ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
author’s oeuvre; and at his death in 1653, the number had expanded to an even
heftier 141. 59
In an important sense, the attention on the title page to quantity tells a large
part of Taylor’s story as a poet. Instead of the usual allusion to genre—a gesture
often made to link an author to a classically derived tradition that might elevate
him above the commonplace—Taylor’s “sixty-three” signals at the outset the
material concerns that run throughout his writings (when, why, and for how
much he undertook a project), their frequently practical bent, and the rather
astonishing fact that someone as lowly as a sculler could be visited so frequently
by the muse. Taylor is in many ways the citizen hero of seventeenth-century
verse, a cross between Shakespeare’s Bottom and Deloney’s Jack of Newbury. A
Gloucestershire boatman with a minimal education who exchanged rowing for
a most rare vision of himself as the “King’s poet” when business on the Thames
slackened because of a rerouted theater traffic and the invention of the carriage,
Taylor never attempted (in contrast to Jonson) to hide his lowly feet in the
tracks of the ancients. He sought instead to peregrinate around England in plain
view to all and to record his thoughts in simple and often unabashedly clumsy
verse:
Thus have I been imployd, besides my trade is,
To write some Pamphlets, to please Lords and Ladies,
With Gentleman or others that will read them,
Whose wits (I hope) not over much will heed them.
To all these services I am immediate
Obedient, willing, at occasions ready at,
My riches is my Lame Legge, let the blame lye
Upon that Legge, because I have writ Lamelye.
85
(W, II: 8)
This epilogue from his Mad Verse, Sad Verse, Glad Verse, and Bad Verse (1644)
sounds as if it could have been spoken by any one of Shakespeare’s mechanicals
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it is doubtful how many lords and ladies
would have actually suffered their way through Taylor’s works, or for that matter,
how many of the gentry either. Taylor’s primary audience of “others,” despite the
usual references and dedications to nobility, were fellow sailors, tradesmen, and
craftsmen—that segment of England’s population who experienced the greatest
rise in literacy at the end of the sixteenth century and who might be most
amused by a sculler swatting out anagrams on the spot, sparring with the likes of
William Fennor over the right to be called “his majesties Riming Poet,” and
otherwise intruding into the domain of the privileged. Taylor was quick to add a
groat’s worth of wit to an already infamous occasion, as in the case of the coterie
brouhaha surrounding the 1611 publication of Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (Taylor
mimicked the whole production in a sequence beginning with Laugh and be Fat),