SIR JOHN DAVIES

                                              1569-1626

Sir John Davies was a law student at the Middle Temple when he wrote Orchestra, or A Poem of Dancing, judicially proving the true observation of time and measure in the authentical and laudable use of dancing. In the next year, 1595, Davies was called to the bar. He had a distinguished legal career, becoming successively solicitor-general for Ireland, attorney general for Ireland, and finally, just before his death in 1626, lord chief justice of the King's Bench in England. Five years after writing Orchestra he published a serious philosophical poem called Nosce Teipsum ("Know Thyself"). He is also the author of some amusing parodies on Elizabethan sonnets, his so-called Gulling ("Fooling") Sonnets.

Orchestra pretends to be a light, even frivolous poem, but it is really a serious expression of some important Elizabethan concepts. (The title has the original Greek meaning, a dance floor.) The courtier was supposed to learn to dance, not merely as a social accomplishment, but as a part of his liberal education. Dancing was considered allegorical; as Sir Thomas Elyot said in his treatise on the ideal Elizabethan gentleman, dancing "betokeneth concord." It reconciles and harmonizes such moral and psychological opposites as fierceness and mildness, boldness and fearfulness, arrogance and modesty.

The poem purports to be an account of an episode that for some reason was left out of Homer's Odyssey. The chaste Penelope, Ulysses' queen, has been waiting patiently for the return of her husband (although suitors have tried to persuade her that she is really a widow and should therefore remarry). The foremost suitor, Antinous, begs her to dance; she refuses, and an extended debate ensues, in which Antinous claims that the whole universe is organized in a dance-the sun, the moon, the fixed stars, the elements in descending order beneath the moon, the winds, even the rivers and brooks.

The idea that the universe is bound together by harmony or concord is fundamental in Elizabethan cosmology. The music of the spheres orders the heavens, and music alike orders and tempers human passions and social forces. Orchestra also reflects another Elizabethan idea-that of degree or rank, the orderly arrangement of all things in the universe from the highest to the lowest. If Davies had finished his poem, he would have shown Queen Elizabeth surrounded by a dance at court, as the perfect image of political order and harmony.

armony.