Sir John DaviesArticle Free Pass Sir John Davies, (born April
1569, Tisbury, Wiltshire, Eng.—died Dec. 8, 1626), English poet
and lawyer whose Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing reveals a
typically Elizabethan pleasure in the contemplation of the
correspondence between the natural order and human activity.
Educated at the University of Oxford, Davies entered the Middle
Temple, London, in 1588 and was called to the bar in 1595. Much
of his early poetry consisted of epigrams published in various
collections. Epigrammes and Elegies by J.D. and C.M. (1590?)
contained both Davies’ work and posthumous works by Christopher
Marlowe and was one of the books the archbishop of Canterbury
ordered burned in 1599. Davies’ Orchestra (1596) is a poem in
praise of dancing set against the background of Elizabethan
cosmology and its theory of the harmony of the spheres. In Nosce
teipsum (1599; “Know Thyself”), he gave a lucid account of his
philosophy on the nature and immortality of the soul. In the
same year, he published Hymnes