Chapter 3

Revision

John Davies of Hereford’s “Rough Hewings”

John Davies of Hereford’s “Of My Selfe,” which appears as prefatory material to his sonnet sequence Wittes Pilgrimage (1605), begins with the poet questioning his motives for writing poetry at all: “What meane I miscreant my Braines to beate, / To forge these Fancies light as Leuity?” (“Of My Selfe,” WP, 2:5).¹ As he muses while disappointedly surveying his own works, personified Reason intervenes and advises him to “vndoe” what he had written and start over. Davies did not heed this advice—a fact to which the mere existence of the volume preemptively attests—and he explains this decision in the final lines of “Of My Selfe”:

Then Reason I acquite thee from disgrace,

Sith thus thou promptst me what I ought to write:

Let Tyrant shame with bloud stil fil my face.

For so abusing thy right ruling might.

My frinds (though fraile as I am) pres me stil

To presse these lines (more fraile) to publike view:

If I should saie it is againste my will

I shoulde speake truly, and yet most vntrue:

 For my wills fixt my fast friends stil to please:

 But yet still wauers thus, to publish these,

  Yet sith, in wauering wise, thus fixt, it stands

Fames wind, Wits weather-cocke, my will, commands.

(“Of My Selfe,” WP, 2:5)

In the previous chapter, we saw Astrophil claim Stella’s divine name as justification for refusing to dash out his lines; by contrast, Davies here claims only the flimsy epiphany of friendly encouragement. Though he deploys the common trope of blaming anonymous peers for goading him to publish his work, however, he also immediately confesses that he did not need much compelling. Whereas Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy advised poets to consult the “unflattering glass of reason” before believing themselves worthy of adulation, here we find Davies glancing in the mirror to acknowledge his own blemishes and nevertheless hurrying out the door.²Potential fame, it seems, could dispel rational concerns about potential shame.

The other prefatory materials of Wittes Pilgrimage corroborate this attitude: the collection opens with two poems appealing for patronage to Philip Herbert (Sidney’s nephew) and James Hay, prominent favorites of King James I. Appealing to wealthy courtiers—either through dedicatory verses or encomiastic epigrams—was a tactic of nearly all socially ambitious poets of the era, and John Davies of Hereford was an uncommonly prolific practitioner. But despite Davies’s willingness to grasp at fame, his career never reached any kind of prominence, either in his own lifetime or in the centuries since. One problem was that his poems were just not very good: as Philip J. Finkelpearl notes, Davies “condensed, simplified, and omitted much from his sources, and the product was an incoherent and clumsy patchwork of philosophical fragments, often in unreadable technical language.” While he “may have been one of the most voluminous didactic poets of the age,” Finkelpearl concludes, Davies was “also one of the most tedious”—a point echoed in Brian Vickers’s appraisal of him as “busy but mediocre.”³ Perhaps he should have listened to Reason when it told him to revise his lines.

What compelled poets to revise their work in early modernity, and what prevented them from doing so? While the previous chapter presented invention as a debate undertaken with oneself, this chapter examines how the work of revision continues that debate amid the material and temporal circumstances of professional life. If poesy, as Sidney presents it, must be approached as difficult work vulnerable to experiences of doubt and hesitation, it must also be understood as work that will likely take more time to undertake than the poet can anticipate. At the threshold of revision, already-written words argue through their obstinate physicality for their own persistence; blotting a page, in this light, means canceling the time and effort that went into setting words down in the first place. Quintilian points out that revision requires “a double effort, because we have both to condemn things which we once liked and discover things which had escaped us.”⁴ The willingness to condemn one’s own words means choosing to do more work, and if this decision is extrinsically enforced, the work risks becoming onerous and cumbersome.

The approachably mediocre John Davies of Hereford, a poet who knew his limitations but also recognized his own potential, may become a new sort of hero for the work of writing in the literature classroom. What distinguishes him from nearly all other poets of his era—and the reason his writings, so undervalued by his contemporaries, are invaluable to the project of this book—is that Davies also happened to be, in a very specific sense, a teacher of writing. He was for a time one of England’s most famous writing masters, a profession that rose to prominence in the sixteenth century, Richard S. Christen notes, “as increasing numbers from all ranks and walks of life coveted proficiency or even mastery of one or more of the several ‘hands’ practiced during the era.” Due to this demand, the writing master, according to Christen, ended up being “a prominent figure on the early modern professional landscape.”⁵ Writing masters shared some responsibilities with grammar school instructors like John Brinsley (whose Ludus literarius also contains instruction on orthography) but focused primarily on the acquisition of ornate styles and orthographic correctness.

Davies’s day job thus entailed a professional preoccupation with the way ink sat on paper, and so when he wrote poems he could not help but hold a consistently bifocal view of the effort as a confluence of the manual techniques of “fair writing” (inscribing stylish letterforms in neat rows) and as the uncertain exercise of “inditing” (“giving a literary or rhetorical form”).⁶ His poetry bears the residue of his professional life, and is as a result perpetually torn between the different responsibilities that attended setting pen to page. He worries about penmanship, in other words, as much as about prosody. This attention to the material conditions of writing extended beyond the management of his hand, however, and led him to ruminations about the broader forces that make poesy a difficult undertaking. His work consequently demonstrates how making the decision to embrace discomposition—to undertake revision for its own sake—is largely a problem of labor. More vividly than most of his contemporaries, Davies voices the complaint that he simply was not given enough time, or paid well enough, to undertake revision in earnest.

Born in Wales in 1565, Davies was a direct contemporary of Marlowe (son of a shoemaker), Nashe (son of a parson), Shakespeare (son of a glovemaker), Jonson (son of a bricklayer), and Drayton (son of a butcher-tanner). When Sir Philip Sidney’s poetry was printed in the 1590s, the “unemployably eloquent” members of Davies’s generation witnessed increasing legitimacy for poetry but also quickly confronted the fact that opportunities for patronage and courtly appointment were scarce.⁷ Though his own will suggests that Davies died “a respectable distance above poverty,” for much of his professional life he worried about money.⁸ He was self-consciously one of an emerging class of what Laurie Ellinghausen terms “laboring writers,” who understood their work in relation to social conditions rather than to divine inspiration, and who reflected on their “self-professed marginality” in order to construct “an alternative kind of authority to that of the socially privileged.”⁹ Davies aspired to make a name for himself by affiliating with the “socially privileged,” but he was also very aware that he was not even the best poet in London named John Davies—that would have been the nobly born Sir John Davies, who had become a favorite of both Queen Elizabeth and King James I. Finding it difficult to attract the same kind of attention, our Davies churned out writing with yeoman-like labor and published nearly every kind of verse—theological treatises, epigrams, sonnets, satires, lyrics, histories, translations—without ever really breaking through.

What did it take to become a working poet in early modern England? David Cressy estimates that by 1600, as few as 25–30 percent of men and 5–10 percent of women in England showed evidence of being able to sign their own names.¹⁰ Several scholars have disputed these figures as an index of general literacy—particularly on the grounds that reading was taught prior to writing, and so it is likely that many more people had basic reading skills than had basic writing skills—but what remains clear is that the acquisition of writing skills posed both individual and social challenges that were not overcome by many members of the English citizenry.¹¹ Beyond mere literacy, writers who may have been lucky enough to receive grammar schooling but did not attend university or proceed into legal careers were competing for literary renown with those who had. Higher education at institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, and the Inns of Court not only was increasingly becoming an emblem of privilege, but also enabled those who attended to form political alliances and cultural coteries.¹² As a result, for early modern writers, “breaking through” was determined by their sociocultural background both directly, in the sense of the degree of education they could claim, and indirectly, in the sense of their marginalization from elite cultural communities. Those whose technical skills might have rivaled those of university-affiliated poets rarely had access to the spaces and networks, such as the royal court, private coteries, or educational institutions, within which elite aesthetic tastes were developed and consolidated.¹³

By the end of the sixteenth century, many poets like Davies found themselves torn between effort and expediency in their quest for fame—and with fame, a chance at patronage or courtly employment. Writing poetry was not really a viable professional pathway, but the allure of financial gain and social mobility nevertheless influenced poetic craft both directly and indirectly. As Richard McCabe points out, “[T]he lack of anything resembling a professional career structure (even within the emergent book-trade where stationers were guildsmen but authors were not), or any formal mode of public recognition or legal copyright, forced writers to employ a variety of idealized paradigms and socio-cultural templates in an attempt to flatter, cajole, or shame prospective patrons into a sense of ‘obligation’ variously expressed in ethical, personal, intellectual, or nationalist terms.”¹⁴ While print circulation afforded poets an alternative pathway toward financial reward, McCabe notes that participation in this economy “threatened, at its worst, to downgrade the author to the level of hired penman, the mere employee of some printer or publisher” rather than a legitimate creative artist. In the poem preceding “Of My Selfe,” Davies even hints at the ways his authorial will had been corrupted, and he worries that he had become a mere “people-pleaser” (“The Author to his Muse,” WP, 2:5).¹⁵

Reflecting on these circumstances in his own poetry, Davies offers a more concrete defense of poesy than the one we saw Sidney make in the previous chapter. The courtier-poet requested that readers be more generous to poets’ attempts and that poets themselves aspire to take their own work far more seriously. Davies would insist that taking one’s own work seriously requires more than just generous readers—it requires access to material resources such as time and financial security. Reading The Writing School-master (ca. 1620), his manual for “fair writing,” alongside his epigrams, the first section below locates Davies’s defense of poetry within the way he navigated the blurry distinction between “writing” and “inditing.” As a creature of ink and paper who aspired for perfect, blotless regularity, he struggled to reconcile himself to poesy’s rough workmanship of risk.¹⁶ A sensitivity to how marred pages could blemish his professional reputation led him to perceive the inky blot itself as a figure for the aesthetic contradictions inherent to poesy. A formless form indexing both the ink that makes writing possible and the obliterations that make it distinct from speech, the blot emblematized for Davies the dissonance produced by restless Fantasy’s discomposing encounter with calm Reason.

Affiliating the stuff of imperfection with the stuff of poetry in this way allowed Davies to recognize poetic composition as a marring as well as a making, as an art of illegibility as well as an art of writing. This realization, as we will see in the chapter’s second section, was coupled with a heightened awareness that poesy’s conditions of possibility were often available only to the idle elite. Self-conscious enough to anticipate appraisals of his hard work as “mediocre,” Davies was openly frustrated by the fact that he never rose to the stature of his more famous contemporaries. He compared himself on the one hand to elite poets like Jonson, Donne, and (of course) Sir John Davies, and on the other to working-class and aesthetically disdained “pot-poets” like John Taylor, the Water Poet. From the middle (medio-) of the mountain (-ocris), Davies not only could discern what lay above and below himself but could also vividly chart the rocky terrain on which he stood. This perspective appears both in his early theological rumination, Microcosmos (1603), and in his satirical tirade, Paper’s Complaint (1611). In the latter, personified paper pleads with writers, including Davies himself, to commit to the attentiveness and patience required of poesy rather than smearing it with excremental outpourings. In doing so, however, it also articulates that one of the reasons writers fail to revise their work is less a personal failing than a matter of time and resources. Paper’s appeal on behalf of meaningful revision—positioned in opposition to impudent overproduction or timid correction—hinges on a plea for reforming social conditions in ways that might afford writers time for unproductive labor.

At the end of the chapter, I adopt Davies’s pleas for social reform as the starting point for a defense of poetry enacted through the practices of the modern literature classroom. As teachers of literature who are also teachers of writing, we must explore how work produced in idleness, in time left unburdened by obligation, may become central to our pedagogy. We must develop ways, as John Bean suggests, to “create an academic environment that encourages revision.”¹⁷ Given the elitist, white supremacist, and colonialist history that prefigures any class in early modern English literature, teachers of these classes might recognize that to truly encourage revision in our students we must revise our own ways of doing business. If doing the hard work of poetic and critical writing is accessible only to those who can already financially support undertaking it, the study of the literature of the past will grow increasingly irrelevant to political life and become, even more than it already is, a pastime for the idle elite. Our classrooms might work to counteract this by extending to students the sorts of advantages that poets such as John Davies of Hereford knew they lacked. By creating time and space for the hard work of literary idleness, we might make a small stand in defense of our students’ right to engage in labor that is purposefully unproductive, or even gleefully subversive. The early modern literature classroom might, in this way, aspire to revise the way students think about writing and what they might do with it.

Thoughts in Blots

A page of writing in early modernity was appraised visually as well as literarily; this is partly the reason the profession of “writing master” existed at all.¹⁸ Wendy Wall notes how the fact that “readers had set expectations when they approached books that did not disappear when print technology was founded or when it became more popular” led to printed books embracing stylistic conventions of manuscript texts. Yet the coexistence of manuscript and print in the seventeenth century sees Wall’s “pseudomorphic” relation as more of a two-way street: manuscript writing also responded to the expectations catalyzed by print.¹⁹ Rosemary Huisman observes that “printing [led] to a more fixed sense of visual layout for printed or handwritten poems,” but that while the effect of print “up until, say, 1640, was … to ‘privatize’ handwriting” and allow manuscripts to retain the effects of subjectivity, “in the century after the introduction of printing,” poets’ writing “indicates a stronger consciousness of the literate sense of the poem, that its lines and stanza shape together are ‘seen’ as a clearly differentiated visual object, interdependent with the rhythm and heard patterns of the speaking of those words.”²⁰ Written poems were apprehended from at least two imbricated vantage points: typographic appearance corresponding to shape, line regularity, and “fairness,” and appraisals of literary merit.

Building on Jonathan Goldberg’s study of early modern handwriting in Writing Matter (1990), this section studies the relationship between writing and inditing as they played out in how “the hand moves in language” and how “its movement retraces the ‘being’ of the individual inscribed within the simulative social practices that are lived as ordinary experience.”²¹ Goldberg deconstructs the ways in which “habits of behavior begin with the control of the hand” to consider how a writer’s management of a pen reflects the management of the social order.²² I argue, to extend this analysis, that foregrounding experiences of discomposition reclaims some ground for poesy from the “regime of copying.”²³ In Davies’s writings, we can perceive one of this regime’s senior officials openly doubting himself, thereby illuminating for modern readers a poetic process driven neither by inspired fury nor by careful imitation, but by the dissonance between the different sorts of labor poetry demanded of poets.

Revision was what one did with poems in early modern England; in its purest form it is effectively synonymous with Jonson’s account of the “doing” of poesy.²⁴ Looking at an early modern manuscript, or even revised printed versions of it, we are only ever looking at pieces of poesy’s puzzle. Here we might reflect on the distinction between early modern literature’s “foul papers” (rough drafts) and “fair copies” (versions intended for transmission and presentation). This distinction, the terms of which largely derive from concern for the transmission of Shakespeare’s plays, has a complicated history.²⁵ Early modern writers knew that the first impression their work gave to readers was often independent from its content, and at some point, they certainly decided to train their pens toward legibility. We might consequently presume that making something “fair” in both hand and function—fair writing for a fair copy—was the ultimate goal of a poet’s endeavor. Matthew Zarnowiecki resists this presumption. A “fair copy,” he explains, is neither “the best copy out of many (as in copy-text) nor the single copy in the author’s hand presented to all eternity (the presentation copy).” A fair copy instead reflects early modern poesy’s investment in “creative copying,” wherein “mutation” could always occur “at the moment of reproduction.”²⁶ To account for this instability, Zarnowiecki proposes “medium close-reading”—a style of analysis that tracks a poem through its different publication contexts and that “requires attention not only to how poems change across these media, but how poets adjust their formal and generic choices to both canonical and emergent lyric forms.”²⁷

Yet even in attending to the movements of a text and its changing meanings in different contexts, we can still, at best, glimpse the activity that precipitated them. As Lisa Gitelman argues, once any object is “framed as or entered into evidence—once it is mobilized—it becomes a document,” and as such becomes an instrument for “knowing-showing.”²⁸ Seeing a draft may offer further knowledge about how a thing was made, but it also reveals the limits of our knowledge about what we can definitively know. Reflecting on our own experiences as writers, we may acknowledge that the “mutations” Zarnowiecki attributes to the transmission of texts could occur even at the moment of those texts’ initial production. The slip of a pen, the look of a line, the inattentive autopilot of a facile rhyme could have provoked new creative energy that modified poetic invention.

Revision takes place between document states, witnesses, variants. John Bryant uses the term “fluid texts” to describe literary documents under revision, because their “apparent instabilities and indeterminacies … give us a vivid material impression of the flow of creativity … that constitutes the cultural phenomenon of writing.”²⁹ Accounting for this flow, Bryant adopts “energy” as a metaphor for naming “the power of a people and culture to create a text.”³⁰ That last phrase is crucial: the energy that powers the creation of a text circulates between people and culture but is wholly attributable to neither. Bryant revises the Romantic conception of authorial intention and origination by positing that although the “design of a textual revision may not be consciously crafted, … the designs are there, and with them the impress of writers interacting with cultures.”³¹ When we write, our words attach themselves to the discursive communities within which we are ourselves embedded—but these attachments are neither permanent nor perfectly solid. Revision senses that underneath the architecture of discourse throbs a restless volatility, the potential energy of doing things in a different way.

The poetics of revision may be understood as akin to what Andrew Pickering calls the “mangle of practice” inherent to scientific experimentation.³² Lab technicians, in Pickering’s account, wrestle with their equipment in a “dance of agency,” which “takes the form of a dialectic of resistance and accommodation, where resistance denotes the failure to achieve an intended capture of agency in practice, and accommodation an active human strategy of response to resistance, which can include revisions to goals and intentions as well as to the material form of the machine in question and to the human frame of gestures and social relations that surround it.”³³ Pickering’s adumbrated account of this process may be applied, if with some limitations, to the development of a new poem. “As active, intentional beings, scientists [poets] construct some new machine [poem],” Pickering posits. “They then adopt a passive role, monitoring the performance of the machine,” at which point they cede agency to the machine, which likely does not perform flawlessly. This moment of resistance prompts “another reversal of roles” as the human agents are “once more active in a revision of modelling vectors,” which is followed by “another bout of human passivity and material performance, and so on.”³⁴ The scientists’ orientation can change and may even change as a function of the resistance offered by the machine, just as the poet may find, upon lighting on a specific configuration of words or dazzling metaphor, new inspiration for the work as a whole. Creative invention, in this way, originates not in fixed intention, but in the interaction between author and text, or experimenter and equipment, tuning themselves to each other. Once words are written, the poem-machine poses a challenge to the writer’s intentions by compelling the poet to tune subsequent words to an emergent occasion—one in which there are already words on the page.

Perhaps no one in early modern England reflected on writing’s mangle of practice as acutely as John Davies of Hereford. At the end of the 1590s, he was selected by Mary, Countess of Pembroke, to transcribe a presentation copy of the Sidney Psalter, and his manual on “fair writing,” The Writing School-master (ca. 1620), would eventually go into multiple reprints—unlike all but one (Microcosmos) of his twelve volumes of poetry. Thomas Fuller’s Worthies of England (1662) cites him as “the greatest master of the pen that England in his age beheld” (and, like much of literary history, nods at his “pretty excursions into poetry” only as an afterthought).³⁵ In his own estimation, Davies was distinguished from other writing masters by his punctiliousness. As he insists in The Writing School-Master, fair writing demands a considerable investment of time and attention, even though “many Imposters … undertake to teach perfectly in two and twenty houres, or a moneth at most” despite being “not able to judge of, much lesse perform perfect writing.” For Davies, writing’s singular difficulty was a direct consequence of its vulnerability to even momentary slips: in vocations like “Limming, Painting, Clocking, Graving,” he argued, practitioners might “mend and correct their errors,” but scribes did not have such leeway.³⁶ A “perfect” page was the result of conformity, compliance, and consistency, and other manuals on “fair writing” corroborate this by presenting blots and blemishes as insidious threats.³⁷ Blotted leaves betrayed a lack of discipline and inattention, as Jean de Beau Chesne and John Baildon’s manual proclaims: “Who that his Paper dooth blurre or elles blott, / Yealdes me a sloven it falles hym by lotte.”³⁸ In another of their mnemonic aids, they explicitly link the visuality of the written page to rational, mathematical protocols: “To writing belonges good thinges two or three, / As drawing, Painting, and eke geometree.”³⁹ Fair writing, despite there being some debates about it in the seventeenth century, was a mechanical art that could be, with time and patience, perfected.⁴⁰

From the perspective of a writing master, unconventional or unregulated scribal hands would signal either inattention or eccentricity. In a passage discussing the virtue of “running hands”—like cursive, in which the letter forms are joined—Davies recounts the development of such eccentricity in a noteworthy pupil. Explaining that the “old ordinary slow Romane hand,” which required that the pen be “taken up at every letter,” proved an encumbrance to many students, he recalls that Prince Henry, the son of King James I, grew to resent it. This “dull slow hand” prompted the “apt, ingenious and docible” prince to “devise a hand of his own, wherein the letters were linked for his use” because the Roman hand had “made writing but odious to him, as it is to all them that can write non other hand.”⁴¹ Davies knew how boredom, frustration, and confusion could arise if students disdained the mere management of their quills. Even the spaces between written characters could prove too strong a resistance. Yet however ingenious, the prince’s invented hand would have likely proved socially embarrassing, so Davies presumably substituted it with instruction in a more established running hand, such as cursive or secretary.⁴²

Davies’s account of “running hands” turns to glance briefly at poetic composition, and as he does so he acknowledges the disadvantages of rigidly aligning oneself with external standards of correctness. Observing how the Roman hand was imposed on women, he complains about what he perceived as arbitrary and ignorant rules:

Of which number women (for the most part) are, who out of the ignorance of their teachers (for very view or no English teachers write this hand kindely) are perswaded that the dull set Romane is the womans right hand, but nothing lesse; for women naturally have as much facility in joyning, and are as nimble handed in all manuall qualities (to their praise be it spoken) as men. Many of them are Poets, and indite in verse as well as prose with rare commendation: then in their composition, should they use to take up the pen at every letter, they had need to have good memories, lest their invention should be lost ere they could record it with their pen.⁴³

Several women were included among Davies’s pupils—notable among them, the playwright and historian Elizabeth Carey—and his admiration for poets and patrons like the Countess of Pembroke and Lucy, Countess of Bedford, made it abundantly clear to him that such arbitrary regulations could be stifling.⁴⁴ A hand that mandated lifting the pen, and, indeed, anything that posed resistance to the poet’s ability to wrangle thoughts into words, threatened her attentiveness to invention. Since the hand that inscribes is also the hand that endites, these twinned functions vie for dominance in a dance of agency.

Davies confesses this outright when he subsequently offers the reader an intimate glimpse into his own writer’s garret: “[F]or when I am about any such businesse my self, I am fain to neglect the fairenesse of my hand, for the freenesse of it to help my memory: so that should some see my first rough hewings in this kinde, (though it be better perhaps then every one can do) yet little would they think it to be my hand, especially writing (as often I do) in my bed: for as our divine Sir Philip well said, ease is the nurse of Poesie, which makes many Poets so idle-busie.”⁴⁵ When setting out to compose poems, he set aside his identity as a writing master to free up his poetic attention. The work of poesy, he acknowledges, is partly one of refining clumsy bodgeries and uncorked spewings, or what Anne Lamott candidly terms “shitty first drafts.”⁴⁶ Davies even invites the reader to imagine what his “first rough hewings” looked like, parenthetically suggesting that they would probably still be inscribed with better penmanship than “every one [else] can do.” This confession reveals that even when he tried to break his hand’s musculature loose from the social forces that had conditioned it, he could not help flexing. Letting oneself grow discomposed is easier said than done. Positioning the idle business of poetry against his actual occupation in this way, Davies confesses that the former compels him to neglect, but not necessarily abandon, the latter. A perceptive reader of Sidney, he also recognized that poetic idleness did not mean unreflective leisure.

Inefficiency is an important aspect of how creativity proceeds. Drawing on Pickering’s account of the mangle of practice to discuss musical composition, Tasos Zembylas and Martin Niederauer invoke his concept of the “disciplinary agency” of different discursive domains to explain that expectations exert pressure that can derail the flow of invention and also promote creative resourcefulness. Disciplinary agency may emerge in music as “notation systems,” in essay composition as the five-paragraph structure or prohibitions against passive voice, in early modern poetry as meter and rhyme. Reckoning with these discursive criteria—oscillating between laboring to adhere to patterns and laboring to depart from them—can be cognitively and physically draining: “During most composition processes, there are days of few ideas and very meagre work results. Such work days are just as important as days with clearly measurable outputs: composers eliminate specific options by heading into impasses, as it were—by trying out things and then discarding them. These acts mean that the ‘unproductive’ days are simply productive in a different way. Making cannot be reduced to efficient and effective action.”⁴⁷

If human intentionality arrives at creativity by accommodating resistance, as Pickering’s account of the mangle of practice suggests, this implies that incapacity and failure are fundamental to creative production. The creative process labors, in part, after differently productive labor—inherent to revision is the gesture of “trying out things and then discarding them.” In this way, revision is not merely an authorial practice, but paradigmatic of “how we pay attention to the world,” according to Richard Lanham: “We alternatively participate in the world and step back and reflect on how we attend to it. We first write, absorbed in what we have to say, and then revise, look at how we have written it.”⁴⁸ By oscillating between conception and completion, resistance and accommodation, revision subsists on potential energy. Thoughts become things that may still, in turn, be rethought. Negotiating between creative fantasies, rational calculations, disciplinary agents, affective impulses, formalized grammars, and coercive imperatives, revisers exercise restless judgment without committing to binding verdicts. Revision, as such, is the epicenter of discomposition; it is when a text wavers; it is what makes labor discontinuous with productivity.

In contrast to the calm, even-handed attentiveness of fair writing, poesy is animated by revision’s restlessness. As Davies recounts in his first book of poetry, Mirum in Modum (1601), the mind grapples with the world by way of “Fantacie,” which, as a “through-fare” to the “Intelligence,” activates when the senses “cannot discerne” something. In these moments, Fantasy “resteth not” and “doth so forme reforme, and it deforms” the perceiver’s conception of what faces him or her. Fantasy is the “Ape of Nature” but also, importantly, adds her own “Patterns” via “[a] thousand toyes which in hir Bowells breede.”⁴⁹ Recalling Spenser’s allegorical depiction of Errour in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, Fantasy appears monstrous, feminine, and excessively reproductive. Davies quickly clarifies, however, that even though she births “Chimeraes,” Fantasy also creates “Beauties” that “do the Mynde beheau’n with matchless blisse.” Neither good nor evil, Fantasy but “makes and marrs as she disposèd is”; her “double diligence” involves taking impressions from the world and remaking them into “imprintes” on the mind, sometimes with the aid of forms that she had devised herself. An engine of discomposition, Fantasy leads images in the mind through turbulent encounters with the world. At this juncture, Davies’s poetic speaker reemerges to describe how the restless Muse of Fantasy eventually arrives at Reason:

Halla, my Muse; heere rest a breathing while,

 Sith thou art now arriu’d at Reasons seate;

 To whom, as to thy Sou’raigne reconcile

 Thy straying thoughts, and humbly hir entreate,

 With hir iust measure all thy lines to meate,

 Lest that like many Rimers of our time

 Thou blotst much Paper, without meane or measure,

 In Verse, whose reason runneth al to Rime:

 Yet of the Lawrell wreathe they make a seasure,

 And doth Minerua so, a shrewde displeasure.

(Mirum in Modum, 1:8)

The “many Rimers” of Davies’s age are said to blot paper because of their haste and inattention; their very words, Davies suggests, are errors. Such metaphorical blots are distinct from the blots the Muse will inevitably produce as a function of her “straying thoughts” being brought into order in compliance with Reason’s “iust measure.” The Muse is made to align with correctness by pausing, resting, and bracing itself for Reason’s judgment, which will require a different sort of blot. As both the spilling of ink and the obliteration of it, the blot becomes emblematic of revision’s mangle of practice. It is the offspring of Fantasy and Reason, of ebullience and assiduousness, produced when writers choose to sacrifice and readjust what they have already written.

In the early modern period, blots were metonymic for the materiality of writing, making its primary metaphorical connotations contingency, embodiment, sin, and waste.⁵⁰ Yet any blot could tell two stories: of error or of amendment. Writers blotted the page to literally materialize the word out of ink’s primordial chaos; they also blotted the page to cover a mistake. Making blots required that pages be rewritten, thereby risking more errors that would delay once more the final blotting. Being thus overruled, or rather overrun, was apparently the fate of Davies’s commissioned copy of the Sidney Psalter: according to William Ringler, Davies was given the task of rendering the Sidneys’ work “in a single beautiful Italian hand with the capitals, and loops of the other letters, in gold” for presentation to the queen, but the copy was apparently never presented “because the many corrections made in the process of copying marred its appearance.”⁵¹ Writers avoided sharing blotted leaves for fear of impropriety, and we might read confessions that their work was too blemished for publication as a performance of modesty.⁵² As evidence both of error and of care, however, such confessions also narrated energetic expenditure. Rather than presenting oneself as someone pressed to speak without a say in the matter, an announcement of spilled ink redefined authority as the ability to revise. Sir John Harington does this explicitly in the preface to his translation of Orlando Furioso (1607), when he rebuffs criticisms of his feminine rhymes. He first appeals to conventional authorities by arguing that French poets and Philip Sidney also use feminine rhymes, before ultimately pointing to his “many blotted papers,” because this paper trail “might affoord me authoritie to giue a rule of it.”⁵³ The “authoritie to giue a rule” derived from a willingness to countenance one’s own unruliness.

Though Davies wielded great authority in rules about inscribing words in clean lines, he openly foundered when he could not do the same for inditing. In another of his many epigrams about himself, he reflects on this schism:

A drie friend, lately, thus did write of mee;

But whether well or ill, the World shall see:

There’s none were fitter then thou to endite,

If thou couldst pen as well as thou canst write.

This praise is Capitall: ah, so wer’t scand,

Then should my Head bee prais’d before my Hand.

But this doth lightly lift my Hand so hie

To fall on mine owne Heade more heauily.

If I deserue it, still so let it fall;

So shall my shame not fame bee Capitall.

If not; that Heath-bredde Muse is but a Drabb,

That (Ioab-like) embraceth with a Stabb.

(“Of Myselfe [Epig. 251],” SF, 2:36)

Davies’s “drie friend,” as the penultimate line indicates, was John Heath, a fellow at New College, Oxford.⁵⁴ Even in his defensive retort to this acquaintance, he showcases a career-long insecurity: entertaining doubts about what Heath could have meant, Davies leaves the decision to however “the World” will choose to interpret it. Deferrals to external validation appear throughout his work. In Wittes Pilgrimage, for example, the speaker explains that he “maketh happlesse Blotts in eu’ry Line / To simbolize his Loue vnfortunate” and proceeds to underscore that the page’s discomposition is a function of the writer’s: “Pen, Ynke, and Paper, then, are quite vndone, / (As is their Master) with Sad Sorrowes smart” (“Sonnet 67,” WP, 2:15). This conceit reflects Davies’s habit of noting that the mark he made on culture was interrelated with the marks he made on paper. Another poem echoing this theme advises his brother Richard Davies, also a writing master, by cautioning, “Conforme thine head and heart vnto thine hand, / Then staidly they thine actions will command” (“To My Brother Mr. Richard Dauies,” TWP, 2:58). The hand’s effects were inextricable from the head’s endeavors; the act of poetic composition was supposed to bring intelligence and manual technique into alignment.

In an irony for a writing master whose primary role was to train students away from blotting, then, Davies felt at times as if poetry was diminished once blots were excised. A prefatory poem to his Microcosmos (1603) celebrates the recently coronated King James I by depicting poets having a difficult time expressing their joy:

Some bend their browes, and wroth with their conceite

Doe scratch their Cogitation’s hardest Hold

For having no Worths in their rude Receipt

Worth the bestowing, though the worst be gold;

Which is but Drosse, compar’d with what they would:

Some other write and blot, and blotting write,

So thoughts in Blots infolded, thoughts vnfold;

Bewraying so the Worlds of their delight,

Is more then Worlds of thoughts can well recite.

(Microcosmos, “A Preface,” 1:13)

While some poets arrive at “gold” despite believing their work to be “Drosse” compared to what their ambitions had promised, in the circularity of cogitation other poets “write and blot, and blotting write.” By this, Davies suggests that the blots best depict their authors’ actual inventions by disclosing the “Worlds of their delight.” Just as a blot can depict deformity—such as when Ben Jonson asks the painter William Burlase to make “one great blot” in order to render his own bulky frame⁵⁵—they can also conjure obstreperous joy as rhetorical conjurations of the sublime. Joshua Calhoun notes that a blot, unlike other forms of revision that enabled deletion, “can function as paralipsis, as an explicit gesture toward a thing that is emphasized even as it is overtly ignored.”⁵⁶ Here, Davies presents them as an earnest aposiopesis: a breaking off of speech in the middle of conversation as if overcome with emotion. Within the blot lives poesy’s endeavor; it materializes both self-censure and irrepressible utterance. Writing doubts about his own words, or even about words’ capacities for representation, Davies equates cancellation with composition.

In another poem about himself, this one an epigram responding to a poem by Thomas Bastard, he documents in detail the roughness of his hewings:

BASTARD, thine Epigrams to sport inclines;

Yet I protest that one delights me best

Which saith the Reader soone deuoures thy lines,

Which thou in many houres couldst scarce digest.

So fares it twixt the Reader and my Muse;

For that which she compiles with paine (God wot):

This word she chooseth, that she doth refuse;

This line she enterlines, that she doth blot;

Heere’s too much ornament, and there it lackes;

This figure’s farre-fetcht, out with it againe;

That phrase of affectation too much smackes;

This reason, rime doth racke and too much straine;

That simil’s improper, mend the same;

This application’s harsh, harmonious make it;

Fye, out vpon’t, this verses foote is lame,

Let it goe vpright, or a mischiefe take it;

Yet it runnes ill, the cadence crabbèd is,

Away with it, for shame, it marres the rest;

Giue it sweet accent; Fy, fy yet I misse;

Store makes me scarce I know not which is best.

Heere is a bodge, bots on’t; farwell my pen,

My Muse is dull’d, another time shall serue;

To-morrow she (perhaps) shall too’t agen;

And yet to-morrow she (perhaps) may swerue… .

(“To Mr. Tho. Bastard, and the Reader,” SF, 2:20)

Davies has caught hold of a writing prompt after perusing Bastard’s Chrestoleros (1598), in which the poem “Ad lectorem” explains that the poet’s verses are “easie of digestion” because of his concerted effort: “How many verses haue I cancelled? / How many lompes of meaning seasoned[?]” While epigrams “sprowte forth,” Bastard explains, “I vse mine arte, and prune them with my pen.”⁵⁷ Like a well-trained humanist, Davies copiously elaborates on Bastard’s example. He describes the physical ramifications of his muse’s endeavors, and as he documents these traces, he also points to a host of formal and aesthetic decisions. In a cascade of verses divided by medial caesuras, the poem directly reckons with the disciplinary agents of early modern poetry: figurative language, meter, rhyme, cadence, tone, affectation.⁵⁸ Any or all of these things place pressure on the poet’s hand, and any of them can mar the work. Each decision being made with respect to one element complicates the standing of others. “Store,” says Davies, alluding to the options available to him at every turn, “makes me scarce I know not which is best.” Looking down at his work midstream, he cries out, “Heere is a bodge, bots on’t” and relents, awaiting his muse’s return on another night.

At the end of his pen’s fantastic voyage, after his muse has returned and at the point when he feels ready to pass his restless energy forward, Davies finds the journey rendered irrelevant by greedy, superficial readers:

Well yet at last the poem being pend

The Printer it presents to Readers view;

Some foule-mouth’d Readers then (which God amend)

So slop them vp that it would make one spew,

To see how rudely they deuoure at once

More with then ere their head-peece held perchance;

As if my wit were mincèd for the nonce,

For them with ease to swallow with a vengeance.

Yet preethee Reader be not so vnkinde,

(Though I am bold with thee) to eate me too;

I beg (being thy poore cooke) but thy best winde;

If thou wilt not do this thou’lt little doo;

But f[y], I shall not be beholden to thee

A rough ryme choake thee; eate and much good do thee.

(“To Mr. Tho. Bastard, and the Reader,” SF, 2:20)

Proud of his labors, he despairs about how easy it is for readers to ignore them. Even here, however, he is self-deprecating, and the last six lines vacillate like the wavering indentation that closes “Of My Selfe.” At first they implore (“Yet preethee Reader …”), then they judge (“If thou wilt not do this …”), and then they dismiss (“I shall not be beholden to thee”). The poem’s final line then again deploys a medial caesura, first blurting out how the poet really feels—“A rough ryme choake thee”—before suggesting either that his poor cooking will stick in readers’ throats or that the food may be nourishing despite their shallow tastes. As with his poem responding to Heath, the judgment is left out of Davies’s overtaxed hands, and the final verdict of praise or blame remains an open question. The poem thus aligns a collection of “choke” points across writers’ and readers’ encounters with the poem itself: Davies’s muse stopping up his pen and pressing him down a surer path, him pausing in his efforts night after night until finally issuing something, readers rushing headlong into his verses and risking indigestion, and the author angrily critiquing those readers, dismissing them, and then finally resigning himself to the situation. If only God would “amend” the readers, the poem parenthetically prays, with as much attention as a poet reworking his creations.

Fantasy never rests, but the muse, poets, and readers alike may grow tired and inattentive—as Horace noted, even Homer might sometimes be caught nodding off.⁵⁹ In another epigram addressing himself, Davies complains about how writing drains him: “Lord! my poore braines now busily I beate, / My temples toile with chafing of my hand; / My sleepes disturb, my meales cutt short at meate; / My time consume” (“Of Myselfe,” TWP, 2:64). In his concern with material want, Davies echoes comments made by other writers interested in the tenuous alignment between labor and recognition.⁶⁰ Participating in this trope, he ventriloquizes the carping criticisms of a shallow reader who pays little attention to an actual composition. Pointing to “some gull” who might declare about his poem, “[I]ts pritty, pretty,” he hears such a reader then question why someone would spend “so much witt” to “so small purpose.” Some other reader, he then expects, might concede some value in the work, but then find cause for remarking on trivial errors—“And then (perhapps) he cauills with a T / That was misplaced, or at the most missuted” (“Of Myselfe,” TWP, 2:64). As we have seen, Davies distinguished between “writing” and “inditing,” between what the page looked like and the poesy that produced it. When turning his attention to the reader’s experience rather than the writer’s, he imagines this distinction collapsing. Any ungenerous reader could choose to brood on a typo. In such a context, no writer could be certain of the conditions or standards by which his or her work might be appraised.

A successful poetic business depended in no insubstantial part, Davies came to realize, not just on privileged access to idleness but also on poets’ capacity to market themselves and to win the benefit of readers’ doubt. Because he lacked the ability to adjust his readers’ expectations and make them endeavor to read him “aright,” he ended up unwillingly documenting the trajectory of a poet correcting himself in accordance with norms and expectations. The problem with revision, after all, is that if it is not sustained with the same alacrity as invention—if the poet is disallowed the straying frenzy of Fantasy—it may lapse either into impulsive necessity, exhausted compromise, or rationalized correction. Undertaking revision requires having enough energy, time, ink, and paper, and Davies, watching the movements of his own hand as he lay awake in his bed, understood that his idleness was not the same as that of the idle rich. Aware of the conscious and unconscious compromises he made by trading the blotted circumlocutions of poesy for the linear logic of productivity, he witnessed himself becoming busier only to become more mediocre.

Wealth and Wit

“Mere bric-a-brac by dull conceited fool!”

 So dry-as-dusts, snatch-and-run readers, prate

 O’ Davies of Hereford; and then elate

Ween they have damn’d him. Men not of their school,

With brains, and heart, and judgment true, to rule

 Their verdicts—both of late and early date:

 Men who far up transfigured heights had sate—

Differ. Granted, the books are over-full;

Granted they are unsifted, hurried, mixt

 Of tares and grain; fair flowers with weeds entwined:

 Yet there is genius; and, my friend, you’ll find

Thought, feeling, fancy, wit, rounded and fixt

 As stars; with happy memories and traits

 Of Shakespeare and “The Mighties” of those days.⁶¹

This poem prefaces the only modern printed edition of John Davies of Hereford’s collected works. Composed in the late nineteenth century by Alexander B. Grosart, who edited over forty volumes of writings by Tudor and Stuart “worthies,” it foreshadows how the volume’s critical introduction intends to refute the “un-golden asses” who have dismissed the poet despite being “in utter ignorance of his books.”⁶² Even as he makes his strenuous case in Davies’s favor, however, Grosart concedes that the poet’s works are often “unsifted, hurried, mixt” and that his poems—riddled with “superfluities of commonplace”—“render any lofty claim for Davies as a Poet impossible.” Nevertheless, his justifications for producing the volume anyway are aesthetic: “If there be not in this poem the sign-manual of POWER of a very noticeable type,” he writes to introduce his favorite excerpt, “I confess I am incapable of discerning what is and what is not powerful.”⁶³ As careful a reader of Davies as anyone—his sonnet itself closely echoes Davies by borrowing some of his phrases—even Grosart quails at fully affiliating his reputation with this lowercase-p poet. Both the poet and his eventual editor surveyed the poetic landscape of early modern England to declare what they saw as worthwhile, or at least not worthless—but Grosart, unlike Davies, presumes a learned authority that Davies himself would never access. Over time, as we will see, Davies consciously distanced himself from the practice of adjudicating on poetic work; he resolved to be an admirer rather than an evaluator of writing, because judgment proved to be an unreliable standard for appointing value. Grosart’s own posture, one more typical of literary history, is less accommodating: those who damn Davies outright, without even acknowledging those few traces of “power,” he suggests, are of a different “school” than those with “brains, and heart, and judgment true, to rule / Their verdicts.” This defense relies on confidence in his own schooling, which has determined Davies to have passed—just barely—an implicit test (to which the correct answer was and remains Shakespeare).

Unlike his future editor, Davies understood that his restless wit and educational background were not the only engines driving his hand across the page.⁶⁴ In his verses, poesy appears as a concrete practice involving actual physical expenditure. It names a struggle to exceed the things within one’s grasp and a struggle to resist grasping only that which was within reach. This conflict between ambitious impulse and decorous self-restraint required that poets orchestrate their time, deplete their materials, and exhaust their mental faculties. Tabulating these costs, Davies could not help but comment on the fact that his work was typically unrewarded and unremunerated.

Earlier in “Of My Selfe,” Davies plays on the resonances of the word “vain”—frivolous, worthless, narcissistic—to interrogate his own labors:

And who doth loue this vaine of fancy vaine

But vainest men? then, ô how vaine am I

That thus the powers of my wit doe strayne,

To please vaine Skums with skumme of vanity?

(“Of My Selfe,” WP, 2:5)

Unable to distinguish between his approach as a writer and the attitudes and habits of his readers, Davies deplores the vanity of writing for vain men. As we know, however, “Of My Selfe” ends with him deciding to publish anyway. When he points to his “vaine of fancy vaine”—the worthless ore he has excavated with the help of Fantasy—he nods at the “strayne” of this fruitless effort. This straining also appears in a poetical essay in a phrase adapted from Terence’s Eunuchus: “Nihil tam bene dictum, quod no fuit dictum prius” (Nothing is well said, that was not said already). Riffing, as “Of My Selfe” also does, on Ecclesiastes, Davies claims that “Our Actions, and Inuentions are fast fixt / Vnto the Spheare of Vniformity” (“Nihil tam bene dictum,” WP, 2:53). Even though some writers may mix in some variations and changes to their source materials, these hodgepodge creations inevitably still “hold conformity” with the disciplinary agency of poetic traditions. Davies’s contemporaries could only ever remain schoolchildren trailing after the ancients, he supposed, while the ancient poets “strained their Braines / Beyond our reache, though we in vaine, haue sought / To straine our Wits beyond their Wisedoms Straines.” It was only “Self-conceit” (another form of vanity) that had led poets to imagine that they had lighted on “some Inuention, past the modern Straine” (“Nihil tam bene dictum,” WP, 2:53). Only if a poet recovered every trace of his cultural literacy by reading every extant book and still found that “some, or all” of his poetry was not determined by preceding works, this would make him “a Spirit and no Man Naturall” (“Nihil tam bene dictum,” WP, 2:53). Davies, however, keenly sensed that he was not a “Spirit,” to the extent that he sometimes felt he did not deserve to make a claim over his own work. While he rubbed elbows with many of the most prominent poets of his age, he was never bold enough to imagine himself truly great. He was not one of the “self-crowned laureates” who could affix his name to a recognizable vein.⁶⁵

Given the “authorless” transmission patterns of epigrams, wherein lines were written with the understanding that they would be reproduced without ascription, a poet’s “vein” rather than his or her actual words became a calling card.⁶⁶ Prior to the advent of copyright, the idea that one could steal from other writers was complicated by the traditions of “compilation” and “emulation” that informed humanist writing practices.⁶⁷ Achieving literary fame in the early modern period may consequently be better understood, Max W. Thomas suggests, as an author negotiating “his or her own name” (emphasis in the original) within the limitation of recognizing poetic works as “common property.”⁶⁸ A kind of compositional fingerprint in an atmosphere where poetic achievement could precipitate patronage and official posts, a poet’s vein, metonymic for the poet’s name, was social capital.⁶⁹

Davies appears so consistently self-effacing across his epigrams that he counterproductively tries to make a name for himself by diminishing his own stature, warping the modesty topos into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a poem to Jonson, he confesses feelings of envy by invoking those of his addressee: “[W]ould thou couldst enuy mee: / But (ah!) I feare my vertues are too darke / For enuies shadow, from so bright a Sparke” (“To My Well-Accomplish’d Friend Mr. Ben Iohnson,” SF, 2:26). Praising John Donne, he appraises himself as among “some poets of our times / That spoile good paper with their byting pen” (“To the No Lesse Ingenious Than Ingenuous Mr. Iohn Dun,” SF, 2:18). Comparing his muse to that of Sir John Harington’s, which is “plum’d on woodcockes, wrens, and ostridges,” he laments that his “pownces not so strong, / Hauing some geese to pull” (“To the Worthy, Ingenious and Learned Knight Sr Iohn Harrington,” SF, 2:22–23). To the rival epigrammatist John Owen, he even seems willing to relinquish his own claims to authorship. “Lend me thine hand; thine head I would haue said,” he writes, correcting himself when he realizes that all he truly has to offer is his manual labor—“(For my hand’s firmer though thy head’s more staid).” If Owen would “add some merry measures” to Davies’s own verses, he suggests, “Then shall my booke be prais’d (at least) for thine” (“To Myne Ingenious and Learnedly Gamesome Friend Mr Iohn Owen,” TWP, 2:58).⁷⁰

Such subordination of his own name becomes most obvious in Davies’s reflections on his emergence under the intimidating shadow of another poet with whom he was and remains sometimes confused— Sir John Davies.⁷¹ Hereford was a writing master who taught students advanced orthography at Oxford and near the Inns of Court; Sir John had matriculated at Oxford, studied law at the Middle Temple, and was often reprimanded for bad behavior before seeing his poetry win approbation from both Queen Elizabeth and King James I. Sir John lacked discipline but had social connections and wealth; he would eventually become attorney general of Ireland. Hereford cultivated a reputation for discipline but lived at best an effectively middle-class life. In a poem addressed to his noble namesake, he writes, “Good Sir, your nature so affects my Name, / That both your Name and Nature are mine owne / And in their loue to both, affect your fame, / Yet hauing not like fortunes, liue vnknowne” (“To My Right Worthily-Beloued Sr Iohn Dauies Knight,” TWP, 2:53).

Davies knew that his life and work were generally appraised as mediocre; his “fortunes” confirmed as much.⁷² While there are no records of him attending university, throughout his professional life he situated himself near centers of higher learning—likely because they produced a steady stream of pupils seeking to present themselves at court in elaborate hands. In London, he lived near the Inns at Court, and he associated himself with Oxford—namely, with Magdalen College and with several Oxford students who had been his pupils. As a poet, however, he initially made a distinction between living “in the middle” of the social order and writing mediocre verses, arguing that middling men could still be great poets.⁷³ In a poetical essay developing a theme from Publilius Syrus, “Fortuna vitrea est, que cum splendet, frangitur” (Fortune is fragile, after it glitters, it shatters), he writes that it is better to live unseen in order to better observe the ebb and flow of greatness and baseness. The poet may be “like a looker on a Tragedie, / Within the Middle Room, among the Meane.” Not participating in the travails of a great life protects the poet from the calamities that breed true poverty; observing the rise and fall of the reckless greats could instead offer inspiration to compose “matter far aboue the reache of Words” (“Fortuna vitrea est,” WP, 2:48). Those who do not experience great risk, he felt, may still find means to write about it.

He repeats this conceit in another poem, a sonnet possibly referencing the work of a more blatantly ambitious poet, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: “When, with my Minds right Eye, I do behold / (From nought, made nothing lesse) great Tamburlaine.” Davies the theatergoer notes how figures in tragedies may be raised high in order to be brought low, and he concludes that it is wiser to stay “among indiffrent Things” (“Other Sonnets vpon Other Subiects,” WP, 2:22). This poem, too, places poetry outside the karmic calculus of acquisition and debt: “And so I liue, in Case, to take or giue, / For Loue, or Meed, no Scepter but a Crowne: / Yet Flowres of Crownes, for Poesies expence,/Poets might take, and giue no recompence” (“Other Sonnets vpon Other Subiects,” WP, 2:22). Poets may exceed the mean because poetry can break the economy of taking and giving, of economic advantage and individual agency. Through poetry, pangs of desire bubble upward, past the realm of worldly things—somehow, Davies imagines, it may become the vehicle by which one might raise one’s spiritual, if not socioeconomic, stature.

It is one thing to watch Tamburlaine’s rise and fall, or even to be a spectator at Marlowe’s self-consciously audacious Tamburlaine, and another thing entirely to try and emulate greatness while exercising caution. For much of European history, terms like “mediocre” and “mean” invoked the “middle style” of rhetorical discourse, which Rhetorica ad Herennium defines as “words of a lower, yet not of the lowest and most colloquial, class of words.”⁷⁴ Accordingly, mediocrity also named a social and behavioral status valued for common civility. Attaching to concepts like the “golden mean,” the via media, and the “mean between extremes,” it named a standard worth inhabiting— but also one that was a notoriously difficult one to describe or define. Like “common,” as Neil Rhodes explains, the “mean” eventually came to denote both an “average” and something “low or base.”⁷⁵ This proved especially true as it became a term employed in aesthetic appraisal. Developing Ernst Robert Curtius’s view of European literary history as a “tradition of mediocrity,” Paul Fleming adjusts the phrase to “the tradition of exemplarity” because, in the Horatian lineage that inspired much of European poetics until the eighteenth century, unimpressive artfulness was associated primarily with “the inability to observe rules and thus to maintain tradition.”⁷⁶ Fleming observes that it was only after the rise of “the eighteenth-century genius,” and the revival of interest in Longinus’s writings on sublimity, that greatness became associated with originality, and mediocrity with hacky derivativeness. What Horace meant by “mediocre” (i.e., evoking but not quite capturing the greatness of Homer) is quite different from what Pierre Bourdieu calls the products of “middle-brow” culture (i.e., “accessible” versions of the avant-garde).⁷⁷ Yet as Fleming also reminds us, if in one sense mediocrity means that something “fails to achieve completion or perfection,” in another it means “the art of the politician: made to please” and to appeal to the common, the popular.⁷⁸

Davies’s marginal position relative to poetic greatness allowed him to perceive how mediocrity, popularity, and socioeconomic insecurity were intertwined. In this way, he anticipated the rebirth of Longinus’s views of the aesthetic sublime, because for Longinus, mediocrity implied a safeguard against risk: “Perfect precision runs the risk of triviality, whereas in great writing as in great wealth there must needs be something overlooked. Perhaps it is inevitable that the humble, mediocre natures, because they never run any risks, never aim at the heights, should remain to a large extent safe from error, while in great natures their very greatness spells danger.”⁷⁹ This account of mediocrity traces “great writing” and “great wealth” to the same origin—the capacity to engage in risk. To say that Davies was mediocre from a Horatian perspective suggests that his was a failure of artful craftsmanship; to say that he was mediocre from a Longinian perspective is to assert derivativeness. Retracing the slow reemergence of Longinus’s On the Sublime over the course of the European sixteenth century (the first known edition was printed in Italy in 1554, the first Latin edition in 1566), Patrick Cheney argues that these printings and the “sixteenth-century use of the new word ‘sublime’ suggest that something was in the water much earlier” than the first English translation, which appeared in 1636. According to Cheney, “[T]wo historical phenomena emerging during the late sixteenth century—the modern author and the classical sublime—are interconnected.” Both authorship and sublimity share a “commitment to the project of literary greatness”; both are “produced through imitation of preceding authors; they are written primarily in the grand style (occasionally in the plain style); they proceed through elevated figuration; they represent our most serious cultural ideas; and they aim for artistic immortality.”⁸⁰ We might place Davies’s career squarely within the literary transformation Cheney describes, noting in his poesy the competing imperatives of Horace and Longinus, of an impulse to perfection and the self-contradictory art of leaving “something overlooked.”

To declare something mediocre is to say very little concrete about it—mediocrity can only be relatively determined—thereby inviting a conversation about the manner and terms by which judgment itself is being exercised.⁸¹ Heinrich von Kleist observes that people “only argue and squabble about artworks that are not entirely excellent.”⁸² Fleming presses this insight toward an appreciation for mediocrity as a testing ground for social practice: “[T]he necessarily argumentative nature of dissecting mediocrity as well as the conflict of opinion it implies” means that “average art offers a truer model of the sensus communis—a community discussing and perhaps agreeing on what is mediocre and why—that aesthetic judgment presupposes.”⁸³ Declarations of mediocrity are invitations to reflect on the habits of judgment being applied to a given work at a given time, and Davies, as we have seen, openly declared himself mediocre. Because mediocre poetry invites and even provokes social critique, it is in the bland light of mediocrity that we may view him not as a model poet, but as an engaged critic of the literary economy of early modern London.

While he had courtly ambitions, Davies also recognized himself as part of a developing hierarchy of literary quality. Near the bottom of this unstable literary hierarchy was a class of writers who explicitly used their work to comment on public affairs, and their favored genre was the epigram. These writers were known as the “pot-companion poets” or “pot poets,” and as Thomas Cogswell explains, they took advantage of their “rough and ready adult education” to anonymously disseminate scurrilous doggerel. A shade above balladeers and far below courtiers in their technical polish, pot poets exploited anonymity to libel and critique prominent figures. Their name gestures toward a metonymic web that also describes their cultural haunts: the “pot” may refer to their close affiliation with the alehouse, with the cheap “pot paper” on which they wrote, with pots circulated for coins in exchange for verses, and with the privies in which one might read and relish their rubbish. A sort of open-air literary underground that tacitly licensed sharp criticisms of public affairs, pot poetry drew the ire of more respectable sorts—among whom Davies imagined himself.⁸⁴ Yet even though pot poets were maligned by cultural elites for “social roughness and aesthetic worthlessness,” they represented a form of writerly endeavor that could still achieve fame and financial compensation. Davies was familiar with their work—and with their critiques of the literary system of elite London.

Among the most prominent of the pot poets was John Taylor. Because of Taylor’s and Davies’s inverted positions at the margins of early modern literary culture, reviewing Taylor’s unique professional career alongside that of Davies sheds light on the increasing inscrutability of literary value. Davies and Taylor seemed to know each other, and both were, in different ways, “middling” writers who perceived a frayed relationship between the effort a poet might invest in his work and the degree to which he might be compensated. If the ragged Taylor was less educated and less well-connected than the comparatively smooth Davies, however, he was also arguably more famous as a poet. He was known as “the Water Poet” because his day job was as a waterman, or ferry driver on the Thames, garnered him a wide following in early modern London.⁸⁵ He made this poetic career for himself in part by enter‑ taining his ferry fares with extemporaneous wit and poetry, and in part by developing “subscription” modes of remuneration and advertising wherein he would accept payment for putting landmarks and taverns into his works.⁸⁶

In The Praise of Hemp-Seed, Taylor critiques conceptions of value decoupled from ability and social utility: the often overlooked and devalued hemp seed, he contends, is the hardworking source of both fine clothing and tattered rags. Within that poem, he ruminates on paper (a hemp-seed product) as representative of England’s broken value system. He remarks that paper may be a democratizing medium: “For who can tell from whence these tatters springs? / May not the torne shirt of a Lords or Kings / Be pasht and beaten in the Paper mill / And made Pot-paper by the workemans skill?”⁸⁷ Defending the potential of even the lowest born, Taylor concedes that his work is less refined than that of other poets. He brandishes his lack of education as an asset, though, and facetiously reviews how “[s]ome Authors doe the name of Paper gather, / To be deriv’d from Papa, or a Father,” while others, because “it’s made of rags and pouerty, / In stead of Paper name it Pauperis.”⁸⁸ In this framing, paper becomes both the foundation of textual authority and the material evidence of ephemerality. As a ubiquitous good, it allows Taylor to develop a conception of poetic value whereby hard but potentially imperfect work is worth as much as, if not more than, lazy, smooth compilations. Riffing on his own last name, he concedes that he has compiled his verses out of others’ books and stolen phrases and patches, defending himself by arguing, as we saw Erasmus argue in chapter 1, that it was better to show the seams of one’s effort than to pass off wholly borrowed robes as one’s own.

We have seen Davies’s self-deprecations when he positions himself against the literati; here, by contrast, is his commendatory verse to Taylor’s Urania (1615):

In every Art, save Poetry, the meane

Is praisd: but therein meanely-well to do

Is base, too base: then Iudgment cannot leane

On whats too base, but base it must be too.

Then each man that his Reputation huggs

For Judgment, praise no lines of but meane Reach:

And laude but what drawes dry Minervaes duggs,

Lest they their Iudgments might thereby impeach.

Then is my Iudgment Iack, perplext in thee;

For thou dost write so well with meanes so ill

That thine Admirer I confesse to be,

Much rather then the Iudger of thy skill:

 Art makes not Poetry, thou dost plainly prove,

 But supernaturall bountie from aboue.

(“John Taylor, the Water Poet,” Commendatory Poems, 2:9)

The poem spells out some dimensions of Davies’s career-long ambivalence about literary value. It opens by invoking Horace’s declaration—one quoted in Sidney’s Defence—that even though a “lawyer and pleader of middling rank” still has value, “that poets be of middling rank, neither men nor gods nor booksellers ever brooked.”⁸⁹ A consequence of such disdain for middling poets, Davies observes, is that readers are typically ungenerous to any work that appears “of but meane Reach.” No reader would want to “impeach” his or her own judgment in public by praising what others may deem merely mediocre. Carping criticism has always been easier to venture than approving alignment. Diagnosing this social force, Davies acknowledges the difference between a poet at the “mean” and a poet who is able to “write so well with meanes so ill.” Instead of judging Taylor’s “skill,” he resolves instead to simply be an “admirer,” though he couches his admiration not in Taylor’s work ethic but in “supernaturall bountie.” By this logic, the fact that an uneducated person from a lower-class background could achieve “meanely-well to do” poetry was something of a miracle in itself, and it was unfair to “judge” that poet’s work by the same standards as the work of elites.

Davies’s second published collection of poems, Microcosmos (1603), describes a society in which the vagaries of fortune restrict writers, and literary arts in general, from reaching their full potential:

Artes perish wanting praise and due support;

And when want swaies the Senses Common-weale,

Witts vitall faculties was al amort:

The Minde, constrain’d the Bodies want to feele,

Makes Salves of Earth the Bodies hurt to heale,

Which doe the Mind bemire with thoughts vnfitt;

He[n]ce come those dull Conceipts sharp witts reveale,

Which nice Eares deeme to come from want of witt,

When want of wealth (indeede) is cause of it.

How many Poets, like Anatomies,

(As leane as Death for lacke of sustenance)

Complaine (poore Staruelings) in sadd Elegies

Of those whom Learning onely did advaunce,

That of their wants haue no considerance.

What Guift to Greatnesse can lesse welcome be

Then Poems, though by Homer pend perchaunce?

It lookes on them as if it could not see,

Or from them, as from Snakes, away wil flee.

(Microcosmos, 1:49)

Affirming that the mind’s labors cannot be disentangled from the body’s, Davies attributes some of poets’ “dull Conceipts” to a lack of “praise and due support.” He makes clear that money is not the only thing that produces good art by acknowledging in his running marginal commentary that “if some mens wittes were measured by their wealth, they would be accounted Salomons that are nothing else but money-baggs, ïn whõ[m] there is nothing but money” (Microcosmos, 1:49). In the poem itself, however, he raises the salient counterpoint that deprivation has consequences for the liveliness of wit. If Sidney suggests that poetry advances the “purification of wit” and that its “final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of,”⁹⁰ Davies argues that those clay lodgings, when put under strain and want, make for themselves “Salves of Earth” and consequently drag down any chance the wit has of purifying itself. It is no surprise, Microcosmos implies, that the nation’s poets have issued so much dreck—their poverty consumed the care they might have granted to writing.⁹¹

When the mind is bound by a body vulnerable to distraction, compromise, and lethargy—and the body is confined to impoverishment, want, and hunger—the work, poesy, will suffer. Early in his career, Davies appeals to poetry’s transcendent qualities to ignore such material concerns. Diagnosing a disparity between the labors of poesy and the transcendent heights of capital-P Poets, he argues that while poets may be poor, the work remains worth doing: “So make them pure (at least most pure in sight) / Which to Posterity may be a light.” Poetry’s value lies in attaching the earthly present to eternity, so what matter if a poet is not appreciated in the poet’s own time?⁹²

By the time of Paper’s Complaint (1611), however, Davies’s perspective appears to have changed. Posing as paper itself to satirize the sluicing filth that “becackes” (PC, 2:75) its breast, he presses poets to feel as if even their pages can see their laziness. After first railing against the pot poets, ballet mongers, and others who array it with their “Offals of wit,” Paper also turns its yellowed eye on the immorality that had preoccupied antipoetical writings. It takes Venus and Adonis to task for its “bawdy Geare” and rails against Nashe’s “Choice of Valentines” for making it wear the word “dildo” (PC, 2:75). The main thrust of Paper’s argument links the wasting of material components of writing to the mismanagement of social expenditure. Bad poetry is a symptom of the unthinking profligacy of London in general, the denizens of which were coming to prioritize rapid consumption. Commercialization coupled with poor editorial standards had created a class of “infant Rimers” like pot poets and eager mediocrities who “ply their Pens as Plow-men do their Plow / And pester Postes with Titles of new bookes” (PC, 2:76). Paper does not even spare its own author: “And thou (O Poet) that dost pen my Plaint, / Thou art not scot-free from my iust complaint, / For, thou hast plaid thy part, with thy rude Pen, / To make vs both ridiculous to men” (PC, 2:75). Yet even as Paper chastises those who have mistreated it with their crude ink, it concedes that transcendent poetry will endure. It generally approves of poetry, since poetry makes Paper wear its “rich and gaudiest Geare.” Its favorites, it confesses, remain those who “in too earnest Game / (Or little spleene) did me no little shame,” because despite these lapses, “They oft haue me araid with royall Rimes, / That rauish Readers” (PC, 2:76).

As Paper recognizes the virtues of poetry, it also laments the art’s vulnerability to forces outside of poets’ control:

O Poetry! that now (as stands thy case)

Art the head game; and yet art out an Ace:

An Ace? nay two: (for on thee Fortune frownes)

That’s out of Credit quite, and out of Crownes.

Thou art a worke of darknesse, that doest damne

Thy Soule (all Satire) in an Epigram.

Thou art, in this worlds reckoning, such a Botch

As kills the English quite, how er’e the Scotch

Escape the mortall mischiefe: but, indeed,

Their Stars are better; so, they better speed.

Yet Poetry be blith, hold vp thy head,

And liue by Aire till Earthly Lumpes be dead.

But, if Aire fat not, as through thee it passes,

Liue vpon Sentences gainst golden Asses.

(PC, 2:76)

Gone unheralded, unapproved, and underfinanced, poetry that has fallen “out of Credit” and “out of Crownes” has only one recourse: the benighted work of satirical epigrams. If denied access to transcendence because of material want, poets are encouraged to become more caustic, more venomous, and more critical. The first half of “idle-business” is as important as the second; being forced to work by external pressures is as destructive to poetic endeavor as periods of thoughtlessness. Writers, Paper concludes, should embrace idleness as an opportunity to think, learn, and wait: “[L]et your reason idle bee the while; / Let Reason worke, and spare your Writings toile” (PC, 2:79). Moreover, Paper warns those who presume to possess wisdom that any such apprehension divorced from the restless energies of fantasy and desire—of a perpetual and impulsive grasping—is a delusion. Idleness, in this light, is not rest; it is “differently productive” labor that knows that not everything it may produce is worth sharing with the world. Making this case, Paper ultimately bemoans how poets do not all have opportunities to escape, even if fleetingly, the heavy burdens of the other pressures driving hands across pages. “Although your Minde be clog’d with Bodyes weight,” the piece of paper tells the writing master working on it, if you come to write after allowing yourself some idleness, “ye grace me with eternall lines, / That compasse can, and gage the deep’st Designes” (PC, 2:79). Throughout history, far from everyone has been afforded the opportunity to undertake this time-consuming labor. Until all might have this chance, Paper suggests that it is poets’ job to launch critiques, to sustain themselves by feeding on the “golden Asses” who value false idols and equate wealth with wit.

Reflection: Teaching without Judging

Nancy Sommers’s influential study of revision reveals that in experienced writers, a willingness to labor further is sparked by their understanding of the critical importance of “dissonance.”⁹³ Characterized by their ability to discover meaning by confronting “incongruities between intention and execution,” these writers know that writing thoughtfully, or using writing to think, is a practice of reflection and reconsideration.⁹⁴ Inexperienced and learning writers, by contrast, are often guided by instructions, “struggle to bring their essays into congruence with a predefined meaning,” and orient their labors “toward a teacher-reader who expects compliance with rules.”⁹⁵ As bell hooks points out, beyond stifling genuine revision, institutionally enforced “correctness” also perpetuates the silencing of writers from marginalized social classes, or writers who have not already been initiated into the academy’s discursive community.⁹⁶ Getting a good grade, like achieving fame, demands that the work be submitted in accordance with whatever clues the writer might have picked up about what the teacher wants. Experiences of discomposition only derail the timeline of productivity, and students know from experience that dissonance is rarely a people pleaser.

To introduce students to the virtues of revision, Peter Elbow suggests separating the writing process into two stages: free writing and revision. This separation would engage the “two opposing muscles” of creativity and critical thinking.⁹⁷ To depict the struggle that occurs when these muscles are simultaneously taxed, Elbow imagines two writers: one who is “blocked and incoherent” and another who “can always write just what he wants.” Their different approaches manifest not just in terms of the quality of their prose but, via an analogy that John Davies of Hereford might have appreciated, in their management of their pens: “Picture the two of them: one has uneven, scrunched handwriting with pointy angles, the other has round, soft, even handwriting. When I make these two people freewrite, the incoherent scrunched one is often catapulted immediately into vivid, forceful language. The soft handwriting, on the other hand, just continues to yield what it has always yielded: language that is clear and perfectly obedient to the intentions of the writer, but lifeless. It will take this obedient writer much longer to get power. It will take the scrunched writer longer to get control.”⁹⁸ For Elbow, handwriting metonymically captures the cleaving of a writer’s attention between the riotous impulsive urges constitutive of “power” and the externally disciplined technique that bolsters “control.” The shapeliness of smooth letterforms analogizes conventionality, formality, and obedience; the scrunched pointiness, vibrant life. Writing should be a struggle, Elbow suggests: “[Y]ou are trying to wrestle a steer to the ground, to wrestle a snake into a bottle, to overcome a demon that sits in your head,” and you “must overpower that steer or snake or demon,” but “not kill it.”⁹⁹

Both the “soft” and the “scrunched” hands exhibit lack—one of power, the other of control—and so both are part of a class of writers whom Elbow characterizes as “in the middle.” These writers are defined as “those who manage to write but don’t write especially well,” because the muscles that drive creativity are at odds with those that animate critical reflection. “Either creativity has won out and produced writers who are rich but undisciplined,” he observes, or “critical thinking has won out and produced writers who are careful but cramped.” Separating freewriting from revision can alleviate this drive toward mediocrity, Elbow suggests: the clay may “fight you a bit in your hands as you try to work it into a bowl, but that bowl will end up more alive and powerful.”¹⁰⁰ In dissociating power from control, however, Elbow’s analogies arrive at the same problem that Davies arrived at when he attempted to subordinate “Fantasy” to “Reason.” If Reason and control get final say, how much of a say do Fantasy and power ever really get?

Davies had to explicitly send Reason out of the room and excuse it from disgrace, because otherwise Davies would have been compelled to “vndoe” his own lines. If we affiliate “revision” with control, in the end both the “soft” and the “scrunched” students will have simply made the bowl they were asked to make. The problem with linear conceptions of process—drafting then revising, or prewrite/write/rewrite—is that despite the intention to break down the mechanics of composition, they nevertheless obscure the degree to which invention and revision function reciprocally. If students are asked to proceed into revision as something done to meet a specific end—such as the teacher’s evaluation—then revision loses its centrality to the writing process and becomes supplemental to it. Of course, the student’s writing must be shared at some point. Semesters come to an end, and clear deadlines are as necessary for cultivating good writerly habits as clear prompts. If we want to present revision as something a writer will do in response to the gift of time, as volitional “idle-business,” however, we might consider the ways the classroom and its coursework could be structured to introduce revision not as an obligation but as an opportunity.

Crucial to reframing revision, I propose, is recognizing the pernicious effects of imposing conclusive external judgments on student writing. In a 1973 essay, Barrett John Mandell declares, “I cannot teach and judge as the same person.”¹⁰¹ The problem, he explains, is that when students sense “that they have not truly been heard (that is to say, understood), they—like their teachers or any other people—either harden into a strident dogmatism or shrink insecurely away from the fire.” In order to be in a position to “hear” a student, the teacher must resist applying “fixed judgments” and instead create space for students to experiment with their own thoughts. “It does not make me … less of a professor of literature,” Mandel observes, “if I free a student to grapple with Donne by saying, in one way or another, ‘Sure you’re lazy! Who isn’t lazy? I’m lazy. Donne was lazy too! Now let’s talk about what else we are—energetic, creative, and educable.’ ”¹⁰² Finding continuities between the embodied experiences of students and the history of poetic and critical thought exposes literary practice as requiring labor, energy, and encounters with resistance met by strategies of accommodation. To suggest that even John Donne was sometimes lazy, that even Homer sometimes snored, is to acknowledge that what looks like laziness is a part of the writing process too—and that lapses in attention or motivation do not diminish someone’s authorial potential. Donne need not only appear to students as a difficult text that they must write correct compositions about; he may also and just as easily appear as a working writer who, at times, needed to take breaks, or needed more time to finish what he set out to do.

If revising requires paying attention to multiple factors at once—structure, audience, style, syntax, formatting—then revisers will be inevitably inattentive to some things in order to focus on others, only to repeat this process on the next pass through.¹⁰³ Mandel’s solution to teaching without judging, taking stock of the fact that there is simply a lot of work involved, was to grade “entirely, though flexibly, on a quantitative basis, rather than a qualitative one.” Anticipating and inspiring the labor-based grading system developed by Asao B. Inoue, this method allowed him to openly affirm that what he was asking of students would be difficult, and that their only responsibility was to try and rise to the challenge. Creating a system whereby the student would get a grade “the moment he or she hands in the project, regardless of its quality,” Mandel invested in a belief in students’ willingness to learn and recognized that there were some who could not “avail themselves of the opportunities to learn.”¹⁰⁴ Inoue makes explicit that the essential problem with grading student writing is the way grading amplifies the potential discrepancies between different students’ opportunities to learn: “[A]ll grading and assessment exist within systems that uphold singular, dominant standards that are racist, and White supremacist when used uniformly.” Teachers, Inoue argues, must decide whether writing, in their classrooms, is enlisted as a form of thinking or as a consolidation of dominant power structures. Simply recapitulating the standards of assessment that determined the teacher’s own legitimacy, a legitimacy founded on an institutionalization of a specific image of what “standard” writing is, risks reproducing writing as a matter of rule-following compliance.¹⁰⁵

Beyond serving as a more receptive audience for student work, teachers of writing might work more consciously to adhere to Davies’s warning that being generous readers means little if writers are not given the opportunity to take themselves and their own work seriously. When we grade student work, what about their work are we evaluating? We may want to be appraising students’ critical engagement with early modern literary texts, but how much time do we spend revealing to students what it takes to engage these texts critically? If we lecture, walking students through the relationship between specific passages in a text and its formal and thematic architecture, or the relationship between a text and its historical context, what tools are we giving them to attempt to undertake this feat on their own? Do we explain what we are doing when we single out a textual crux and explain its pertinence to the meaning of a text as a whole? If we do explain what we are doing, do we also explain how long it took us to discover this crux, to process it, to develop a reading around it?

In the previous chapter, I cited Laura Wilder’s study of how making explicit some of the common “special topics” of invention improved students’ ability to formulate their own critical arguments. Even if we make these moves visible, however, all we have done is set our students on a course of analytical practice that will require careful and slow study. If they wish to make an argument about the ubiquity of a textual phenomenon, they will need time to take an inventory. If they wish to make an argument about a feature of the text that they feel is latent but nevertheless crucial, they will need time to review not just how the text gives glimpses of this latent feature, but whether other readers regard this feature as latent, as well. Some students may pick up on the conceptual moves their professors are making during class and come to a baseline sense about what their professors want, but what happens in class happens very quickly, managed by an authoritative professor who appears to generate readings without much effort at all. At home, when these students face their own words, it more than likely seems easier to take canned observations and package them into canned arguments. With salves of Google-fed Earth, they patch up whatever ideas they might have had just to meet the deadline.

What if a literature class simply gave its students time, too much time, time they would not otherwise have? What if our classes, citing figures like Davies and Taylor complaining about their lack of access to idleness, made the temporality of creative work part of how they “teach” early modern literature? What if, to match this course content with pedagogical form, our classes then allowed students to start writing their essays in class, granting their writing, their words, some footing on the course schedule alongside the writing of early modern poets? What if, as will be discussed in the next chapter, we devoted class time to conferences wherein we serve as sounding boards and editors? A classroom that embraces poesy, rather than poets and poems, is a classroom that concedes that nothing might be achieved other than the expenditure of thoughtful labor, experiences of idle uncertainty, and the production of discarded drafts. Such a classroom regards time as a gift and a privilege, presenting poesy in its purest form: as a threat to the economy of efficiency and debt.

“When I am about any such businesse my self,” Davies reflected, “I am fain to neglect the fairenesse of my hand.” When he set about to the doing of poesy at home in his bed, he consciously tried to neglect the obligations of his day job. He stayed up late, claimed some idle hours for poetry, at least partly because he derived some pleasure from it. We might theorize the nature of such idle business of poetry in our classrooms, but we might also remember that our students often have literal jobs and often treat their schoolwork as a pathway toward future employment. Is poetry, are critical thinking and reflection, is revision only for the writers on the syllabus? By reducing the demands we place on our students’ time—requiring less reading, issuing fewer assignments—and by giving them clear expectations about what we want them to do and what we have to offer them in return, we may give all of them the opportunity to choose to make the most of their time with us. If we revise our classroom to focus on the doing of literature, we may make a more robust case for why literature remains something worth doing.

1.Davies of Hereford, Complete Works. All references to Davies’s literary works will be to these volumes and indicated in-text by the title of the text and that of the work in which it appears, the volume number, and the page number. Wittes Pilgrimage is abbreviated as WP, The Scourge of Folly as SF, To Worthy Persons as TWP, and Paper’s Complaint as PC.

2.Sidney, Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney, 242.

3.Finkelpearl, “Davies, John (1564/5–1618)”; Vickers, Shakespeare, 16. Finkelpearl points out that Davies “never gained any recognition or financial profit from his poetry” and that “only one of his works [Microcosmos, 1603] ever reached a second edition.” For more on Davies’s social aspirations, and for his biography more broadly, see Vickers, Shakespeare, 30–33. In a review of Vickers’s book, David Bevington voiced his uncertainty about Davies’s authorship of Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint based on the same premise of his mediocrity; pointing to a “splendidly vivid” line, he concludes, “I find nothing of comparable genius in the writings of John Davies.” Bevington, review of Shakespeare, 1465–66.

4.Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 353 (10.4.1).

5.Christen, “Boundaries,” 32–33.

6.Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Indite, v. Def. 3a,” accessed July 11, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/94620.

7.Rhodes, Origins of English, 46.

8.In some epigrams responding to unfair taxes assessed on him for lands he saw as worthless, he complains, “Is my portion in this world but rime?” Alexander Grosart, the only modern editor of his collected works, observes that even “if well married, from the start his was a struggle with narrow circumstances and irregular supplies.” See Grosart, “Memorial-Introduction,” xiv.

9.Ellinghausen, Labor and Writing, 4.

10.Cressy, Literacy, 176–77.

11.See Cressy, Literacy, 34. For critiques of and elaborations on Cressy’s accounting, see Spufford, Small Books, 19–44; Dolan, “Reading, Writing, and Other Crimes,” 143; Hackel, Reading Material, 56–68; Brink, “Literacy and Education.”

12.While the number of commoners attending university had increased during the sixteenth century, Kenneth Charlton suggests that an “influx of nobility and gentry” into the universities over this time led to them claiming an increased proportion of places. Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, 136. For how the social dynamics of these institutions informed literary sensibilities, see Ellinghausen, “University of Vice”; O’Callaghan, English Wits; Winston, Lawyers at Play.

13.On early modern aesthetic elitism, see Schmidgall, Shakespeare, 107–17.

14.McCabe, “Ungainefull Arte,” 4.

15.This view of literary history, as Trevor Ross puts it, corresponds to a shift toward aligning “canon-formation with the judgment of the market and the popular voice.” See Ross, English Literary Canon, 121–22. For accounts of the changing marketplace of early modern poetry, also see McCabe, “Ungainefull Arte”; and McCarthy, Doubtful Readers.

16.For more on the “workmanship of risk” and the “workmanship of certainty,” see Pye, Workmanship. For more context on writing and inditing, see Goldberg, Writing Matter, 126–27.

17.Bean, Engaging Ideas, 35.

18.This section builds on work by many scholars who have studied how bibliographic materiality can augment or complicate writing’s meaning: Fleming, Graffiti; Smyth, Material Texts; Calhoun, Nature of the Page.

19.Wall, Imprint of Gender, 230. Books proliferated at the turn of the seventeenth century to address topics such as the care required in preparing one’s pen, the manner of holding the pen, how to sit, how to prepare a desk, the importance of maintaining a steady hand, and the differences between roman, secretary, and italic hands. For more on the increased demand for handwriting instruction, see Schulz, “Teaching of Handwriting.”

20.Huisman, Written Poem, 129, 127.

21.Goldberg, Writing Matter, 161.

22.Goldberg, Writing Matter, 55.

23.Goldberg, Writing Matter, 113: “The ideology of script does not come from the hands of the nobility but is given to them within the pedagogical apparatus that re-marks them. Nobility is the legibility taught in the regime of copying.”

24.Chris Stamatakis argues that by subordinating or ignoring “variant witnesses, strikethroughs, the import of hand-type, multiple pennings, relocation by compilers, and interventions by readers” when considering a given “text,” modern editions of Thomas Wyatt’s poems “have overlooked the traces of an ongoing manuscript discourse.” Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt, 38. Discussing the work of a poet working a century after Wyatt, Dianne Mitchell’s account of the various writings of Dudley, Third Baron North, similarly suggests a theory of literary production in which “no single text … could embody a version of North’s writings that was truly perfected or finished.” Mitchell, “ ‘Or Rather a Wyldernesse,’ ” 369–70. Both Mitchell and Stamatakis corroborate Arthur Marotti’s contention that the “manuscript system was far less author-centered than print culture and not at all interested in correcting, perfecting, or fixing texts in authorially sanctioned forms.” Marotti, Manuscript, 135.

25.Used most often to describe the phases of production of early modern plays, the distinction between “fair” and “foul,” as Paul Werstine has observed, stems both from a commitment to the bibliographic ideal of a stable copy text and from a literary New Critical emphasis on textual unity. The idea that there is one final version that coordinates an author’s intentions overlooks not only the contingencies—death, deadlines, persons from Porlock—that influence an author’s ability to sustain ongoing attention, but also the reviewers, censors, compositors, and editors that intervene between the author’s final inscription and the text as it arrives before a reader. Werstine, “Printed Shakespeare Texts.”

26.Zarnowiecki, Fair Copies, 12.

27.Zarnowiecki, Fair Copies, 8.

28.Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 3, 2.

29.Bryant, Fluid Text, 6.

30.Bryant, Fluid Text, 61.

31.Bryant, Fluid Text, 63. Reading “fluid texts” thus requires acknowledging that “the fact of the shifting of words (not just the shifted words themselves) has meaning.” Bryant, Fluid Text, 97.

32.Pickering, Mangle of Practice.

33.Pickering, Mangle of Practice, 22.

34.Pickering, Mangle of Practice, 22.

35.Fuller, Worthies of England, 224–25. Davies’s neatness is evident in a holograph letter expressing gratitude for patronage to Thomas, Lord Ellesmere, in a presentation copy of The Holy Roode (1609) at the Huntington Library. A transcript can be found in Collier, Rarest Books, 1:185. It can also be seen in his annotations to a copy of Coryats Crudities, images of which appear in Palmer, “ ‘Progress of Thy Glorious Book.’ ”

36.Davies of Hereford, Writing Schoolemaster, sig. A4r. The first edition appears to have been out by 1620; the 1631 edition announces itself on its title page as the “sixt edition enlarged.”

37.For example, among other cautions, David Browne advises writers to “wette the point” of their quills, discard ink that is too thick, and reject inkhorns that are too “high or long” in order to avoid inadvertent blots. Browne, New Invention, 12, 16, 19.

38.Beau Chesne and Baildon, Divers Sortes of Hands, n.p.

39.Beau Chesne and Baildon, Divers Sortes of Hands, n.p.

40.For these debates, see Christen, “Boundaries.” Simran Thadani explains how copy books like William Panke’s Breefe Receite (1591) “assume[d] no skills at all” by breaking down each letter into “an orderly progression of strokes, rather than merely attempting to recreate a static collection of strokes.” Thadani, “ ‘Faire Writing,’ ” 427.

41.Davies, Writing Schoolemaster, sig. B2r.

42.On James’s advice to Prince Henry, see Goldberg, Writing Matter, 126–30.

43.Davies, Writing Schoolemaster, sig. B2r–v.

44.H. R. Woudhuysen offers an account of Davies’s pupils in Sir Philip Sidney, 37–38.

45.Davies, Writing Schoolemaster, sig. B2r–v.

46.Lamott, Bird by Bird, 21.

47.Zembylas and Niederauer, Composing Processes, 62.

48.Lanham, Economics of Attention, xiii.

49.Suparna Roychoudhury underscores Fancy’s “purposeless self-indulgence” as a function of its idle playing with “toys.” See Roychoudhury, Phantasmatic Shakespeare, 57–58.

50.Wendy Wall notes how the word “blot” meant “either the ink mark on the page, or the incoherent stain that disfigures writing itself” during a period in which writing itself was considered “deviant” because of its associations with obscurity, pollution, and damnation. Wall, “Reading for the Blot,” 132–33. Laura Estill, in “Richard II and the Book of Life,” discusses how blotting was invoked as a mode of expunging both kings and commoners from the divine “book of life.” Christopher Pye observes that in Elizabethan culture, “the most unspeakable of crimes is always marked in that unmarked form” but adds that “to erase a blot is of course to renew it once again,” since “the mark of the king’s undoing has always underwritten his absolute power.” Pye, “Betrayal of the Gaze,” 580–81.

51.Quoted in Vickers, Shakespeare, 18.

52.For important reframings of the modesty topos and its relationship to authorship, see Dunn, Pretexts of Authority; Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing; and Wolosky, “Modest Claims.”

53.Harington, “Answer to Critics,” 221.

54.Heath concocted the witticism in an epigram titled “Ad. I. D., Scribam, eundemq; scriptorem,” and for his addressee, that “eundemque,” the phrase “If thou couldst” and the ambiguous difference between “endite” and “write” struck sour notes. See Heath, Two Centuries of Epigrammes, sig. D1v (epigram 89).

55.Jonson, Complete Poems, 199.

56.Calhoun, Nature of the Page, 79.

57.Bastard, Chrestoleros Seuen Bookes, 179–80.

58.The collection of vectors recalls Quintilian: “[P]rune the turgid, raise the mean, control exuberance, organize the disorderly, give rhythm to the unrhythmical, and restrain the exaggerated.” Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 353 (X.4.1).

59.Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, 481 (lines 358–60).

60.For example, Thomas Nashe grumbles, “But all in vain I sat up late and rose early, contended with the cold, and conversed with scarcity, for all my labours turned to loss, my vulgar Muse was despised and neglected, my pains not regarded, or slightly rewarded, and I myself, in prime of my best wit, laid open to poverty.” Nashe, “Pierce Penniless,” 52. Pender explains that such accounts of travail were a rhetorical trope; a writer’s allusion to working by candlelight was “a strategy which ostensibly places emphasis on the author’s diligence rather than on his natural gifts.” Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 23.

61.Grosart, “Dedicatory Sonnet.”

62.It bears mentioning that Grosart’s two volumes are part of a series of works by early modern “Worthies”—the “Chertsey Worthies Library.” The hundred subscribers of the Chertsey list consisted of university libraries, rich men, church fathers, and the queen of England. While these volumes have been digitized and are now available for perusal at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/completeworksjo00grosgoog and https://archive.org/embed/completeworksjo03grosgoog), I was able to comfortably read them as physical copies (and consequently devote this chapter to Davies) at the Folger Shakespeare Library, whose copy was donated by the Earl of Derby. I was able to do research at the Folger only after receiving a generous fellowship, which I mention to underscore that the scenes in which we encounter poetic texts and produce scholarship about them are as wrapped up with the material conditions of work, access, and privilege as the scenes in which those writings were first created.

63.Grosart, “Memorial-Introduction,” xxi.

64.As Hans Magnus Enzensberger puts it, the social imperatives of compliance enable mediocrity to “[take] revenge on its opponents”; these imperatives are a means whereby “monsters are made to order.” Enzensberger, Mediocrity and Delusion, 184.

65.See Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates. We might approach his sense of a “vein” as a subset of what Samuel Fallon describes in Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England as authorial “personae” in early modern England.

66.See Doelman, “Circulation,” 65. In one epigram in Chrestoleros, for example, Bastard declares that “if Heywood liued now againe / … If he would write, I could expresse his vaine, / Thus he would write, or else I am deceiued.” Bastard, Chrestoleros Seuen Bookes, 59–60. In another, he makes a tentative charge of theft against Samuel Daniel—“Me thinkes thou steal’st my Epigrams away / … For reading thee me thinks thus would I say. / This hits my vaine, this had been my conceipt”—before confessing that were he to try and “doe the like,” he would be at a loss. Bastard, Chrestoleros Seuen Bookes, 140.

67.For the politics of authorship and ownership, see Simonova, Early Modern Authorship.

68.Thomas, “Eschewing Credit,” 290.

69.We can see a similar discussion of the commercial value of poetic veins in Macray, Pilgrimage to Parnassus. These academic dramas begin with two recent graduates from Cambridge finding that they lack the funds to continue residing at university. As they journey through the world outside the academy, they encounter a wealthy and foolish city gallant, Gullio, who requests that one of the graduates produce verses for him to share with his beloved: “Make mee them in two or three divers vayns, in Chaucer’s, Gower’s and Spencer’s and Mr. Shakespeare’s” (58).

70.In his request that Owen add measures to his book, Davies may be reflecting on his own practices of engagement with others’ epigrams. In a copy of Thomas Coryate’s Coryats Crudities (1611) now held at the Pierpont Library, Davies himself wrote a poem in response to a mock-panegyric poem by Nicholas Smith, which was itself mocking both Coryate and the poets who were engaging in the game of mock-panegyrics: “Lo here a Smith, / That firiest Witts doth knock, / With his Witts Hammer giues him self a strok: / For, here hee iudgeth Tom, and not misdeemes, / Then hee’s his Peere as hee him self esteemes.” In adding this finely inscribed mockery of Smith, who had mocked Coryate and by extension poets like Jonson and Donne who were playing Coryate’s game, Davies recognizes the relativism of aesthetic judgments in general, and tacitly perceives how aesthetic power relies on social affiliation. Davies’s marginal poem can be seen and read in transcription in Palmer, “ ‘Progress of Thy Glorious Book,’ ” 349; see Palmer’s extended discussion of Davies’s annotations for a rich picture of his practices as a reader.

71.As R. J. Schoeck puts it, “Sir John Davies was unquestionably the greater poet, and he had already published his Nosce teipsum in 1599 when the lesser John Davies [of Hereford] published his Microcosmos four years later.” Schoeck, “ ‘Nosce Teipsum,’ ” 307. He also might have had to brand himself as “of Hereford” because of yet another John Davies, a well-known mathematician at Oxford implicated in the Essex rebellion.

72.Vickers suggests that “Davies looked up to more gifted writers, expressing admiration from below, but he did so in neither an envious nor a sycophantic manner.” Vickers, Shakespeare, 37.

73.Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 27–28.

74.[Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, 253 (4.8.11). In classical rhetoric, mediocrity denoted a specific stylistic category, between the gravis (a “smooth and ornate arrangement of impressive words”) and the extenuata/adtenuata (“brought down even to the most current idiom of standard speech”). Describing words of a “lower, yet not of the lowest and most colloquial, class,” the middle style, in Rhetorica ad Herennium, tempered the grand style so as to prevent it from becoming “swollen.” As Joshua Scodel points out, the influence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s De officiis on grammar school curricula also linked mediocrity to a desirable sense of measure, proportion, and moderation. Scodel, Excess and the Mean, 2–4.

75.Neil Rhodes relates mediocritas to the term “meane” and the ethical ideal of the via media, and apprehends in it a formal no-man’s-land. This ambiguity, Rhodes suggests, parallels the socioeconomic distinction between “elite and common.” Rhodes, Common, 164. In The English Secretary (1586), Angel Day calls rhetoric’s “high” style “sublime,” which for Patrick Cheney affiliates this conception of rhetorical style with the Latin sublimitas and thereby the notion of the “sublime” that undergirds much of modern aesthetic thought. This adjacency corroborates the transformation of “mediocre” from a category of rhetorical style to an aesthetic appraisal. See Cheney, “ ‘Forms of Things Unknown,’ ” 138.

76.Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 26.

77.Bourdieu, Distinction, 321.

78.Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 23.

79.Longinus, On the Sublime, 265–67.

80.Cheney, “ ‘Forms of Things Unknown,’ ” 141.

81.Sianne Ngai points out that aesthetic declarations are always wedded to how “other judges, abstract figures standing in for our relations to others in general, are already ‘inside’ our most spontaneous, affectively immediate experiences of form.” Consequently, issuing a judgment of something as beautiful is also a demand for agreement that “binds the way in which we face or address others to appearances we can only perceive for ourselves.” Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 22. Judging something as middling, however, may also be an invitation for further specificity. As with Ngai’s accounts of the “gimmick” and the “interesting” as aesthetic categories, the appraisal that something is mediocre gradually reveals an equivocality that puts “aesthetic misgiving as such at the heart of our encounter with compromised form” (24).

82.Quoted in Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 39.

83.Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 41.

84.Poets such as Thomas Bastard and Everard Guilpin were prominent representatives of this group, though, as Andrew McRae notes, the advantages of anonymity mean that “ ‘pot poet’ is a category that could include either all men writing poetry at the time or only a tiny and shifting number.” McRae, “Early Stuart Libeling,” 372.

85.Katharine Craik explains that his unregulated avenue of authorship afforded a “vocabulary to describe, and enact, new strategies of professionalism in print.” Craik, “John Taylor’s Pot-Poetry,” 187. For important studies of Taylor, see Fall, “Popular Nonsense”; Aune, “Thomas Coryate.”

86.As Craik argues, Taylor overcame his self-conscious mediocrity by explicitly resisting a literary philosophy centered on ingenium and imitatio, or innate genius and emulation, instead favoring one that emphasized exercitatio, wherein “literary value depended on the intellectual and physical labor involved in writing.” Craik, “John Taylor’s Pot-Poetry,” 185. In glorifying his own effort, Laurie Ellinghausen observes, Taylor occupied a position of sociopolitical indeterminacy: he challenged social hierarchies by elevating his own humble labors, but did so with an “authorial persona that is distinctly self-promoting, individualist, and entrepreneurial.” Ellinghausen, Labor and Writing, 94.

87.Taylor, Praise of Hemp-Seed, sig. D4v.

88.Taylor, Praise of Hemp-Seed, sig. E2r.

89.Horace, Satires, 481, quoted in Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, 223.

90.Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, 219.

91.For connections between Davies’s Microcosmos and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111, see Jackson, “Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXI.”

92.This sentiment also appears in an epigram addressed to George Chapman that ranks the translator of Homer with “the rarest men” while also complaining, “[I]n thy hand too little coyne doth lye.” He affiliates himself with Chapman—“[T]hou wert accurst, and so was I”—but still counts them both as “blessed” by poetry even if unrewarded by the public. Davies, “To My Highly Vallued Mr George Chapman,” 2:59–60.

93.Sommers, “Revision Strategies.”

94.Sommers, “Revision Strategies,” 104–5. As Susan Sontag bluntly puts it, “What I write about is other than me. And what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it. My books know what I once knew—fitfully, intermittently.” Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 267.

95.Sommers, “Revision Strategies,” 104–5. Also see Murray, Craft of Revision, 4.

96.bell hooks describes this process: “Individual white male students who were seen as ‘exceptional,’ were often allowed to chart their intellectual journeys, but the rest of us (and particularly those from marginal groups) were always expected to conform. Nonconformity on our part was viewed with suspicion, as empty gestures of defiance aimed at masking inferiority or substandard work.” hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 5.

97.Elbow, Writing with Power, 9.

98.Elbow, Writing with Power, 18.

99.Elbow, Writing with Power, 18.

100.Elbow, Writing with Power, 19.

101.Mandel, “Teaching without Judging,” 623.

102.Mandel, “Teaching without Judging,” 628.

103.On the multiple dimensions of revision, see Bean, Engaging Ideas, 33–35.

104.Mandel, “Teaching without Judging,” 629–30.

105.Inoue, Labor-Based Grading Contracts, 3.