Seventeenth Century

This chapter explores authorial identity, the print market, and readers in two pamphlets by the prolific seventeenth-century writer John Taylor, the Water Poet. While A Common Whore and An Arrant Thiefe (both 1622) humorously praise their trivial and transgressive subjects, they also illuminate Taylor’s efforts to fashion an authorial image as an honest and witty labouring class author. In this endeavour, Taylor seeks to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by print and to reimagine publication and the pamphlet form as legitimate, valuable, and worthwhile for both reader and writer.