ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author offers readings of John Taylor's texts to show how, on the level of textual self-presentation, the affirmation of the common self partakes of the fantasy of democratization as well as its problems. It seems that Taylor found the witnesses to his self-presentation on the riverbanks as well as in the bookstalls, for he uses the same standards — honesty, transparency, choice, mutuality, and trust - to describe his encounters in each venue. Taylor "The Water Poet" was an admirer of Thomas Nashe. Taylor's approach to market relations – the advertisement of the inner self and the faith in the critical individual – anticipates the later arrivals of a "bourgeois public sphere". His explanation for the spread of heretical religious ideas resides not in faults of the king, church, or economic order, but within the sins of shiftless individuals who cannot remain content with their modest stations in life.
