ABSTRACT
John Taylor, the sculler poet or, as he later named himself, the Water Poet, is one of the founding figures in a tradition of labouring-class poets.1 He worked as a waterman, writing and publishing verse pamphlets while continuing to ply his trade on the Thames. Taylor was prolific: he published around 200 pamphlets over a forty-year period from 1612 to his death in 1653. Over the last decade, Taylor has deservedly attracted considerable critical interest, largely because his career serves to illuminate the social and cultural forces that define early modern popular culture. Bernard Capp’s biography reintroduced Taylor to the scholarly community, illustrating how his career provides us with a more complex and nuanced view of the historical formations of early modern culture. Taylor was ‘a self-taught waterman who found a niche in literary and court circles’. The relative ease with which Taylor moved between the world of the labouring-classes and the court usefully problematises the simple binarisms of a two-tier model of elite and popular culture.2 On the one hand, Taylor’s ability to find an audience at the Stuart court bears out Peter Burke’s thesis that in the early modern period the elite had not yet withdrawn from a common culture. Conversely, it also warns us to be wary of viewing a tradition of labouring-class poets as emerging out of a plebeian popular culture without the participation or mediation of the elite. As John Goodridge has shown, the rise of the labouring-class poet in the eighteenth century, illustrated by the career of Stephen Duck, was brought about, in part, by the investments of the cultural and social elite as patrons and as editors.3
