John Davies of Hereford

• 1. Introduction

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  John Davies of Hereford wore his hometown like a badge. Born around 1565 in Hereford, he appended the city's name to his own specifically to separate himself from another poet of the same name circulating in the same literary circles. That other man, Sir John Davies, was born in 1569 and lived until 1626. The two were contemporaries, rivals in name if not in spirit, and the confusion between them persists to this day.

  Davies was not merely a poet. He was a writing-master by trade, someone who taught the physical craft of script and letterforms. Yet alongside that practical work, he poured out verse at a rate few of his peers could match. He wrote on theology, on philosophy, on the emerging proto-scientific questions of his age. He wrote epigrams about the people around him. He nearly traveled to Scotland. And centuries after his death in London in July 1618, a scholar would put his name on one of the most contested poems in the English language.

  Who was this prolific, self-naming poet from the Welsh borderlands? What drove his extraordinary output? And how did a work published under Shakespeare's shadow come to bear his name instead?

• 2. The Writing Master's World

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  Writing-masters in late Elizabethan England occupied a peculiar professional niche. They taught penmanship as a serious discipline, producing the clear, elegant hands that commerce, law, and correspondence demanded. Davies built his livelihood on that skill, even as he filled his private hours with verse.

  His social world was wide. Edmund Ashfield was among his friends, and Davies recorded in an epigram that he nearly joined Ashfield on a journey to Scotland in 1599. That near-miss trip, preserved in a few lines of verse, is one of the more personal details we have about his daily life. Davies also wrote about Elizabeth Cary, and his epigrams touching on such contemporaries carry genuine historical value precisely because they catch living figures in unguarded moments.

  The volume of his output across roughly fifteen years of known publication is striking. From Mirum in Modum in 1602 through Wit's Bedlam in 1617, he produced title after title covering spiritual devotion, human folly, wit, and moral philosophy. Humours Heav'n on Earth appeared in 1609, the same year as The Holy Roode. The Picture of a Happy Man and The Muse's Sacrifice both came out in 1612. This pace of production suggests a writer for whom verse was not occasional but habitual.

• 3. Theology, Philosophy, and Early Science

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  Microcosmos, published in 1603, signals something beyond the typical verse of the period. Davies worked proto-scientific ideas into his theological and philosophical writing, bringing questions about the natural world into a public arena where they were still controversial and novel.

  The titles themselves trace the shape of his intellectual interests. Summa Totalis from 1607 echoes the language of scholastic philosophy. The Holy Roode from 1609 addresses Christian devotion. The Scourge of Folly from 1611 puts Davies in the satirical tradition of writers cataloguing human vice. Wittes Pilgrimage, published around 1605, suggests an allegorical journey through the life of the mind.

  What makes Davies unusual is the range. Most poets of his era specialized, tilting toward pastoral, courtly love, or religious verse. Davies moved freely among registers. His theological works brushed against empirical inquiry. His satirical works caught real people by name. His philosophical poems asked questions about the soul's nature. The 1602 title Mirum in Modum carries a subtitle that makes this ambition explicit: A Glimpse of God's Glory and the Soul's Shape.

• 4. Grosart's Rescue

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  By the nineteenth century, Davies had slipped into genuine obscurity. The Reverend Alexander Balloch Grosart, born in 1827 and died in 1899, made it his life's work to pull neglected Elizabethan and Jacobean poets back into print. Davies became one of his projects.

  Grosart gathered the scattered works and published them in a two-volume edition in 1875 and 1878. The volumes were printed at the Edinburgh University Press by Thomas and Archibald Constable. They appeared as part of the Chertsey Worthies' library, a subscription series that financed private editions of rare texts. Only one hundred copies were printed.

  The care Grosart brought to the project is evident in the full title he gave the collected works: "for the first time collected and edited: with memorial introduction, notes and illustrations, glossarial index, and portrait and facsimile." For several of the poems, Grosart noted that only one extant copy was known to survive. Without his intervention, some portion of Davies's writing might have vanished entirely.

• 5. The Shakespeare Question

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  In 2007, the scholar Brian Vickers published a monograph with a striking title: Shakespeare, "A Lover's Complaint," and John Davies of Hereford. Its argument was direct: the poem "A Lover's Complaint," printed by Thomas Thorpe alongside Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609, was not written by Shakespeare at all. Vickers attributed it to Davies.

  The case rested on two pillars. First, Vickers argued at length that the poem is not Shakespearean in character. Second, he compiled a list of verbal parallels between the Complaint and Davies's known works. One pair he cited runs: "What brest so cold that is not warmed heare" from the Complaint against "What heart's so cold that is not set on fire" from Davies. The parallels, Vickers argued, were too numerous and too close to be coincidence.

  The attribution went against a body of existing scholarship. Studies by Kenneth Muir, Eliot Slater, and MacDonald P. Jackson had all pointed toward Shakespeare. The 2007 RSC Shakespeare Complete Works omitted the Complaint on the basis of Vickers's argument, a decision Jackson called a mistake in his review in the journal RES. Jackson's objection was pointed: he argued that the evidence showing Davies had an intimate familiarity with Shakespeare's works equal to that of the author of the Complaint was, in his words, "very meagre." The debate remains unresolved, which means Davies's name stays attached to one of the most contested attribution questions in English literary history.