Davies retired to Oxford where he chose to write poetry, including his first significant longer poem, Nosce Teipsum (Know Thyself). In 1601 he was readmitted to the bar, having made a public apology to Martin, and in the same year served as the member of Parliament for Corfe Castle. In 1603, he was part of the deputation sent to bring King James VI of Scotland to London as the new monarch. Like Queen Elizabeth, the new king was also an admirer of Davies’s poetry, and rewarded him with a knighthood and appointments, first as Solicitor-general for Ireland and, later as the Attorney-general in Ireland. Davies was to be a central figure in the drive to ‘complete’ the conquest by the consolidation of a kingdom of Ireland, on the English model, across the island as a whole, through the extension of royal power, common law authority, and English ‘civility’.
Davies was the crown’s candidate for speaker of the commons in the Irish Parliament in 1613. After the 1605 Gunpowder plot and the Plantation of Ulster in 1613–15, the constituencies for the Irish House of Commons were changed to give Protestants a majority. While the vote for speaker was being taken, Catholic MPs, angered at what they considered to be the unjustified creation of these new parliamentary boroughs to ensure an artificial Protestant majority, placed a Catholic candidate, Sir John Everard, in the speaker’s chair. In the ensuing tussle divers knights and gentlemen of the best quality took Sir John Davies by both his arms and lifted him from the ground and placed him upon Sir John Everard’s lap. Everard was subsequently removed from the chair, prompting Catholic MPs to walk out of the commons in protest. Undeterred, Davies proceeded with his acceptance speech. That ludicrous image of the portly, corpulent, rotund and weighty English politician being hoisted by his compatriots onto the lap of an Irishman in an Irish Parliament is an apt metaphor for British colonial activity in Ireland. (Pardon my politics.)
During one of his circuits in Ireland, in March 1609, Davies married Eleanor Touchet, daughter of Lord Audley (afterwards Earl of Castlehaven). According to Grosart in his introduction to The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, Her later years were darkened with insanity of a strangely voluble type. It is to be feared she was an ill “help-meet” for her husband. This chauvinistic comment hides an intriguing tale. His wife, one of the most prolific women writing at the time, was the author of numerous pamphlets and prophecies. These writings were a source of conflict in the marriage and Davies burned a set of the prophecies that Eleanor had been writing. According to scholar Dianne Watt, she responded by dressing in widow’s weeds and predicting that he would die in less than three years. One day in December of the following year, she began to weep uncontrollably during dinner, and three days later her husband died. Three days before he died, it is related, she gave him pass to take his long sleep.
In 1626 he had been named chief justice of king’s bench in England, but on the day set for his installation (usually given as 8 December), he was found dead of apoplexy following a convivial gathering the previous evening. His funeral sermon was preached by fellow poet, John Donne, and he was buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.
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THE POETRY OF SIR JOHN DAVIES
The earliest poems for which Sir John Davies became known were his epigrams, published with other poems of his in a collection entitled Epigrammes and Elegies by J.D. and C.M containing both Davies’ work and posthumous works by Christopher Marlowe who died violently at the age of 29 in 1593. The book was reprinted twice and, despite the admiration of Queen Elizabeth, to whom he addressed his work Hymns of Astraea, was included in a list of published works that the state ordered to be confiscated and burned.
Despite his admiration for Davies, Grosart admits the epigrams have limited value. It must be conceded that the Epigrams have dashes of the roughness, even coarseness, of the age.…They self-revealingly belong to the wild-oats sowing of the Poet’s youthful period. Nevertheless, I have ventured their reproduction in integrity for four reasons:—
(a) These Epigrams, from their subjects and style, are valuable, as expressing the tone of society at the time.
(b) It would be suppressio veri to withhold them, toward an accurate estimate of their Author. They furnish elements of judgment.
(c) They were what gained the Poet ‘a name’: even when tartly spoken of by Guilpin he is called the ‘English Martial’ from them.
(d) These Epigrams belong to a section of our early Literature that contemporaneously was abundant; and it were advantageous if characteristics of particular periods were more recognised in literary criticism.
Accepting point (d) above, I include the epigrams below as an example of the style of epigram popular at the time. I prefer the Latin epigrams of Thomas Campion, the epigrams, also in Latin, of the Welsh poet, John Owen and the briefer but more incisive epigrams of Ben Jonson. The few epigrams of John Donne, who conducted the funeral service for Sir John Davies, display a far superior sense of style. While the influence of Martial is evident – point (c) above – they lack the eloquent resonance of the Latin poet. Judge for yourself.
In 1593 his poem “Orchestra, or a Poeme of Dauncing was “licensed to Iohn Harison”. The earliest known published edition is that of July, 1596 when Davies was a twenty seven year old student at the Inns of Court . The title-page of this edition is followed by a dedicatory sonnet To his very friend, Ma. Rich. Martin who, we are informed, was the first mouer and sole cause of it, and that he was the Poet’s “owne selues better halfe,” and “deerest friend.” Ironically, this is the same Richard Martin he was later to attack with a cudgel after a deadly quarrel and estrangement. (See above.) The poem, written in rhyme royal, uses dancing as a metaphor to understand the relationship between the natural order and human activity. Invoking Homer, it describes the attempts of the suitor Antinous to persuade Penelope, chaste and patient wife to the long-meandering Odysseus, to dance with him, while it details, at great length, the antiquity and universality of dancing. Although elegant and enjoyable in parts, the poem is over-extended and over written with an excess of courtly love conceits. There are, however, interesting stanzas such as this one from early in the poem
Since when, they still are carried in a round,
And changing, come one in another’s place;
Yet doe they neither mingle nor confound,
But euery one doth keepe the bounded space
Wherein the Daunce doth bid it turne or trace;
This wondrous myracle did Loue deuise,
For Dauncing is Love’s proper exercise.
and this one from later in the poem
Learne then to daunce, you that are Princes borne,
And lawfull lords of earthly creatures all;
Imitate them, and thereof take no scorne,
For this new art to them is naturall—
And imitate the starres cælestiall:
For when pale Death your vital twist shall seuer,
Your better parts must daunce, with them for euer.
There are interesting lines such as
My feet, which onely Nature taught to goe,
Did neuer yet the art of footing know.
and
For all the words that from our lips repaire
Are nought but tricks and turnings of the ayre.
The original publication was described on the title page as Not Finished. But, even with stanzas restored in a later edition, it still fails to cohere. As Grosart notes, these added stanzas show that the Poet had intended to pursue his subject further; even the hitherto omitted stanzas reading more like a fresh ‘invocation’ than a ‘conclusion.’
Theodore Roethke was an admirer. Stanley Kunitz introduced his friend to this poem by Davies. He recalls that Roethke responded to its “clear-voiced music” with “excitement and “joy” and composed a sequence entitled Four for Sir John Davies. The opening lines of Roethke’s poem contemplate the energetic cosmos depicted in Davies’s poem: “Is that dance slowing in the mind of man / That made him think the universe could hum?” Roethke sees this cosmic dance as a projection of the “mind of man,” not as a feature of the natural world. Roethke, like Davies, considers the role that the human mind plays in producing the cosmic hum. Although the ideas explored are those of Davies translated, as it were, to a twentieth century environment, the language, the syntax, the questioning mode, the sway and the cadences owe more to Yeats than to the Elizabethan poet. “I take this cadence from a man named Yeats; / I take it, and I give it back again.” If I prefer Roethke’s poem to that of Sir John Davies, it is because I see it as more polished, more concise and more musical.
T. S. Eliot was also an admirer. A essay simply entitled Sir John Davies, published in the Times Literary Supplement, (9 Dec 1926) and reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, (1957) did much to bring the Elizabethan poet to a wider audience. He begins by elevating the poet’s worth, Davies is a poet of fine lines, but he is more than that. For Eliot, the key poem is Nosce Teipsum… the plan, the versification, and the content of Nosce Teipsum are, in that age, highly original … In a language of remarkable clarity and austerity Davies succeeds in maintaining the poem consistently on the level of poetry; he never flies to hyperbole or bombast, and he never descends, as he easily might, to the pedestrian and ludicrous. Eliot admits that the philosophy behind the poem is neither original nor profound. He also admits that Davies has not had the credit for great felicity of phrase. Yet he even goes so far as to compare him, not unfavourably, with Dante. Unfortunately, I cannot agree. While the poem is not exactly ludicrous, I do find it pedestrian and overlong.
Three Elizabethan poets had a role in establishing English colonialism in Ireland: Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir John Davies. Of the three, Davies was the most influential politically but the least accomplished poetically. He lacks the mellifluous eloquence of Spenser and the acerbic insights of Raleigh. Although Eliot praises the concision in his lines, he is not a concise poet. There are close on one hundred stanzas in Orchestra, yet Roethke can, in four poems of four stanzas apiece, deal with the issues in a more melodic and more concise fashion. There are close on five hundred stanzas in Nosce Teipsum, yet W. B. Yeats can, in Sailing to Byzantium, deal with the body and soul conundrum far more eloquently and far more concisely. (Even his longer two-part poem, A Dialogue of Self and Soul, with its wonderful line – Who can distinguish darkness from the soul? – is far more imaginative and far more emotional than the tepid stanzas of Sir John Davies.)
There is no doubting the skill that Davies brought to his poetry. In his Hymnes of Astræa in acrosticke verse (1599) a homage to Queen Elizabeth, he devised an ingenious form with two stanzas of five lines and a concluding stanza of six lines with the first letters of each line spelling ELISABETHA REGINA. To compose one of these may be ingenious, but to publish twenty-six is overkill. Davies was also an accomplished sonneteer. In his Gullinge Sonnets (1594) he was able to satirise writers of bad Elizabethan sonnets by imitating and mocking the style and substance of such sonnets. (Carol Rumens has an interesting take on one such sonnet.) However, it takes him nine sonnets to do what Shakespeare can do, with far more panache, in one, his sonnet 130. As for the epigrams (below) they are longer than would fit in to a pre-2017 tweet. They also have less bite than many epigrams of his contemporaries. But they are interesting examples of the style of the times.
JOHN DAVIES AND JOHN DAVIES
Two poets with the same name co-existed in Elizabethan England. John Davies (c. 1565– 1618), a writing-master and an Anglo-Welsh poet, referred to himself as John Davies of Hereford (after the city where he was born) in order to distinguish himself from Sir John Davies (1569–1626). John Davies of Hereford was one of the most prolific poets of his age. He maintained a successful career as a writing-master and, at Oxford, instructed scholars in the art of writing, though he was not a university scholar himself. Alhough his poems were published in some dozen large volumes, only one reached a second edition. His literary ambitions far out-stripped his talent. He later moved to London, where he mingled with gifted poets whom he addresses in great profusion in The Scourge of Folly (1611). Among these were Francis Bacon, Sir John Davies, Fulke Greville, Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, John Marston, Joseph Hall, Herbert of Cherbury, Francis Beaumont, Michael Drayton, and George Chapman.
The Scottish scholar and clergyman, Alexander Balloch Grosart chiefly remembered for reprinting much rare Elizabethan literature, provided two-volume editions of both poets. Comparing the two, he wrote I have no thought of claiming for John Davies of Hereford the many-sided genius of Sir John Davies. The point I am alone anxious to establish is, that as having occupied himself with these lofty metaphysical-ethical problems, his intellect had affinities thereto declarative of brain whilst his poetic interpretation, if not in the large utterance of the early gods and without the grandeur of Nosce Teipsum has distinctive worth — together sufficient to vindicate the recognition I ask for him. That is no doubt a just assessment, although Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, in their anthology The School Bag, reproduced an amusing, intriguing and very readable sonnet called ‘If there were, oh! an Hellespont of cream’.
John Davies of Hereford was certainly aware of his more illustrious compatriot. He wrote a lengthy commendatory poem with this fawning salutation: Jn loue and affection of Master lohn Davies, mine approved good friend, and admiration of his excellence in the Arte of Writing. He also wrote this amusing sonnet on his namesake – To my right worthilyt-beloued Sr John Dauies Knight. Attumey generall of Ireland. (I am indebted to Shakespearean scholar Bastian Conrad for alerting me on his Twitter feed to this poem reproduced directly below.)
Brief Poems by Sir John Davies
IN QUINTUM .
Quintus the dancer useth euermore ,
His feet in measure and in rule to moue
Yet on a time he call’d his Mistresse, “‘whore”
And thought with that sweet word to win her loue:
Oh had his tongue like to his feet beene taught
It neuer would haue uttered such a thought.
***
IN GELLAM .
Gella, if thou dost loue thy selfe, take heed,
Lest thou my rimes unto thy louer read;
For straight thou grin’st, and then thy louer seeth
Thy canker-eaten gums and rotten teeth.
***
IN FAUSTUM
“That youth,” saith Faustus, “hath a lyon seene,
Who from a dicing-house comes money-lesse ” :
But when he lost his haire, where had he beene?
I doubt me he had seene a Lyonesse?
***
IN DECIUM
Audacious painters have Nine Worthies made;
But poet Decius, more audacious farre,
Making his mistris march with men of warre,
With title of “Tenth Worthy” doth her lade.
Me thinks that gull did use his tearmes as fit,
Which tearm’d his loue “a gyant for her wit.”
***
IN HAYWODUM
Haywood, that did in Epigrams excell,
Is now put downe since my light Muse arose;
As buckets are put downe into a well,
Or as a schoole-boy putteth downe his hose.
***
IN CASTOREM
Of speaking well why doe we learne the skill,
Hoping thereby honour and wealth to gaine;
Sith rayling Castor doth, by speaking ill,
Opinion of much wit and gold obtaine?
***
IN LICUM
Lycus, which lately is to Venice gone,
Shall if he doe returne, gaine three for one:
But ten to one, his knowledge and his wit
Will not be bettered or increas’d a whit.
***
IN DACUM
Dacus with some good colour and pretence,
Tearmes his love’s beauty “silent eloquence:”
For she doth lay more colour on her face
Than ever Tully us’d his speech to grace.
LINKS
Robert Armstrong’s biographical notes in the Dictionary of Irish Biography
The Britannica page on Sir John Davies
The Wikipedia page on Sir John Davies
The Wikipedia page on Eleanor Davies (née Touchet) the wife of Sir John Davies
The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies Volume One
The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies Volume Two
Alexander Hutchison on ‘Orchestra
T. S. Eliot essay on Sir John Davies
Four for Sir John Davies – a poem by Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke reads his poem, Four for Sir John Davies
Brief Poems 