John Taylor is a poet contemporary to Shakespeare, but with a decidedly unique approach to the writing profession. John Taylor trained professionally as a waterman, or a river worker who taxied passengers to and from city destinations on the rivers like the River Thames in London. John Taylor used his occupation as a waterman to talk with the various playwrights, actors, and patrons while they were on the boat with him between destinations. Over the years, John Taylor used what he learned from these conversations to craft himself into a poet with the purpose of re-inventing the unglamorous and ridiculed 16th century opinion of the profession of waterman into a more glorified occupation by naming himself The Water Poet. Taylor’s work did manage to earn him a position of leadership in a waterman’s guild, and he would write elegies for not only James I, but John Taylor was the first person to write about the death of William Shakespeare, when he wrote a poem mentioning the bard in 1620. Here today to tell us about the life and exploits of this unique character from the life of William Shakespeare is our guest, Bernard Capp. 

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