The most significant events in the history of books on the 8th of December
1626: John Davies dies. A minor poet who was championed in the twentieth century by T. S. Eliot, Davies was an accomplished calligrapher as well as a poet and courtier. This led Jonathan Bate, in his biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age, to propose the theory that Davies was the ‘rival poet’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.