John Davies of Hereford

For other people named John Davies (disambiguation), see John Davies (disambiguation) (disambiguation).

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John Davies of Hereford

John Davies of Hereford (c. 1565, Hereford, England – July 1618, London) was a writing-master and an Anglo-Welsh poet. He is usually known as John Davies of Hereford in order to distinguish him from others of the same name.

In a 2007 monograph, Shakespeare, A Lover's Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford, literary scholar Brian Vickers attributes to Davies the poem 'A Louers complaint', which was published by Thomas Thorpe with Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609. This attribution goes against a scholarly consensus which established itself during the 20th century, and in particular notable studies by Kenneth Muir, Eliot Slater and MacDonald P. Jackson, but is based on both a detailed demonstration of the non-Shakespearean nature of the poem and a list of numerous verbal parallels—such as 'What brest so cold that is not warmed heare' and 'What heart's so cold that is not set on fire'—between the Complaint and the known works of Davies. On this evidence it was omitted from the 2007 RSC Complete Works, a decision which MacD. P. Jackson calls a 'mistake' in his RES review of Vickers's book, arguing, among other reservations, that 'Evidence that, in poems undoubtedly his, Davies exhibits an intimacy with Shakespeare's works equal to that of the author of A Lover's Complaint is very meagre.' He rejoins also:

Had Vickers keyed in ‘spongy’, ‘outwardly’, and ‘physic’—trying the various possible original spellings and selecting instances of ‘physic’ as a verb—he would have found that in the whole of LION, covering more than six centuries of English poetry, drama, and prose, four separate works contain all three words: Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and A Lover's Complaint.

Harold Love, in his TLS review, has similar questions:

Vickers was led to Davies by the number of words from the 'Complaint' he found during a computer search of the invaluable LION archive; but any such investigation is bound to favour such a voluminous author against the less prolific or minimally preserved. In similar work on Restoration poets, I continually found parallels with the verse of Ned Ward for works that it was chronologically impossible for him to have written. The reasons were that, like Davies, he wrote a vast amount of verse and that his style had a chameleonlike quality that brought it close to the poetic mean of the time.

This incorrect attribution is due to Vickers' fundamentally flawed method of literary attribution. Like Robertson in the early 20th century, Vickers' method involves merely listing words that a work and one writer have in common, without checking to see if the same words can be found in Shakespeare, and without checking to determine whether there are even more parallels to found within Shakespeare's works. Furthermore, the presence of individual words, such as for example 'palliament' in both Titus Andronicus and a poem by Peele, does not necessarily mean that Peele must have written Titus Andronicus. What it signals is that one or both of the writers in question may have read each other. This last point is especially important in Shakespeare's case, since he is known to have incorporated the work of other authors into his own work, for example, Holinshed, Plutarch, Thomas Lodge and Norton and Sackville. Davies' poetry is in the public domain and it is available at books.google.com.

Hereford was at that time a Welsh-speaking area, even though officially in England. Davies wrote very copiously on theological and philosophical themes. He also wrote many epigrams on his contemporaries which have some historical interest. Davies's works include:

• Mirum in Modum, a Glimpse of God's Glory and the Soul's Shape (1602)
• Microcosmos (1603)
• Wittes Pilgrimage (1605?)
• Humours Heav's on Earth (1605)
• The Scourge of Folly (1610)
• The Picture of a Happy Man (1612)
• Wit's Bedlam (1617)

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.

External links

• Encyclopædia Britannica