This book studies a self-educated popular writer who carved out a pioneering role for himself as a ‘media celebrity’ and became a national institution. John 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 th ... More

This book studies a self-educated popular writer who carved out a pioneering role for himself as a ‘media celebrity’ and became a national institution. John 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 assumed: 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.