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The Origins of English Nonsense
Noel Malcolm


A major rediscovery and reevaluation of a lost strand of English literature from one of today’s most brilliant scholars.Nonsense verse in England is generally thought to have its origins in Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Noel Malcolm’s remarkable book lays before us the extent of its flourishing a full two hundred and fifty years earlier, with the work of such now nearly forgotten nonsense poets as Sir John Hoskyns and John Taylor. It presents an anthology of their work, much of it published here for the first time since the 17th century, and in a long introduction discusses the origins and development of the genre in England, and the history of medieval and Renaissance nonsense poetry in Europe. It is a brilliant addition to the study of English literature in the 17th century.













COPYRIGHT (#ulink_431177f7-9ae9-5eda-825e-ee4585dc87b5)

Fontana Press

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers,

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London SE1 9GF

Published by Fontana Press 1998

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 1997

Copyright C Noel Malcolm 1997

Noel Malcolm asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Source ISBN: 9780006388449

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PRAISE (#ulink_e25881b7-3ccd-5587-b47f-291ae7e27326)

From the reviews of The Origins of English Nonsense:

‘In this most original study, Noel Malcolm has discovered the first stirrings of English nonsense … it is a work of some wit, and itself tends towards parody of more solemn studies. Malcolm’s book has all the elaborate paraphernalia of scholarship, complete with learned footnotes and a lengthy bibliography designed to promote the cause of nonsense. This book is as rare, then as hedgehog’s feathers or baskets of water.’

PETER ACKROYD, The Times

‘Brilliant scholar, political journalist, an expert both on Bosnia and Thomas Hobbes, Noel Malcolm is a sort of Renaissance man himself: far-ranging in the scope of his learning, rational, elitist, impervious to the claims of political correctness or trendy jargon. His prose has a satirical edge which is a continual intellectual challenge, if not always warmly sympathetic; his quirky facts are extraordinary; and he has produced an elegant, enjoyable book which is a real contribution to literary history.’

JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER, Financial Times

‘Never happier than when he is writing against the grain of received opinion, Noel Malcolm takes full delight in making a coterie cult of poems which more solemn scholars have dismissed as irrelevant doodlings. Malcolm’s immensely erudite introduction, which explains the vogue for nonsense poetry at the turn of the seventeenth-century and traces its origins in Classical and European literature, measures its tone perfectly, managing to sound as serious and at the same time as frivolous as much of the best verse in the anthology … Malcolm’s book is a delight, in which he recovers something genuinely rich and strange about our poetic ancestors. If the best history compels our attention by making the past not more but less familiar, The Origins of English Nonsense succeeds.’

MARK ARCHER, Spectator


DEDICATION (#ulink_0c1876a5-2e23-51a1-bef0-63fafc5c1956)

For Euthymia,

and in memory of her father,

John


Estrangement

Se fet mun quer dolent,

Quant me purpens,

Que jo ai gaste mun tens

Sanz rimer de aucun sens

The poet ‘Richard’, in E. M. Stengel (ed.) Codicem manu scriptum Digby 86 in bibliotheca bodleiana asservatum (Halle, 1871), p. 118

Nonsense (when all is said and done) is still nonsense. But the study of nonsense, that is science.

Saul Lieberman, introducing Gershom Scholem’s lectures on the Cabbala: quoted in S. Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995), p. 134


CONTENTS

Cover (#ubfc4d66b-f41b-56d7-a6f8-d3da0dcc3d98)

Title Page (#uafa64966-ebda-5fdc-b50e-fec504ac29f3)

Copyright (#ulink_638214e0-143a-5ebe-afc3-7ea875d3e015)

Praise (#ulink_35128d63-0a3c-57f6-ae85-1fea068fa3d4)

Dedication (#ulink_0be6fb8b-72d5-58c5-98f7-beda7b773871)

PREFACE (#ulink_cbed86c6-3bd1-56eb-bc5d-59330b5bbbea)

INTRODUCTION (#ulink_ad00ab5f-754b-5269-96af-9b2f55ae72f5)

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_a1b7f29f-8dc6-5cb0-b011-7657a8837e85)

The origins and development of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry (#ulink_a1b7f29f-8dc6-5cb0-b011-7657a8837e85)

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_25710ab0-1a92-5b41-83fe-aa38bc2fefc6)

Fustian, bombast and satire: the stylistic preconditions of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry (#ulink_25710ab0-1a92-5b41-83fe-aa38bc2fefc6)

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_3ffed865-df41-5bb5-b552-274b662113da)

A short history of nonsense poetry in medieval and Renaissance Europe (#ulink_3ffed865-df41-5bb5-b552-274b662113da)

CHAPTER 4 (#litres_trial_promo)

The sources and resources of nonsense: literary conventions, parodic forms and related genres (#litres_trial_promo)

POEMS (#litres_trial_promo)

1 JOHN HOSKYNS, ‘Cabalistical Verses’ (#litres_trial_promo)

2 HENRY PEACHAM, ‘In the Utopian tongue’ (#litres_trial_promo)

3 JOHN SANFORD, ‘Punctures and Junctures of Coryate’ (#litres_trial_promo)

4 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Cabalistical, or Horse verse’ (#litres_trial_promo)

5 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Poem in the Utopian Tongue’ (#litres_trial_promo)

6 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Epitaph in the Barmooda tongue’ (#litres_trial_promo)

7 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Epitaph on Coryate’ (#litres_trial_promo)

8 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Certaine Sonnets’ (#litres_trial_promo)

9 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Barbarian verses’ (#litres_trial_promo)

10 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Great Jacke-a-Lent’ (#litres_trial_promo)

11 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes from No Place’ (#litres_trial_promo)

12 MARTIN PARKER, ‘Sir Leonard Lack-wit’s speech to the Emperor of Utopia’ (#litres_trial_promo)

13 RICHARD CORBET, ‘A Non Sequitur’ (#litres_trial_promo)

14 RICHARD CORBET, ‘A mess of non-sense’ (#litres_trial_promo)

15 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Aqua-Musae’ (#litres_trial_promo)

16 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Mercurius Nonsensicus’ (#litres_trial_promo)

17 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘The Essence of Nonsence upon Sence’ (#litres_trial_promo)

18 JOHN TAYLOR AND ANON., ‘Non-sense’ (#litres_trial_promo)

19 ANON., ‘Nonsense fragment’ (#litres_trial_promo)

20 ANON., ‘A sonnett to cover my Epistles taile peece’ (#litres_trial_promo)

21 T. W., ‘I am asham’d of Thee, ô Paracelsie’ (#litres_trial_promo)

22 ANON., ‘Pure Nonsence’ (#litres_trial_promo)

23 ANON., ‘Nonsense’ (#litres_trial_promo)

24 T. C., ‘Thou that dwarft’st mountains into molehill sense’ (#litres_trial_promo)

25 JAMES SMITH, ‘Ad Johannuelem Leporem, Lepidissimum, Carmen Heroicum’ (#litres_trial_promo)

26 ANON., ‘A Fancy’ (#litres_trial_promo)

27 ANON., ‘Interrogativa Cantilena’ (#litres_trial_promo)

28A ANON., ‘Prophecies’ (#litres_trial_promo)

28B ANON., ‘Newes’ (#litres_trial_promo)

29 ANON., ‘A Bull Droll’ (#litres_trial_promo)

30 ANON., ‘Witley’s Lies’ (#litres_trial_promo)

31 ANON., ‘From the top of high Caucasus’ (#litres_trial_promo)

32 ANON., ‘Cure for the Quartain Ague’ (#litres_trial_promo)

33 ANON., ‘How to get a Child without help of a Man’ (#litres_trial_promo)

34A MARTIN PARKER, ‘A Bill of Fare’ (#litres_trial_promo)

34B JOHN TAYLOR, ‘A Bill of Fare’ (#litres_trial_promo)

35 MARTIN PARKER, ‘An Excellent New Medley (i)’ (#litres_trial_promo)

36 MARTIN PARKER (?), ‘An Excellent New Medley (ii)’ (#litres_trial_promo)

37 ANON., ‘A New Merry Medley’ (#litres_trial_promo)

38 ANON., ‘A New made Medly’ (#litres_trial_promo)

39 JOSEPH BROOKESBANK, ‘Monosyllables’ (#litres_trial_promo)

40 GEORGE DALGARNO, ‘Mnemonic verses’ (#litres_trial_promo)

FOOTNOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

NOTES, BIBLIOGRAPHY, INDICES (#litres_trial_promo)

Longer Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Manuscript Sources (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index of authors of the nonsense poems (#litres_trial_promo)

Index of titles and first lines of the nonsense poems (#litres_trial_promo)

Index to the Introduction (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Noel Malcolm (#litres_trial_promo)

Credits (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


PREFACE (#ulink_91e05a96-f79b-5fbc-bdda-96c13053b6a4)

ONE MIGHT ASSUME that the period of English literature which lies between the major works of Shakespeare and Milton was a peculiarly well-ploughed field, where little remained to be explored. Yet the purpose of this volume is to make known a genre which enjoyed real popularity in precisely that period, and which has never yet been discussed in any detail. I am not aware of a single study, not even a short article, that sets out to describe or explain the history of this minor but fascinating literary phenomenon.

It would not be true to say that the poetry itself is entirely unknown. Individual poems have been printed in anthologies such as John Broadbent’s Signet Classic Poets of the Seventeenth Century and Alastair Fowler’s New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse.


Several of the poems printed and discussed in this volume have appeared in general nonsense anthologies, the fullest selection being provided by Hugh Haughton’s valuable Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry. But I know of no collection specifically devoted to these seventeenth-century nonsense poems.

Nor would it be fair to suggest that literary scholars have never noticed or alluded to the existence of such a genre. Some acknowledgements of the presence of this vein of nonsense writing can be found in the scholarly literature; but notices and allusions are all that they amount to. Thus Wallace Notestein, in his path-breaking study of John Taylor, merely comments: ‘He was, I think, the first writer of nonsense verse. In The Essence … of Nonsence upon Sence (1653) he gives us nonsense verse and not without skill.’


Similarly, a standard work on the comic poetry of the Restoration period discusses at length the ‘drolleries’ or collections of light poetry, but devotes only one sentence to the nonsense poems which they contained: ‘There are not many of these in the drolleries, but there are some.’


Even Bernard Capp’s excellent study of John Taylor, the only full-length work ever to have been published on this seminal nonsense poet, makes only passing references to his nonsense writing, and does not attempt to assess his place in the development of the genre itself.


The best discussion known to me of the seventeenth-century nonsense tradition is given in Timothy Raylor’s recent study of Sir John Mennes and James Smith; but it amounts to no more than two suggestive paragraphs.




In more general works of literary history, the ignorance of this genre is even more striking. Standard works on nonsense poetry either pass over the seventeenth century in silence, or allude briefly to one or two poems which have appeared in modern nonsense anthologies without investigating the genre to which they belonged.


Entries on ‘Nonsense’ in reference works such as the Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics make no allusion whatsoever to the seventeenth-century material. More surprisingly, there is no overall history of nonsense poetry in medieval and Renaissance European literature, even though specific aspects of this subject, and works by specific authors, have been discussed separately in some detail.


In Chapter 3 of the Introduction to this collection I have tried to put together for the first time an overall history of medieval and Renaissance nonsense poetry in Europe, and, in doing so, to suggest some of the lines of transmission which tie together the nonsense literatures of different periods and countries.

Why bother to take such serious trouble over such a self-evidently ridiculous subject-matter? One reason must be that nonsense poetry, like any comic genre, is part of the larger literary culture which it inhabits, and to which it is connected in many ways, both direct and indirect: understanding more about those connections can only shed light on other areas of literature too. It can tell us about the ways in which writers and readers regarded the literary fashions, stylistic conventions, and canons of taste and diction of the day. In Chapter 2 of the Introduction I have tried to show how intimately the earliest seventeenth-century nonsense poetry was bound up with the development of late Elizabethan dramatic and satirical poetry. Nonsense poetry is also connected, in more tangential ways, with a wide range of minor genres, sources and traditions in European literary history; I have offered some examples of these connections in Chapter 4. Also in that chapter, I have tried to set out some more general conclusions about the nature and origins of nonsense poetry, which may be valid for other periods too; these conclusions run contrary to the theories about ‘carnivalesque’ humour which nowadays dominate most discussion of early modern comic writing.

But the most important reason for collecting these poems should not be left altogether unsaid. At their best, they are supremely enjoyable – exuberant, sonorous, and (within the confines of some soon-to-be-familiar routines) richly inventive. The best sections of Taylor’s two large-scale nonsense works (Sir Gregory Nonsence and The Essence of Nonsence upon Sence: poems 11 and 17 in this collection) contain some of the most splendid nonsense poetry in the English language, which can be enjoyed by anyone who possesses even a slight acquaintance with the ‘serious’ literature of the period. Of course, reading page after page of this material will jade any reader’s appetite, like feasting on chocolate; and in any case not all the poems in this collection are of high quality. Nevertheless, the most important aim of this book is not to trade arguments with scholarly specialists, but to share the pleasure of these poems with all interested readers.

For that reason, notes have been added to explain words and allusions; some of these may seem unnecessary to those readers who have a thorough grounding in classical mythology or a specialist knowledge of seventeenth-century vocabulary. A few ‘Longer Notes’ are presented on pp. 289–94. Otherwise, I have placed all explanatory notes at the foot of each page, rather than collecting them in a single glossary at the end of the book. This has been done for two reasons: first, for the ease of the reader, and secondly, because some of the words which need explanation would not obviously strike the reader as requiring it. (In the phrase ‘Ale and Wigs’, for example, the ‘Wigs’ are bread-rolls, not hairpieces; but it would not occur to most readers to look up ‘Wigs’ in a glossary.) I hope that readers will be patient with the inevitable degree of repetition which this method entails (repeated explanations have been dispensed with only within the unit of a single page), and remember that the repetitions are there for their own convenience.

The annotations also contain occasional textual notes (distinguished by the key-words being printed in italics), recording material variants between texts and my own formal emendations of the copy-text; the sources referred to in these notes are listed at the end of each poem. But my emendations are few and far between. With a few exceptions (recorded in the notes) I have preserved original spellings and punctuations; the only changes which I have made systematically and silently are to convert initial ‘v’ to ‘u’, medial ‘u’ to ‘v’, ‘i’ to ‘j’ (where appropriate) and long ‘s’ to normal ‘s’. Otherwise the degree of emendation is as light as possible. Some of these poems use word-play, or ingenious Hudibrastic rhymes, which would disappear from view in a modernized spelling of the text. Others, which are in gibberish, cannot of course be modernized at all. And where textual emendations are concerned, it is necessary to bear in mind that nonsense poetry overturns all the usual rules of procedure. Normally, where different stages of manuscript transmission survive, corruptions to the text can be identified by an editor on the grounds that a corrupted text makes less sense than the original. In the case of nonsense poetry, the opposite is true: corruption involves the introduction of sense. ‘O that my lungs could bleat’ is, for example, a corruption of ‘O that my wings could bleat’. The most insidious error a modern editor can commit, therefore, is to introduce any further corruptions of this kind into the text. Some strange examples of this were perpetrated by Charles Hindley, the diligent Victorian editor of one collection of John Taylor’s works: ‘Sinderesis of Wapping’, for instance, was emended by Hindley to ‘Cinderesses of Wapping.’


This brings to mind the logic of the (perhaps legendary) German editor of Shakespeare, who ‘corrected’ one famous passage to make it read: ‘stones in the running brooks, Sermons in books’. It is a logic which I have tried to avoid.

Finally, a few words about definitions, or the lack of them. Readers will note that I use the term ‘genre’ in a fairly loose, non-technical way. Readers will also observe that at no point in this book do I attempt to frame a precise definition of nonsense. Such definition-making is not necessary for practical reasons, any more than it is necessary for studies of lyric poetry or comedy to begin with watertight definitions of those terms. These are things which, usually, we recognize when we see them. But close definition is not desirable for theoretical reasons either, since these literary types are cluster-concepts: they have a core on which all can agree, and a more variable periphery on which disagreement is always possible. The ‘high’ literary nonsense of Hoskyns, Taylor and Corbet clearly belongs at the core of any notion of nonsense poetry; some of the other items in this collection are closer to the periphery.

I am grateful to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for permission to print the texts of poems 14, 19, 20, and 32; to the British Library, London, for permission to print the text of poem 30; and to Nottingham University Library for permission to print the text of poem 21. I should like to record my thanks to the staff of not only those libraries, but also the Cambridge University Library, where much of the research for this edition was done.

The notes record specific sources of information, but I have not thought it necessary to give such sources for general information contained in standard reference works. Of such works, the most useful in preparing this edition have been the following: The Oxford English Dictionary, The Dictionary of National Biography, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Brewer’s Reader’s Companion, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, Sugden’s Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare, Stow’s Survey of London, Kent’s Encyclopaedia of London and Partridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang. Full details of these works are given in the bibliography.

Finally, I am particularly grateful to Dr Colin Burrow, Dr Richard Luckett, Mr Richard Ollard and Dr Timothy Raylor for reading this work in typescript and giving me their comments. I should also like to express my gratitude to Dr Edward Chaney for suggesting the Inigo Jones drawings which ornament the cover of this book, and to thank his Grace the Duke of Devonshire and the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement for permission to reproduce them. Last but not least, I owe a special word of thanks to Stuart Proffitt for showing such an interest in this book, and to Arabella Quin for seeing it expertly through the press.


INTRODUCTION (#ulink_656271b7-8e53-53ef-9f31-bf75e583943b)







CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_9396b8d8-393e-5d12-a59c-0b5eacb820c7)

The origins and development of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry (#ulink_9396b8d8-393e-5d12-a59c-0b5eacb820c7)

THERE ARE TWO COMMON BELIEFS about the literary genre of nonsense poetry in England, and both of them are false. The first holds that nonsense poetry was the exclusive product of the nineteenth century, more or less the creation of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. ‘Considered as a genre’, argues a recent study by a specialist in this field, ‘we cannot, indeed, trace the origins of nonsense literature beyond the nineteenth century, when it first appeared in Victorian England.’


Another modern writer has argued in all seriousness that nonsense poetry began in 1846 and ended in 1898, after which date ‘it can no longer exist’.


The second common belief about this genre is that nonsense is not so much a cultural-historical product as a timeless, universal category, which therefore has only instances rather than origins. This was the view of some of the earliest modern writers on nonsense literature, G. K. Chesterton and Émile Cammaerts, and it seems to be implied by those modern studies of nonsense which explore its dependence on formal procedures of inversion, repetition, serialization, circularity and simultaneity.




That those procedures in themselves are universal, to be found in the literature and folklore of different cultures from various times and places, is clear. They can be found too in English popular writing and folk materials: drinking songs, humorous ballads, folktales, nursery rhymes, and so on. But full-scale nonsense poetry as an English literary phenomenon is not a timeless thing, springing up here, there and everywhere of its own accord; still less is it something that wells up from folk culture. It is, rather, a literary genre with a particular history or histories, developed by individual poets and possessing a peculiarly close relationship – largely a parodic one – to the ‘high’ literary conventions of its day. After a brief flowering in the late Middle Ages (discussed in Chapter 3 of this Introduction), literary nonsense poetry in England was re-invented in the early seventeenth century. It then enjoyed an extraordinary vogue for more than fifty years, and was still being printed in the popular ‘drolleries’ of the Restoration period. This efflorescence was due partly to the stylistic conditions of English declamatory poetry in the early seventeenth century (discussed in Chapter 2 of this Introduction), which were so ideally suited to nonsensification. But the success of high literary nonsense poetry in this period was due above all to the skills and energies of the individual poets who created and developed the genre. As it happens, it is possible to attribute the origins of this genre to one poet in particular, and to explain how, when and why he created it. The literary nonsense poetry of the seventeenth century was invented by a lawyer, rhetorician, minor poet and wit, Sir John Hoskyns, in 1611. Since this fact has never been properly recognized hitherto, it is worth setting out in some detail the story of how nonsense poetry sprang, almost fully armed, out of Hoskyns’s head into the English literary world.

John Hoskyns was born in 1566, to a humble family of Welsh origins living in the Herefordshire village of Mounckton or Monnington.


He was sent to Winchester College, where he displayed a prodigious memory as well as a special talent for Latin verse composition; at Winchester he was, in John Aubrey’s words, ‘the flower of his time’. His friends and contemporaries there included several who later became well-known poets and littérateurs: John Davies (also from Herefordshire), Henry Wotton, the epigrammatist John Owen, and the poet Thomas Bastard. With Wotton and Owen he went on to New College, Oxford, where he matriculated in early 1585. He proceeded BA in 1588 and MA in 1592; but at the ‘Act’ (the degree-giving ceremony) on that latter occasion he caused serious offence to the University authorities. He had been chosen to perform at the ‘Act’ as Terrae filius, the mock-orator whose role it was to make a humorous speech which might contain topical and personal allusions in a satirical vein. These traditionally elaborate and boisterous rhetorical performances, like much of the material in the comic University dramas of the period (the Cambridge Parnassus plays being the best known), cultivated parodic routines and in-jokes. But Hoskyns carried the joke too far, to the point where its humour was no longer apparent. One modern biographer has ingeniously reconstructed his offence, suggesting that his declamation satirized the recently deceased Chancellor of Oxford University, Sir Christopher Hatton.


The punishment was severe: as Aubrey later put it, ‘he was so bitterly satyricall that he was expelled and putt to his shifts’.




After a brief period as a schoolmaster in Somerset, Hoskyns travelled to London in early 1593 and was admitted as a student of the law at one of the Inns of Court, the Middle Temple. He may have been persuaded to take this step by his friend John Davies, who had been at the Middle Temple since 1588. The Inns of Court (Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple) formed a kind of legal counterpart to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; many sons of merchants and country gentry studied there, not in order to become professional lawyers, but merely to acquire a grounding in legal procedures which would see them through the innumerable lawsuits of their adult lives. But with so many connections between the lawyers, the parliamentarians and the court wits, the Inns of Court also formed the basis of much of the literary culture of London during this period. Not only did they produce lawyers with wide-ranging intellectual and literary interests (such as Francis Bacon and John Selden); but also whole coteries of poets and writers were fostered within their walls. Hoskyns and Davies were later joined at the Middle Temple by their old friend Henry Wotton, the poet and dramatist John Marston, the minor poet Charles Best, and the ‘character’-writer Thomas Overbury. Thomas Campion was at Gray’s Inn during this period, and John Donne was at Lincoln’s Inn. One modern critic has described Donne’s works of the 1590s as products of ‘a typical Inns of Court poet’, characterizing them as follows: ‘In his verse epistles occur many instances of his recondite learning and startling wit, but the tone is always that of an easy intimacy, of someone speaking to an audience of equals; often he appears to be improvising entertainment for their amusement.’




The Inns were famous for their elaborate Christmas revels, whole sequences of speeches, mock-trials, comic plays, processions, banquets and dances, which extended through December and January. A leader of the revels was chosen before Christmas; he was given the title of ‘Prince d’Amour’ at the Middle Temple and ‘Prince of Purpoole’ at Gray’s Inn (after the parish in which the Inn was situated). He would appoint members of his princely ‘court’, and organize and preside over the revels; on Candlemas night (2 February) the Prince would die, and a final banquet would be held. Fortunately, texts survive from the Gray’s Inn revels of 1594–5 (Gesta Grayorum, first published in 1688), and from the Middle Temple revels of 1597–8 (Le Prince d’Amour, published in 1660), giving us the full flavour of these performances.


The Gray’s Inn materials consist mainly of mock-edicts issued by the Prince of Purpoole, and mock-correspondence between him and the Russian Tsar. The edicts indicate the kind of legal-parodic word-play which was the staple of Inns of Court humour; one announcement excuses all those within the Prince’s domains of

all manner of Treasons, Contempts, Offences, Trespasses, Forcible Entries, Intrusions, Disseisins, Torts, Wrongs, Injustices, Over-throws, Over-thwartings, Cross-bitings, Coney-catchings, Frauds, Conclusions, Fictions, Fractions, Fashions, Fancies, or Ostentations:… All Destructions, Obstructions and Constructions: All Evasions, Invasions, Charges, Surcharges, Discharges, Commands, Countermands, Checks, Counter-checks and Counter-buffs: … All, and all manner of Mis-feasance, Nonfeasance, or too much Feasance …




And the flourish of seigneurial titles with which the Prince begins each document strikes a typically mock-heroic note, with its conjuncture of aristocratic style and bathetic London place-names:

Henry Prince of Purpoole, Arch-Duke of Stapulia and Bernardia, Duke of High and Nether Holborn, Marquis of St. Giles’s and Tottenham, Count Palatine of Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell, Great Lord of the Canton of Islington, Kentish-Town, Paddington and Knights-bridge, Knight of the most Heroical order of the Helmet, and Sovereign of the same …




The surviving text of the Middle Temple revels of 1597–8 is a similar affair, centring on a mock-trial before a grand jury. One of the speeches is attributed in two manuscript versions to Hoskyns; in the printed version its speaker is described as ‘Clerk of the Council’ to the Prince d’Amour – in other words, one of the senior figures chosen to help organize the revels by the Prince, who on this occasion was Hoskyns’s friend Richard Martin.


The same qualities of verbal dexterity which had qualified Hoskyns to be Terrae filius at Oxford must also have distinguished him at the Middle Temple; but this time he employed that talent not in biting satire but in something altogether more harmless and fantastical. After a speech by the Prince’s ‘Orator’, Charles Best, Hoskyns was (according to one of the manuscript sources) ‘importuned by ye Prince & Sr Walter Raleigh’.


He obliged with a speech which was a classic example of the ‘fustian’ style of parodic prose.


The reputation of this speech lived on long after its author’s death. When compiling his notes on Hoskyns in the 1680s or 1690s, John Aubrey jotted down: ‘Memorandum: – Hoskyns – to collect his nonsense discourse, which is very good’.


The speech is not in any strict sense ‘nonsense’, but it is so important as a preliminary to Hoskyns’s invention of English nonsense poetry that it is reproduced here in full:

Then (Mr. Orator) I am sorry that for your Tufftaffata Speech, you shall receive but a Fustian Answer. For alas! what am I (whose ears have been pasted with the Tenacity of your Speeches, and whose nose hath been perfumed with the Aromaticity of your sentences) that I should answer your Oration, both Voluminous and Topical, with a Replication concise and curtal? For you are able in Troops of Tropes, and Centuries of Sentences to muster your meaning: Nay, you have such Wood-piles of words, that unto you Cooper is but a Carpenter, and Rider himself deserves not a Reader. I am therefore driven to say to you, as Heliogabalus said to his dear and honourable servant Reniger Fogassa, If thou dost ill (quoth he) then much good do thee; if well, then snuffe the candle. For even as the Snow advanced upon the points vertical of cacuminous Mountains, dissolveth and discoagulateth itself into humorous liquidity, even so by the frothy volubility of your words, the Prince is perswaded to depose himself from his Royal Seat and Dignity, and to follow your counsel with all contradiction and reluctation; wherefore I take you to be fitter to speak unto stones, like Amphion, or trees, like Orpheus, than to declaim to men like a Cryer, or to exclaim to boyes like a Sexton: For what said Silas Titus, the Sope-maker of Holborn-bridge? For (quoth he) since the States of Europe have so many momentary inclinations, and the Anarchical confusion of their Dominions is like to ruinate their Subversions, I see no reason why men should so addict themselves to take Tabacco in Ramus Method; For let us examine the Complots of Polititians from the beginning of the world to this day; What was the cause of the repentine mutiny in Scipio’s Camp? it is most evident it was not Tabacco. What was the cause of the Aventine revolt, and seditious deprecation for a Tribune? it is apparent it was not Tabacco. What moved me to address this Expostulation to your iniquity? it is plain it is not Tabacco. So that to conclude, Tabacco is not guilty of so many faults as it is charged withal; it disuniteth not the reconciled, nor reconcileth the disunited; it builds no new Cities, nor mends no old Breeches; yet the one, the other, and both are not immortal without reparations: Therefore wisely said the merry-conceited Poet Heraclitus, Honourable misfortunes shall have ever an Historical compensation. You listen unto my speeches, I must needs confess it; you hearken to my words, I cannot deny it; you look for some meaning, I partly believe it; but you find none, I do not greatly respect it: For even as a Mill-horse is not a Horse-mill; nor Drink ere you go, is not Go ere you drink; even so Orator Best, is not the best Orator. The sum of all is this, I am an humble Suitor to your Excellency, not only to free him from the danger of the Tower, which he by his demerits cannot avoid; but also to increase dignity upon his head, and multiply honour upon his shoulders, as well for his Eloquence, as for his Nobility. For I understand by your Herald that he is descended from an Ancient house of the Romans, even from Calpurnius Bestia, and so the generation continued from beast to beast, to this present beast. And your Astronomer hath told me that he hath Kindred in the Zodiack; therefore in all humility I do beseeche your Excellency to grant your Royal Warrant to the Lo. Marshal, and charge him to send to the Captain of the Pentioners, that he might send to the Captain of the Guard to dispatch a Messenger to the Lieutenant of the Tower, to command one of his Guards to go to one of the Grooms of the Stable, to fetch the Beadle of the Beggars, ut gignant stultum, to get him a stool; ut sis foris Eloquentiae, that he may sit for his Eloquence. I think I have most oratoriously insinuated unto your apprehension, and without evident obscurity intimated unto your good consideration, that the Prince hath heard your Oration, yea marry hath he, and thinketh very well of it, yea marry doth he.




The generic relation of this sort of prose to nonsense literature is obvious: it plays on a contradiction between form and content, the form being that of an oration arguing strenuously about high matters, and the content being perversely inconsequential. But most of the sentences or phrases in this composition are not in themselves nonsensical; they merely use a tightly packed succession of comic devices such as stilted diction, bathos, puns and exaggerated intensification. Here and there, however, one sees touches of a more radically nonsensical sensibility: the phrase ‘to take Tabacco in Ramus Method’, for instance, uses precisely that kind of category-mistake (applying a logical method to a physical object) which was to become one of the standard building-blocks of nonsense literature.

In 1604 Hoskyns was elected a Member of Parliament for the city of Hereford. During the years in which this parliament sat (until 1611) he must have spent much of his time in London. ‘His great witt quickly made him be taken notice of’, writes Aubrey: ‘In shorte, his acquaintance were all the witts then about the towne.’


A jocular Latin poem survives about a ‘convivium philosophicum’ (philosophical banquet) held at the Mitre tavern in London, probably in 1611. It lists fourteen individuals as participants, including Hoskyns, Richard Martin, John Donne, Christopher Brooke (a close friend of Donne and a known friend of Hoskyns) and the suddenly famous travel-writer, Thomas Coryate.


This group of wits formed the nucleus of the original ‘Mermaid Club’, which romanticizing literary historians were later to populate with Raleigh, Shakespeare and other poets and dramatists. The only definite contemporary reference to any such club comes in one of Coryate’s letters from India, which is addressed to ‘the High Seneschall of the Right Worshipfull Fraternitie of Sirenaical Gentlemen, that meet the first Fridaie of every month at the signe of the Mere-Maide in Bread-streete in London’. In a postscript to this letter Coryate asked to be remembered to a number of writers and wits, including Jonson, Donne, Christopher Brooke, Richard Martin, William Hakewill (a member, like Brooke, of Lincoln’s Inn) and John Hoskyns.




Coryate himself appears to have played a strangely central part in this group – strangely, that is, because he was its least typical member, being neither a lawyer nor a poet. He was born in the Somerset village of Odcombe, where his father was rector of the parish. He studied at Oxford and acquired a considerable amount of classical learning, but seems never to have contemplated a university or church career. Instead, he was briefly employed in the household of the young Prince Henry, where his position ‘seems to have been that of an unofficial court jester’.


Then, in May 1608, he began the first of the two adventures which were to ensure his fame: he sailed to Calais and travelled, mainly on foot, through France and northern Italy to Venice, returning via Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. On his return to London in October he began converting the copious travel-notes he had taken into a long, continuous narrative, which, thanks to ‘the importunity of some of my deare friends who prevailed with me for the divulging of the same’, he decided to publish. Following the custom of the period, he asked for commendatory verses from his most distinguished literary friends (whose acquaintance he had made either through Prince Henry’s court, or through the man who was his local patron in Somerset, the eminent lawyer and member of the Middle Temple, Sir Edward Phelips). ‘But word of what was afoot soon spread’, writes his modern biographer, ‘and with the encouragement of Prince Henry himself, the courtiers and wits set about composing mock panegyrics with gusto. It became the fashion to make fun of Coryate and his book.’


Anyone who reads Coryate’s narrative, with its long quotations from Latin poetry and its serious and observant descriptions of European cities, may wonder why this work should have provoked such a storm of hilarity and ridicule. Many of the court wits had evidently not read the work, and chose to assume that it was full of tall stories and traveller’s tales. But most of them, it seems, had seen an advance copy of the engraved title-page, which contained a number of vignettes illustrating the most bizarre episodes in the book: Coryate being pelted with eggs by a courtesan in Venice, for instance, or being hit over the head by a German peasant for picking a bunch of grapes in a vineyard. Each vignette was linked to an explanatory couplet by Ben Jonson, which helped to set the tone for the other wits’ performances: for example,

Here France, and Italy both to him shed

Their homes, and Germany pukes on his head.

And the very title Coryate had chosen was also an incitement to jocular metaphor-making: Coryats Crudities Hastily gobled up in five Moneths of travell … Newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, & now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling Members of this Kingdome.

In the end no fewer than fifty-six authors sent in their humorous commendations to be printed; and Coryate was under express orders from Prince Henry not to omit a single one. There were poems in seven languages, including Spanish and Welsh. John Donne contributed a macaronic quatrain which combined Latin, English, Italian, French and Spanish:

Quot, dos haec, linguists perfetti, Disticha fairont,

Tot cuerdos States-men, hic livre fara tuus.

Es sat a my l’honneur estre hic inteso; Car I leave

L’honra, de personne nestre creduto, tibi.




And Coryate himself rounded off the collection of verses with thirty-four lines of more traditionally Latinate macaronics of his own:

Ille ego qui didici longos andare caminos

Vilibus in scrutis, celeri pede, senza cavallo;

Cyclico-gyrovagus coopertos neigibus Alpes

Passavi, transvectus equo cui nomina, Ten-toes …




Two of the contributions bring us very close to nonsense poetry. One, by Henry Peacham, is described as ‘In the Utopian tongue’ (poem 2 in the present collection). It uses a few words of gibberish language more reminiscent of the ‘Antipodean’ spoken by Rabelais’s Panurge than of the specimen of ‘Utopian’ provided by More.


Most of its lexical material, however, consists of place-names, some of them belaboured into puns (‘Not A-rag-on ô Coryate’). Nonsense language is, of course, a type of nonsense; it presents the form of meaning while denying us the substance. But the denial is so complete that it can go no further; it is unable to perform that exploration of nonsense possibilities in which proper nonsense literature excels. Apart from creating a generic nonsense effect, gibberish is capable of performing only one trick, which is to make funny noises. To achieve any other effects, it must dilute itself with words (or at least recognizable vestiges of words) which are not nonsense. The few other examples of gibberish poems in the present collection will illustrate the nature of this problem.

The second piece of near-nonsense poetry among the prefatory verses to Coryate’s book is an English poem (poem 3), with mock-learned footnotes, by ‘Glareanus Vadianus’ – probably the witty cleric John Sanford.


Although the poem itself is comical rather than nonsensical, it contains several phrases which verge on nonsense, either through the compression of a conceptual metaphor into an incongruously physical description (‘the shoing-horne of wine’, meaning something which makes wine slip down more easily) or through the deflection of a familiar metaphor into an unfamiliar, unexpectedly literal form. (Thus ‘Sometimes he warbleth sweet as a stewd prune’ takes the taste-metaphor implied in a common adjective for beautiful singing, and makes it absurd by giving it a literal embodiment.)


But it is the notes to this poem which come closest to pure literary nonsense: the term ‘Bologna sawcidge’, for example, is explained as ‘A French Quelque chose farced with oilet holes, and tergiversations, and the first blossoms of Candid Phlebotomie’. These notes belong to the humanist comic tradition of mock-scholarship, a tradition which runs from Rabelais to Sterne and is an important part of the background to nonsense literature.

For the first specimen of full-blown English literary nonsense poetry in the seventeenth century, we must turn to John Hoskyns’s contribution to the mock-praise of Coryate. An explanatory note at the head of these lines describes them as ‘Cabalisticall Verses, which by transposition of words, syllables, and letters make excellent sense, otherwise none’. Without further ado, we are launched on literary nonsense at high tide:

Even as the waves of brainlesse butter’d fish,

With bugle horne writ in the Hebrew tongue,

Fuming up flounders like a chafing-dish,

That looks asquint upon a Three-mans song …




That explanatory note was, needless to say, only mock-explanatory. Contributing as he was to a collection of poems written for show (which includes pattern-poems and acrostic verses), Hoskyns pretended that he was performing an even more elaborate formal exercise. Although there was little general knowledge of cabbalistic matters in England in this period (the ‘briefe Index, explayning most of the hardest words’ appended to the 1611 edition of Sylvester’s translation of du Bartas explicates ‘Cabalistick’ as ‘mysticall Traditions among the Jewes Rabbins’), Hoskyns’s learned friends would probably have been aware of the interest shown in the Jewish cabbalistic tradition by Renaissance scholars such as Reuchlin and Pico della Mirandola.


They may have had some knowledge of the techniques of verbal and numerical analysis applied by cabbalists to the Hebrew scriptures, of which the most complex method, ‘themurah’ or ‘transposition’, involved a combination of letter-substitution and anagrammatic interchanges of the resultant letters.




A well-known anti-astrological work published by the Earl of Northampton in 1583 had included a section on the ‘Arte of Cabolistes’ which observed: ‘Another kinde of mysterie they had lykewise, which consisted eyther in resolving wordes of one sentence, and letters of one word that were united, or uniting letters of one word, or wordes of one sentence that were dissevered.’ ‘But’, the Earl continued, ‘I declaime against the follies of the foolishe Jewes of this tyme, and some other giddy cock-braynes of our own, which by the resolution or transporting of letters, syllables and sentences, are not ashamed to professe the finding out of secrete destinies.’


That last sentence is quite closely echoed in Hoskyns’s own phrasing (‘which by transposition of words, syllables, and letters’); and this fact makes it possible to reconstruct the precise mental process by which Hoskyns was led to compose his seminal nonsense verses. The most likely explanation is that Hoskyns, prompted by one of the incidents described by Coryate and depicted in his title-page (an encounter between Coryate and a Rabbi in the Venetian Ghetto, when the parson’s son from Odcombe immediately tried to convert the Rabbi to Christianity), had leafed through his books in search of an idea for a witty pseudo-Rabbinical conceit, and had stumbled on this passage in the Earl of Northampton’s account. Perhaps it was the reference to ‘giddy cock-braynes’ which alerted him to the possibility of a comic application to Coryate.

Those twelve lines of high nonsense were, apparently, the only such verses Hoskyns ever wrote. The genre of nonsense poetry might now have died in infancy, were it not for the intervention of another minor poet, who adopted it and made it his own. He was John Taylor, the ‘Water-poet’, and once again it was Tom Coryate who provided the catalyst.

Taylor was the son of a Gloucestershire barber-surgeon; born in 1580, he was briefly educated at Gloucester Grammar School before being packed off to London and apprenticed to a waterman (the Thames equivalent of a gondolier).


During his apprentice years he also served several times in the Navy: the Thames watermen were frequently used as a kind of naval reserve. In 1598 Taylor took up the waterman’s trade. Resident in Southwark, the play-house and low-life district on the south bank of the river, he formed many friendships with actors and writers. In 1612 he joined the ranks of the latter when he published the first of what was to become a torrent of minor literary productions, many of them in humorous quasi-doggerel verse. Although the title of this pamphlet was probably designed to cash in on the fame of Coryate’s book (The Sculler, rowing from Tiber to Thames: with his Boat laden with a Hotch-potch, or Gallimawfrey of Sonnets, Satyres, and Epigrams), it was not primarily directed against Coryate; Taylor was not pretending to have travelled to Italy himself, the reference to the ‘Tiber’ merely alluding to the fact that the first group of epigrams consisted of fierce attacks on the Papacy and the Roman Catholic clergy. But one of the poems in this work was entitled ‘To Tom Coriat’, and it addressed him in tones of genial disrespect:

What matters for the place I first came from

I am no Duncecomb, Coxecomb, Odcomb Tom

Nor am I like a wool-pack, crammed with Greek,

Venus in Venice minded to goe seeke …




This seems to have cut Coryate to the quick: ‘it was one thing for the wits and gallants to flatter him with their notice by laughing at his antics and quite another to be publicly called a dunce by an upstart waterman.’


Although he did not stoop to reply in print, his reaction was reported by Taylor in a later work:

He frets, he fumes, he rages and exclaimes,

And vowes to rouze me from the River Thames.




Taylor had a talent for self-publicizing, and would not allow the opportunity to slip. He quickly turned out another pamphlet, entitled Laugh, and be Fat: or, a Commentary upon the Odcombyan Banket, in which he supplied a humorous running commentary on the prefatory verses to Coryate’s Crudities. His reaction to Sanford’s poem was one of bemusement rather than emulation:

Thou fatall impe to Glastonburie Abbey,

The Prophecie includes thou art no baby …




To Peacham’s poem in ‘the Utopian Tongue’ he responded in kind, filling his own version of gibberish with semi-submerged fragments of abuse (poem 5). And on reaching Hoskyns’s poem he paused only to indulge in a little trans-linguistic pun (‘Cabalistical, or Horse verse’) before launching himself into headlong imitation:

Mount Malvorn swimming on a big-limb’d gnat,

And Titan tilting with a flaming Swanne …




This was Taylor’s induction into the art of nonsense poetry, an art of which he was to become, in his own time if not in ours, the acknowledged master.

In 1613 Taylor renewed his ridicule of Coryate with another poetical pamphlet, Odcombs Complaint. Coryate had set out in October 1612 on his second great adventure, a journey to India, and Taylor’s new work was a set of spoof elegies, based on the supposition that Coryate had drowned on his way to Istanbul. These included an ‘Epitaph in the Barmooda tongue, which must be pronounced with the accent of the grunting of a hogge’ (poem 6 – this resembles a later gibberish poem by Taylor ‘in the Barbarian tongue’, ridiculing tobacco-taking: poem 9), another in the ‘Utopian tongue’ (poem 7), and finally an exuberant sextet of sonnets in the high Hoskyns nonsense style (poem 8). Thomas Coryate did eventually die on his travels, succumbing to a ‘flux’ at Surat in December 1617; and within a few years Taylor had emancipated his own nonsense writing from the narrow confines of his feud with Coryate. At the end of a humorous prose pamphlet on fasting and feasting published in 1620, Jack a Lent, Taylor added twenty-three lines of nonsense verse, entitled ‘Certaine Blanke Verses written of purpose to no purpose’ (poem 10). The genre was now a firmly established part of his repertoire.

Two years later Taylor issued the first of his two large-scale nonsense works, Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes from No Place (poem II); and in 1630 all his hitherto published nonsense poems received a much wider circulation when he published a fat volume of his collected works, which, as he proudly announced on the title-page, were ‘Sixty and three in Number’. Taylor was now a celebrity, and his nonsense poetry was one of the things that helped to make him famous. A comedy by the minor playwright Henry Glapthorne, published in 1640, includes a scene in which a master instructs his servant to buy books. ‘John Taylor, get me his nonsense,’ he commands; to which the servant replies, “You mean all his workes sir.’


And three years after the republication of Sir Gregory Nonsence in Taylor’s Workes, another poet, the balladeer Martin Parker, published an explicit homage to Taylor, entitled The Legend of Sir Leonard Lack-Wit, sonne in law to Sir Gregory Nonsence. Most of this work was in nonsense prose, of a by now quite recognizable type:

The petty-foggers of Virginia set Hercules and Caucasus together by the eares, about the drinking of fryed Hartichokes. The blue bores of Islington Forrest leapt over Pancrasse Church to invade the Turkes Army in Bosworth Field: these things (with diligent negligence) were told to the Emperour of Pyramedes, who sent foure dripping pannes to tell great Tamberlaine, that London had never a Cuckold in it.




And so on, for all of eighteen pages. Parker’s one venture into nonsense poetry in this production (poem 12), on the other hand, illustrates the surprising difficulty of the genre: organized in rigid rhetorical patterns and constantly veering into sense, it may at least function as a tribute to Taylor by demonstrating the superiority of his own nonsense.

Another trace of Taylor’s influence can be found in a nonsense poem which can confidently be attributed to the minor poet James Smith (poem 25); first published in 1658, it was probably written in the mid 1640s.


The mock-scholarly footnotes attached to this work place it in the tradition of academic self-parody to which the poem by John Sanford (poem 3) also belonged. But a comparison between the texts of these two poems clearly shows that, somewhere in between, the influence of Taylor’s own nonsense poetry has interposed itself. Smith’s line ‘But then an Antelope in Sable blew’ recalls Taylorian lines such as ‘With that grim Pluto all in Scarlet blue’; other lines, such as ‘And to the butter’d Flownders cry’d out, Holla,’ or ‘And mounting straight upon a Lobsters thigh’, betray both Taylor’s habitual parodying of Marlowe (discussed below, pp. 42–4), and that gastronomic obsession with marine delicacies which characterizes so much of the nonsense poetry in the Hoskyns—Taylor tradition.

Smith’s involvement in writing nonsense poetry is significant too in the light of a recent discovery about a London literary club or coterie of the late 1620s and early 1630s, the ‘Order of the Fancy’, to which he belonged. A denunciation of Smith in a legal document of 1633 affirmed: ‘That for 4 yeares last past James Smith hath bin a Common and ordinary frequenter of tavernes alehouses playhouses, and players Companye … and he with them and others stiled themselves of the order of the fancye whose practise was to drinke excessively, and to speake non sence …’ Another witness declared: ‘That he heard James Smith say and … bragge that he was one of the Cheifest and first founders of that societye, and that he of that Company that could speake best non sence was Counted the best man, which was him selfe …’


The modern scholar who discovered this evidence has painstakingly reconstructed the possible membership of the ‘Order’, which probably included the playwright Philip Massinger, the poets John Mennes, Robert Herrick and William Davenant, and several other known London wits and members of the Inns of Court.


There is thus a clear similarity (though not, it seems, a direct connection) between this group and the grouping of wits at the Mitre tavern which helped give rise to the first nonsense poem by Hoskyns. Nor is this surprising, since the self-parodic routines of nonsense poetry are characteristic products of enclosed, self-conscious institutions such as clubs. The ‘non sence’ spoken by Smith and his friends may of course have been closer to the ‘fustian’ style of Hoskyns’s nonsense speech (a style which, as we shall see, was by now becoming almost an obligatory party trick for undergraduates in at least one Oxford college) than to the concentrated nonsense poetry practised by Taylor.


But it is quite inconceivable that any gathering of London wits and players in the 1630s could have been ignorant of John Taylor’s well-known contributions to the genre.

Thanks to his tremendous efforts at self-publicizing, Taylor was by now almost a public institution. He was famous not only for his poetry and pamphlets but also for his ‘travels’ – journeys to different parts of the British Isles, announced by prospectus in advance and described in pamphlet-form soon after their completion. Most of these had the nature of stunts, such as his much-trumpeted journey to Edinburgh and back without spending, borrowing or stealing any money on the way. One stunt, reminiscent of the famous wager-journeys of Elizabethan comedians such as Will Kemp, might almost be described as a nonsense journey: he attempted to scull from London to Queenborough (on the Isle of Sheppey, off the Kentish coast) in a brown paper boat with oars made out of salted dried fish.


But many of Taylor’s travelogues supply valuable descriptions of ordinary English life, and two of his more entrepreneurial publications are important source-materials for modern historians: his catalogue of taverns in the Home Counties, and his directory of carrier services from all the provincial towns of England to their terminus-points at different London inns.




A few months after the outbreak of the Civil War Taylor was publicly accused of royalism and ‘popery’; and in early 1643 he refused to pay a parliamentary tax. Soon afterwards he fled, first to Windsor and then to Oxford (the royalist garrison town and seat of government), where he remained until 1646.


Taylor’s own royalism was not in doubt; he wrote elegies on Charles I after his execution in 1649, and later that year was arrested for espionage and/or corresponding with the King’s friends.


Taylor’s devotion to the Crown spurred him into another literary feud, this time against an old friend, the Puritan poet George Wither. Wither had supported the King against the Scots in 1639, but by 1642 he had gone over to the parliamentary side. When the Civil War broke out he raised his own troop of cavalry; his next book of poems, entitled Campo-Musae (1643), was written while serving in the field as a captain.


Taylor, in one of his several pamphlets written in the form of proclamations by the Devil and ironically praising the war, referred in 1644 to ‘our dear sons Mercurius Britannicus, George Wither (the Gull’s Darling) and Booker, the Aetheriall Planeteriall learned Preterpluperfect Asse-trologian, with the rest of our English andScottish Doves, Scoutes, Scoundrells and Lyurnall-makers’.


In the same year he issued his Aqua-Musae: or, Cacafogo, Cacadaemon, Captain George Wither Wrung in the Withers, which concluded with a brief nonsense poem (poem 15). A final quatrain following this poem made – for the first time in Taylor’s output – a claim about the ideological significance of nonsense poetry:

And is not this rare Nonsence, prethee tell,

Much like thy writing, if men marke it well:

For Nonsence is Rebellion, and thy writing,

Is nothing but Rebellious Warres inciting.




If this were the only surviving specimen of nonsense poetry, it would be tempting to take this comment and construct on its foundation a whole theory about the political significance of nonsense as an expression of the satirical-political ‘world turned upside-down’ theme during the Civil War. That this theme appealed to Taylor is evident from a poem he wrote to accompany a woodcut (of which it provides a full and accurate description) in 1642:

This Monstrous Picture plainely doth declare

This land (quite out of order) out of square.

His Breeches on his shoulders do appeare,

His doublet on his lower parts doth weare;

His Boots and Spurs upon his Arms and Hands,

His Gloves upon his feet (whereon he stands)

The Church or’eturnd (a lamentable show)

The Candlestick above, the light below,

The Cony hunts the Dogge, the Rat the Cat,

The Horse doth whip the Cart (I pray marke that)

The Wheelbarrow doth drive the man (oh Base)

And Eeles and Gudgeon flie a mighty pace.




But possessing, as we do, the earlier history of nonsense poetry, we can see that it was a literary phenomenon long before it became an ostensibly political one; Taylor’s remarks about nonsense and rebellion at the end of poem 15 are just another example of his talent for turning whatever materials he had at hand to an immediate topical use.

This poem was followed by two brief extensions of the same theme (poem 16), added at the start and finish of a pamphlet which Taylor published in the form of a mock-news-sheet in 1648, Mercurius Nonsensicus. These verses are of interest for two other reasons. The first is their curious mixture of literary aims and conventions, which makes them unlike the rest of Taylor’s nonsense output. Some of the lines are examples of the ‘impossibilia’ tradition, which is discussed below (pp. 78–88). At the same time they are a direct parody (again, untypical of Taylor) of a popular poem on man’s mortality:

Like as the damask rose you see,

Or like the blossom on the tree,

Or like the dainty flower of May,

Or like the morning to the day …




The second point of interest here is that the original idea for subjecting those trite lines to nonsensical parody seems to have come from another minor poet, Richard Corbet – who was probably, therefore, the third writer of such concentrated nonsense poetry in English. In 1641 a collection of humorous verse had published a similar parody in three stanzas (poem 14); the author’s name was not stated there, but some of the early manuscripts containing this poem ascribe it to Corbet. A later collection, published in 1658, included another nonsense poem (poem 13) under the title ‘A non sequitur, by Dr. Corbet’. Both poems show the evident influence of Taylor, containing some of his own most characteristic images, such as lobsters and bag-puddings; but the second poem is in an elaborate classical form (the Pindaric ode) which Taylor seems never to have attempted. Since the two poems are clearly quite closely connected, their separate attributions to Corbet can be taken as mutually reinforcing evidence of his authorship of both.


Although he rose to be Bishop first of Oxford (1628) and then of Norwich (1632; he died in 1635), Corbet was best known for his wit and high spirits; Aubrey described him as ‘very facetious, and a good fellowe’.


He may have read Taylor’s Workes and the first printed version of the mortality poem at roughly the same time (1630); or he may have been familiar with the latter as it circulated, like so much of the poetry of this period, in manuscript. His own nonsense verses had evidently been circulating in this way for many years before they appeared in print.

Also circulating in manuscript were several more or less close imitations of Taylor. One of these (poem 21), which seems never to have been published, appears in a manuscript together with a copy of Taylor’s verses from Jack a Lent: it is so close to Taylor’s style that it could indeed be attributed to him, were it not for the fact that the manuscript attributes it to ‘T. W.’. Another (poem 20) in a much more bitter and scatological vein than anything that survives from Taylor’s own pen, is entitled ‘A sonnett to cover my Epistles taile peece’. This suggests that it was intended to be printed at the end of a dedicatory epistle; but it has not yet been located in any printed work. Two other reasonably successful imitations of Taylor’s style were printed in collections of humorous poetry which appeared in 1641 (poem 22) and 1655 (poem 23); a more elementary fragment in a similar vein appeared in another such collection in 1656 (poem 26). As always with anonymous poems printed in miscellanies of this kind, it is impossible to know for how long they had been circulating, by manuscript or by word of mouth, before they were finally printed.

The one fragment of nonsense by Taylor which seems to have undergone widespread circulation in manuscript (and, evidently, in recitation and memory) was contained in a work published in February 1654, just two months after his death: The Essence, Quintessence, Insence, Innocence, Lye-sence, & Magnificence of Nonsence upon Sence: or, Sence upon Nonsence (poem 17).


This was Taylor’s longest and most ambitious nonsense performance; only three of its twenty-three pages are not in nonsense verse. (Those three pages contain a doggerel about ‘the death of a Scottish nag’, which includes what is probably the longest list of horse-diseases in English poetry, but is not reproduced in the present collection.) This little volume, as published in 1654, was in fact the end-product of a cumulative process: the first part had been published as Nonsence upon Sence in 1651, and that work had then been reissued in the following year with additional material, under the title Nonsence upon Sence, or, Sence upon Nonsence: Chuse you either, or neither. Curiously, it was the very last set of additional verses, written in the final weeks of Taylor’s life and appearing for the first time in the posthumous Essence of Nonsence upon Sence, that yielded the most popular and enduring of all Taylor’s nonsense poems. One section of this work, beginning ‘O that my wings could bleat like butter’d pease’, recurs in several manuscript copies, usually with ‘lungs’ instead of ‘wings’; together with twenty extra lines, probably by a subsequent imitator, this acquired a separate existence as a nonsense poem (poem 18) and was printed in a popular anthology three years after Taylor’s death.


(A similar extension or adaptation of Taylor’s last nonsense poem exists, in somewhat fragmentary form, in a manuscript compilation; it is printed here as poem 19.) Two years later, another imitation of Taylor was published in a collection of ‘Such Voluntary and Jovial Copies of Verses, as were lately receiv’d from some of the Wits in the Universities’; this poem, by ‘T. C.’ (poem 24), pays direct homage to Taylor by borrowing one of his most characteristic phrases for its title (‘Upon the Gurmundizing Quagmires …’), and is perhaps the most successful of all the attempts to replicate his style.




To follow the history of English nonsense poetry beyond the seventeenth century would be outside the scope of this Introduction. However, one suggestive link can be made between Taylor’s last poem and the genre of nonsense poetry in the nineteenth century. A poem published in 1815 by the minor American author Henry Coggswell Knight, entitled ‘Lunar Stanzas’, has long been recognized as one of the path-breaking works of nineteenth-century nonsense: Carolyn Wells called it ‘among the best examples of the early writers’, and one recent study has described it as ‘one of the most astonishing nonsense-poems of the period’.


Two lines in this poem,

Yet, ’twere profuse to see for pendant light,

A tea-pot dangle in a lady’s ear;

are so directly reminiscent of one of the most striking conceits in Taylor’s poem,

I grant indeed, that Rainbows layd to sleep,

Snort like a Woodknife in a Ladies eyes,

that it is surely necessary to conclude that Knight had read either Taylor’s original text or the version of these lines printed in the later anthology. We know that seventeenth-century texts were eagerly devoured by early nineteenth-century ‘library cormorants’ such as Robert Southey, who attempted to revive interest in Taylor with a long and sympathetic essay on the water-poet in his Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (1831). In this essay Southey quoted ten lines from Taylor’s Sir Gregory Nonsence, describing them as ‘verses of grandiloquous nonsense … honest right rampant nonsense’.


It is not impossible, therefore, that, more than 150 years after his death, Taylor’s grandiloquous nonsense played some part, however indirectly, in stimulating the growing fashion for nonsense poetry which was to find its finest examples in the works of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.


CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_5f33d1aa-a7db-55ba-9354-bd015c69f9b4)

Fustian, bombast and satire: the stylistic preconditions of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry (#ulink_5f33d1aa-a7db-55ba-9354-bd015c69f9b4)

THE ‘FUSTIAN’ SPEECH performed by John Hoskyns in the winter of 1597–8 (above, pp. 9–11) belonged to a genre which formed an important part of the background to the nonsense poetry of this period. Many seventeenth-century writers would use the terms ‘nonsense’ and ‘fustian’ almost interchangeably. This may surprise the modern reader, to whom it is obvious that most instances of fustian prose have a definite sense, albeit one expressed in needlessly obscure or elaborate terms. But the association of fustian with nonsense must be taken seriously. It helps to show that in this period nonsense writing was thought of primarily in terms of a parodic stylistic exercise: to write nonsense was not to express the strangeness of unconscious thought but to engage in a highly self-conscious stylistic game. The history of fustian prose still waits to be written; a brief account can be given here.

The phenomenon itself was older than its name. Many writers in the sixteenth century were acutely conscious of the fact that large quantities of vocabulary were being lifted out of Latin (either directly or via French) and added to the English language. A few (such as the Bible translators William Tyndale and John Cheke) deliberately resisted this trend; others welcomed the enrichment of the language, but were aware at the same time that English was acquiring new registers of ornate and lofty diction which could easily be abused. Two varieties of misuse could be distinguished: the excessively ‘aureate’ language of the would-be courtier, and the deliberate obscurity of the would-be scholar. Since both of these involved the use of cumbersome Latinate terminology, they were easily conflated into a single stylistic fault: the use of ‘inkhorn terms’. One very influential English handbook, Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (first edition 1553; revised edition 1560), put it as follows:

The unlearned or foolish phantasticall, that smelles but of learning … will so Latin their tongues, that the simple can not but wonder at their talke, and thinke surely they speake by some revelation. I know them that thinke Rheorique to stande wholie upon darke wordes, and hee that can catch an ynke home terme by the taile, him they coumpt to be a fine Englisheman, and a good Rhetorician.




To illustrate his point, Wilson printed a preposterous letter, sent (as he claimed, with tongue in cheek) by a Lincolnshire man to an acquaintance in the household of the Lord Chancellor:

Pondering, expending, and revoluting with my selfe, your ingent affabilitie, and ingenious capacity for mundane affaires: I cannot but celebrate, & extol your magnifical dexteritie above all other. For how could you have adepted such illustrate prerogative, and dominicall superioritie, if the fecunditie of your ingenie had not been so fertile and wonderfull pregnant …




This still retains some power to impress the modern reader; it requires an effort of the imagination, however, to realize now just how outlandish this sounded in the mid sixteenth century, when so many of these words were newly minted.

Wilson may not have invented this parodie genre in English, but he certainly helped to ensure its widespread popularity. By the 1590s, as we have already seen, it was standard fare at the Inns of Court revels; and it is quite certain that Hoskyns had studied Wilson’s book carefully, since some of the word-play in his own ‘fustian speech’ is taken from another section of The Arte of Rhetorique.


But Wilson was not the only popularizer of the genre. Sir Philip Sidney, writing in the 1580s, had also given a fine specimen of it in the person of Rombus, the learned fool in his Arcadia:

Why you brute Nebulons have you had my corpusculum so long among you, and cannot tell how to edifie an argument? Attend and throw your ears to me, for I am gravidated with child, till I have endoctrinated your plumbeous cerebrosities. First you must divisionate your point, quasi you would cut a cheese into two particles, for thus must I uniforme my speeche to your obtuse conceptions …




So popular was this passage that an allusion to ‘plumbeous cerebrosities’ became a common hallmark of later fustian speeches.

At the time when Sidney was completing his Arcadia, English prose was experiencing a huge intensification of stylistic self-consciousness as a result of the influence of John Lyly’s Euphues. Ornate, mellifluous and elaborate, ‘Euphuistic’ prose was a nonstop succession (and superimposition) of stylistic devices, especially alliteration and the balancing and echoing of clauses, in a diction both lofty and pretty. This style encouraged courtly, ‘aureate’ prose to attempt new heights, while at the same time slightly blurring the line between extravagant achievement and self-parody. Thomas Coryate supplied a very blurred instance of this when he printed the ‘orations’ he had made when delivering copies of his Crudities to members of the royal family in 1611. His address to Prince Henry, for example, began:

Most scintillant Phosphorus of our British Trinacria, Even as the Christalline deaw, that is exhaled up into the ayre out of the cavernes & spungie pores of the succulent Earth, doeth by his distillation descend, and disperse it selfe againe upon the spacious superficies of his mother Earth, and so consequently fecundate the same with his bountifull irrigation …




This is quite close to the sort of thing ‘fustian’ prose parodied. But the essence of fustian was that it parodied the language of scholars, rather than courtiers. In Act III of Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour (first performed in 1599) Carlo Buffone says to his companion: ‘prithee, let’s talk fustian a little, and gull ’em: make ’em believe we are great scholars’. The speech he proceeds to make (which, more than any other instance of fustian prose, verges on the fully nonsensical) depends for its ‘fustian’ effect not on devices such as alliteration but on the sheer density of inkhorn terms:

Now, sir, whereas the ingenuity of the time and the soul’s synderesis are but embryons in nature, added to the paunch of Esquiline and the intervallum of the zodiac, besides the ecliptic line being optic and not mental, but by the contemplative and theoric part thereof doth demonstrate to us the vegetable circumference, and the ventosity of the Tropics …




That fustian prose normally retained some element of scholarly or academic pretensions is hardly surprising, since it was the rituals of places of learning – the Inns of Court and the universities – that kept it going as a popular genre. Anthony Wood supplies a valuable description of the Christmas traditions he experienced at Merton College, Oxford, in 1647. Fires were lit in the College hall on every feast-day and holiday from All Saints to Candlemas:

At all these fires every night, which began to be made a little after five of the clock, the senior undergraduats would bring into the hall the juniors or freshmen between that time and six of the clock, and there make them sit downe on a forme in the middle of the hall, joyning to the declaiming desk: which done, every one in order was to speake some pretty apothegme, or make a jest or bull, or speake some eloquent nonsense, to make the company laugh.




Wood also recorded the ‘eloquent nonsense’ which he himself spoke on that occasion: ‘Most reverent Seniors, may it please your Gravities to admit into your presence a kitten of the Muses, and a meer frog of Helicon to croak the cataracts of his plumbeous cerebrosity before your sagacious ingenuities…’


Writing in the 1680s, Wood apologetically observed that this illustrated ‘the folly and simplicity of those times’; at some time between 1647 and the restoration of Charles II in 1660, he wrote, ‘it was disused, and now such a thing is absolutely forgotten’.


In this last claim he was not quite accurate. A few examples of fustian can be found in publications of the late seventeenth century; the generation which had been at Oxford or Cambridge in the 1640s and 1650s still formed a significant part of the reading public, and one would not expect the genre to become ‘absolutely forgotten’ until that generation itself was no more. One late example can be found in a compilation of humorous letters edited by Charles Gildon and published in 1692. Introduced as a letter ‘From a conceited Fellow that affects to write fine Language, tho’ he makes his Letter perfect Nonsense’, and signed ‘Jehoiachim Balderdash’, it begins:

Obscenical Sir,

I could not recognise upon any Substance since I was so Malheureus in your transcendent Conversation, which the Philosophy of the Cymerians most abtrusly demonstrated, tho’ I must confess, I for those Ecclarisments, and doubtful Disputations have no small Antiquity, and yet the extraordinary Regret that Humidity, and Preter-natural turn of your Wit superseded them, makes me desire a fresh Excrement from you to nourish my Intellectuals …




Reading this, one becomes aware of a more fundamental reason for the decline of the genre: whereas much latinate vocabulary was still either off-puttingly scholarly or completely new-minted in the late sixteenth century, such large quantities of it had been absorbed into the language during the next hundred years that it was becoming impossible to achieve the same effects of sheer density and outlandishness any longer.

As the ‘fustian’ speech in Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour and Hoskyns’s performance of the previous year demonstrate, the term ‘fustian’ was well established by the late 1590s. It is, however, hard to say exactly when this name had come into use. The OED draws a comparison between the development of this term and the use – which is datably earlier – of the word ‘bombast’; other metaphors of cloth or material, such as ‘taffeta’, were also used in this period, and their meanings were eventually conflated. But the more closely one looks into the history of each term, the further apart their original meanings seem to stand. Bombast (a kind of coarse cotton-wool) was used by tailors for padding, and its natural metaphorical application was to poetry or oratory which was padded out with redundancies or puffed up to impress. This was a matter of rhetorical extravagance and excessive grandeur rather than pretentious obscurity: when George Puttenham drew up his list of stylistic defects in The Arte of English Poesie (written in the 1570s and 1580s) he kept his strictures on ‘inkhorn terms’ and over-Latinate diction quite separate from his attack on what he called ‘Bomphiologia, or Pompious speech’, in which he observed: ‘Others there be that fall into the contrary vice [contrary, that is, to the vice of excessively mean diction] by using such bombasted wordes, as seeme altogether farced full of winde, being a great deal to high and loftie for the matter, whereof ye may finde too many in all popular rymers’.


By the end of the 1580s there was one style above all that attracted this criticism: the extravagant poetic oratory of Marlowe. In 1589 Thomas Nashe pointed unmistakably at Marlowe’s Tamburlaine when he referred to those playwrights ‘who, mounted on the stage of arrogance, think to out-brave better pens with the swelling bumbast of a bragging blanke verse’. Swelling and bragging, rather than affecting obscurity, were the original connotations of ‘bombast’.

Fustian, on the other hand, was a ‘velure’ cloth made either from cotton or from a mixture of flax and wool, so silky in appearance that it could be used in place of velvet. A modern historian of costume observes that ‘Elizabethan statutes of apparel limiting the use of silk materials to rich nobility made fustian a fashionable substitute for middle-class persons’.


So the natural metaphorical use of the term was for the pretentious and the bogus – things which appeared more valuable or exotic than they really were. The earliest known use of the word as a linguistic metaphor comes in a popular work which itself used the device of representing the social and moral world by means of differences in cloth and clothing: Robert Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier: or, a quaint Dispute between Velvetbreeches and Cloth-breeches (1592). A description of a fashionable barber includes the following: ‘Then comes he out with his fustian Eloquence, and … saith, Sir, Will you have your Worships Hair cut after the Italian Manner, short and round, and then frounct with the curling Yrons, to make it looke like to a Halfmoone in a Mist?’


Two years later Thomas Nashe used the term in his The Terrors of the Night, referring to mountebank astrologers ‘with their vaunting and prating, and speaking fustian in steede of Greeke’.


This usage by Nashe (unlike that by Greene) does show that the term had already acquired some connotations of pseudo-scholarliness; but in the early 1590s it was obviously not quite tied to the stylistic phenomenon of addiction to inkhorn terms. When Nashe himself had mounted one of the most famous attacks on that phenomenon in his verbal assault on Gabriel Harvey, Strange Newes, of the Intercepting certain Letters (1592), he had made no use of the term ‘fustian’, preferring ‘inkehornisme’ instead.




Another influential passage using the term ‘fustian’ also dates from the early 1590s: it comes in one of the comic interludes in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, which may have been written for a performance in 1594. One modern scholar has suggested that they were written by Nashe himself; Nashe’s modern biographer argues, more plausibly, that they were written by someone who was influenced by Nashe’s writings.


The passage is an exchange between Faustus’ assistant, Wagner, and a ‘clown’:

Wagner Vilaine, call me Maister Wagner, and let thy left eye be diametarily fixt upon my right heele, with quasi vestigias nostras insistere.

Clown God forgive me, he speakes Dutch fustian.

There are several possible levels of allusion here. Wagner was himself ‘Dutch’ (high Dutch, i.e. German). German fustian was the coarsest and cheapest of all the commonly imported varieties: so substituting ‘Dutch fustian’ for velvet would be the height of false pretension.


It is also conceivable that some word-play on ‘Faustian’ was intended.

The use of cloth-metaphors for speech features prominently in another play, written probably in 1593–4: Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost. Here it the poetical wooer Berowne finally abjures

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-pil’d hyperboles, spruce affection,

Figures pedantical

and declares:

Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d

In russet yeas and honest kersey noes …




(‘Three-pil’d’ refers to the deepest-piled variety of plush velvet; ‘spruce’ is used in its ordinary sense of ‘neat’ or ‘dapper’, as applied to dress; and ‘affection’ here means ‘affectation’.) Taffeta was a fine material made of glossy silk, worn by the ostentatious and the fashion-conscious: in Thomas Overbury’s ‘character’ of ‘an Innes of Court man’ we read that ‘His very essence he placeth in his outside, and his chiefest praier is, that his revenues may hold out for taffeta cloakes in the summer, and velvet in the winter’.


Shakespeare varies the metaphor according to the type of language: shimmering cloths for fine, poetic or courtly speech, and soft plush fabric for hyperbole (where the metaphor, as with ‘bombast’, works on tactile or three-dimensional, rather than visual, qualities).


The metaphor of ‘taffeta’ here operates in a quite different way from that of ‘fustian’: it is meant as a genuinely pretty and luxurious material.

‘Tuft-taffeta’ or ‘tufftaffeta’, however, brought further implications into play. This was a ‘tufted’ variety of the material, which meant that it was woven with raised stripes or spots. ‘These stripes, upon being cut, left a pile like velvet, and, since the tufted parts were always a different colour from the ground, beautiful colour combinations were possible.’


Tufftaffeta could also appear to change its colour, according to the angle at which it was viewed or the way in which it was brushed. The mixture of colours could be associated, in the metaphor, with a mixture of different meanings. (‘Motley’ was similarly used as a metaphor for absurd speech: this was not the parti-coloured fool’s costume we now associate with the term, but a variegated cloth made from different colours of wool.)




When Hoskyns made his ‘fustian’ oration at Christmas 1597 he began with the apology: ‘I am sorry that for your Tufftaffeta Speech, you shall receive but a Fustian Answer.’ Since the tufftaffeta speech itself does not survive, we cannot tell whether he was alluding to any difference in style, or merely playing on the fact that fustian was the cheaper material. Already, any original distinctions between terms such as ‘fustian’, ‘taffeta’ and ‘bombast’ had begun to break down. Earlier that year, Shakespeare had written the scene in Henry IV Part Two where Doll Tearsheet complains of Pistol, who has been declaiming mangled passages from Marlowe: ‘I cannot endure such a fustian rascal’ (II. iv. 184).

The association of Marlovian poetic oratory with fustian was a powerful one, and it helped to make the terms ‘fustian’ and ‘bombast’ almost interchangeable. This was encouraged too by another idiom, the origins of which are very obscure: ‘fustian fumes’, the special condition of the humours that prompted people to indulge in furious invective. As a speaker in Lodge and Greene’s A Looking-Glasse for London and England related, ‘At last in a great fume, as I am very cholericke, and sometimes so hotte in my fustian fumes, that no man can abide within twentie yards of me, I start up, and so bombasted the divell, that sir, he cried out and ranne away.’


Another work of 1600 explained: ‘Testines and furie, bee fonde effects that proceede from certaine fantasticall humours in their heades, whom wee commonly call testie 6c fustian fooles’.


It may be conjectured that this term derived not from the cloth but from an association with ‘fusty’. It may have meant the fumes given off by stale liquors which are undergoing fermentation – a process which can cause bottles (like testy fools) to explode. In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida Ulysses describes how Patroclus parodied the oratorical style of Agamemnon:

’Tis like a chime a-mending, with terms unsquar’d,

Which, from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropp’d,

Would seem hyperboles. At this fusty stuff

The large Achilles, on his press’d bed lolling,

From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause …




The comparison here with the volcanic Titan of classical mythology suggests that ‘fusty’ must surely be intended here in the sense of ‘fustian fumes’, i.e. explosive bombast, rather than in the sense of ‘mouldy’ (which, the editor of the Arden text believes, ‘suits the rest of the food imagery in the play’). By the time this play was written (probably in 1602), bombast and fustian had almost fused into one.

Some of the linguistic factors in that process have now been described: the original overlap between bombast and fustian in their use of latinate terms; the natural conflation of cloth metaphors; and the probably coincidental use of the word ‘fustian’ in ‘fustian fumes’. But the convergence between bombast and fustian can also be explained in terms of a literary development: the appropriation of elements of the Marlovian style by the satirical poet John Marston. And this in turn brings us close to the stylistic heart of seventeenth-century English nonsense. The development of nonsense poetry in the hands of its master, John Taylor, would have been unthinkable had it not been preceded by Marlowe and Marston. This is not just a matter of the models which Taylor parodied. The combination of Marston and Marlowe made possible a radical destabilizing of poetic diction; and of that resulting instability, Taylor’s nonsense poetry was both a parody and an even more radical expression.

Marlowe’s declamatory style – above all, that of Tamburlaine – made a huge impression on his contemporaries. It was highly rhetorical; but the rhetoric was of a different kind from that employed by earlier English tragedians. In his use of blank verse, Marlowe not only dispensed with the end-stopping of rhymed couplets, but also turned away from the enclosed pattern-making rhetorical devices which that end-stopping had encouraged: devices of alliteration and word-symmetry within the line or the couplet. Instead, his rhetoric depended much more on the nature of the diction he employed. This, together with the motoric force which blank verse made possible (with the play of declamatory speech-rhythms against the metre), created effects which could best be placed in the category of ‘energy’ rather than that of ‘order’. One modern analysis, by Alvin Kernan, of the Marlovian grand style singles out the following seven characteristics, the majority of which are peculiarities of diction:

(1) the steady, heavy beat of ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ … (2) the consistent use of present participles for adjectives – ‘shining’ for ‘bright’, ‘rising’ for ‘high’ – expressing a mind always in movement and always aspiring; (3)frequent appearance of such ‘rising’ words as ‘soar’, ‘mount’ and ‘climb’; (4) persistence of the rhetorical figure Hyperbole, conveying a constant striving for a condition beyond any known in this world … (5)parataxis, the joining together of several phrases and clauses by ‘and’ – and … and … and – to create a sense of endless ongoing, of constant reaching; (6)the use of the privative suffix in words which state limits – ‘topless’, ‘quenchless’, ‘endless’; (7)frequent use of ringing popular names and exotic geographical places to realise the sensed wideness, brightness and richness of the world.




Readers of John Taylor’s nonsense verse will recognize many of these characteristics in it. The steady onward movement of Marlowe’s mighty line is the least obvious of these in Taylor’s verses, whose movement tends to be more steady than onward. For most of his nonsense poems he could not resist the comic-doggerel potentialities of rhyme; and in any case the fragmentation of sense in such writing was not conducive to large-scale cumulative effects. (Hence also the general lack of cumulative ‘and … and’ parataxis in these verses.) Taylor first made use of blank verse for his nonsense writing in Jack a Lent: here the diction is certainly Marlovian, but the rhythmical effects are undistinguished and the thinking still comes in couplets:

Great Jacke-a-Lent, clad in a Robe of Ayre,

Threw mountaines higher then Alcides beard:

Whilst Pancradge Church, arm’d with a Samphier blade,

Began to reason of the businesse thus:

You squandring Troglodites of Amsterdam,

How long shall Cerberus a Tapster be?

‘You squandring Troglodites of Amsterdam’ is, however, a piece of pure mock-Marlowe, with a participial adjective, an exotic term and a resonant place-name, all wrapped up in the declamatory vocative. The most sustained piece of Marlovian nonsense achieved by Taylor was in the opening section of Sir Gregory Nonsence his Newes from No Place (poem II); and there the management of large-scale syntactical structure through whole paragraphs of verse is much more assured, with the rhythmical character of the poetry also gaining in the process.

But it was Marlowe’s diction that Taylor imitated most closely. Grandiose participial adjectives recur in his six sonnets in praise of Coryate: ‘Conglomerating Ajax, in a fogge’; ‘And with conglutinating haughty pride’; ‘Whilst thunder-thwacking Ossa limps and halts’. These sonnets also exhibit the ‘rising’ syndrome (‘’gan to swell’; ‘leaps and vaults’), as does the opening section of The Essence of Nonsence upon Sence (poem 17):

Then mounted on a Windmill presently

To Dunstable in Derbyshire I’le flie …

From thence I’le soare to silver Cynthia’s lap,

And with Endimion take a nine years nap …

As for hyperbole, one of the most essential techniques of this type of nonsense poetry is to out-hyperbolize hyperbole, doing to hyperbole what hyperbole itself does to ordinary speech. The privative suffix does not play a prominent part in these poems, but exotic geographical (and classical) names are omnipresent:

Then shall the Perecranians of the East …

All knuckle deep in Paphlagonian Sands,

Inhabite Transylvanian Netherlands …

And one other stylistic tic of Marlowe’s poetry (not mentioned by Kernan) is also picked up by Taylor: the citing of large numbers. Where Marlowe had written

My lord, the great commander of the world,

Besides fifteen contributory kings

Hath now in arms ten thousand janizaries …

Two hundred thousand footmen that have served

In two set battles fought in Graecia …




Taylor could write:

Then did the Turntripes on the Coast of France,

Catch fifteene hundred thousand Grasshoppers,

With fourteene Spanish Needles bumbasted,

Poach’d with the Egs of fourscore Flanders Mares




That Marlowe’s style invited parodic imitation seems clear; and yet, a direct parody of it (which Taylor’s verses are not) was curiously difficult to achieve. Its most obvious feature, heightened diction, could scarcely be heightened any further. The best early parody of it, Pistol’s ranting in Henry IV Part Two, keeps the diction at more or less the same level and dislocates the sense:

Shall packhorses,

And hollow pamper’d jades of Asia,

Which cannot go but thirty mile a day,

Compare with Caesars, and with Cannibals,

And Troiant Greeks? Nay, rather damn them with

King Cerberus; and let the welkin roar.




The full comic potentialities of this sort of declamatory poetry could only be exploited after it had undergone another transformation (not itself parodic), at the hands of the satirist John Marston.

Marston’s two sets of satires were published in 1598: ‘Certaine Satyres’ as the second half of the volume The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image, and ten further satires published as The Scourge of Villanie later in the year. These poems were modelled in the first place on the satires of Persius and Juvenal; but they were also steeped in the Marlovian style of declamatory verse. They abound in exclamations (‘O Hecatombe! o Catastrophe!’; ‘O hidden depth of that dread Secrecie’),


rhetorical questions (‘Nay, shall a trencher slave extenuate, / Some Lucrece rape? and straight magnificate / Lewd Jovian lust?’),


and vocative constructions brimming with classical names:

Ambitious Gorgons, wide-mouth’d Lamians,

Shape-changing Proteans, damn’d Briareans,

Is Minos dead? is Radamanth a sleepe?

That ye thus dare into Joves Pallace creepe?




Although deeply influenced by Marlowe, Marston was not trying simply to reproduce his style. Following his Roman models, he aimed at a more concentrated and crabbed type of invective; and this meant increasing the linguistic density of the verse. One way to do this was to pile up adjectives or nouns (‘O what a tricksie lerned nicking straine / Is this applauded, sencles, modern vain!’; ‘Fidlers, Scriveners, pedlers, tynkering knaves, / Base blew-coats, tapsters, brod-cloth minded slaves’).


Another way of thickening the diction was to mix in inkhorn terms such as ‘circumference’, ‘esculine’ and ‘capreall’: this conveyed a sense of intellectual intensity to match the intensity of feeling. But at the same time Marston was also trying to give his denunciations an unprecedented sense of gross physical disgust: for this purpose he repeatedly exploited a range of vocabulary which included ‘slime’, ‘dung’, ‘muddy’, ‘reeking’, ‘stinking’, ‘slimie’ and ‘putrid’. And so, intermixed with his high latinate diction and resounding classical names was an utterly different register of language, which not only referred to slime and dung but also described the material props and settings of vice in late sixteenth-century England: it alluded, for example, to aphrodisiac foods in a manner unthinkable in high classical diction (‘marrow pies, and yawning Oystars’; ‘A Crab’s baked guts, a Lobster’s buttered thigh’),


and alongside the place-names of classical mythology it referred to scenes of contemporary vice such as Pickt-hatch and Stourbridge Fair. Marston had brought Marlovian declamation out of Persia and Syria and placed it in the streets – and gutters – of Elizabethan England.

This stylistic mixture was improbable, unstable and potentially explosive. It deliberately violated all the canons of taste which distinguished high diction from low. It was sustained only by the sheer intensity of the satirical charge with which Marston managed to invest it; and the moment that the reader ceased to believe in this, the entire project could become almost hysterically funny. The anonymous authors of the Cambridge Parnassus plays (1598–1601) were quick to seize on its comic potential: they introduced a Marston-figure, ‘Furor poeticus’, whose outpourings characteristically combine Marlowe, inkhorn terms and low diction:

The great projector of the Thunder-bolts,

He that is wont to pisse whole clouds of raine

Into the earthes vast gaping urinall,

Which that one ey’d subsizer of the skie,

Don Phoebus, empties by caliditie:

He and his Townesmen Planets bring to thee

Most fatty lumps of earths faelicitye.




Ben Jonson contributed to the ridicule of Marston in his Poetaster (1601), where the character Crispinus (representing Marston) declaims the following poem:

Ramp up, my genius; be not retrograde:

But boldly nominate a spade, a spade.

What, shall thy lubrical and glibbery Muse

Live, as she were defunct, like punk in stews?

Alas! That were no modern consequence,

To have cothurnal buskins frighted hence.

No; teach thy incubus to poeticize;

And throw abroad thy spurious snotteries …




Later in the play a purge is administered to Crispinus, who spews up fustian words such as ‘turgidous’, ‘ventositous’, ‘furibund’ and ‘fatuate’. Jonson had in fact already ridiculed Marston’s fustian tendencies: most of the obscure terms in the fustian speech in Every Man out of his Humour (quoted above, p. 33) were drawn either from The Scourge of Villanie or from Marston’s Histriomastix.


And to some extent Marston had himself invited this treatment, since he had not only denounced ‘fustian’ poetry in The Scourge of Villanie:

Here’s one, to get an undeserv’d repute

Of deepe deepe learning, all in fustian sute

Of ill-plac’d farre-fetch’d words attiereth

His period, that all sence forsweareth

but also described his own satires as ‘my fustian’.




So by the turn of the century several stylistic ingredients had come together. Marlovian bombast had become intermixed not only with a deliberately coarse vernacular, but also with the fustian of Marston’s inkhorn terms; and the fashion had already begun of submitting the resultant mixture to ludicrous parodizing routines. The comic potentialities of such a style were peculiarly rich and various. A consistently high style can be guyed, of course, using effects of bathos and incongruity; but the incongruity is then likely to be systematic, depending on a sustained contrast between high level and low (as in the two forms of burlesque, mock-heroic and travesty). The starting-point for English seventeenth-century nonsense, on the other hand, was a style with built-in incongruities of several kinds, constantly working their effects at the local level. In exploiting these parodically, nonsense poetry could shake out a kaleidoscopic mixture of comic effects. Hence both its strength and its weakness. Its strength was its exuberant multifariousness, which included its ability to make use of shreds of other genres at the same time (sententious or proverbial lines, ballad-material, etc.). And its weakness was its inherent tendency to fragmentation, its inability to develop large-scale poetic designs.

Finally, one other literary influence on Taylor’s nonsense poetry must also be mentioned, though its effect is hard to measure in any precise way: the prose of Thomas Nashe. It is clear that Taylor idolized Nashe, and tried to model his own comic-rhapsodic-satirical prose on Nashe’s style. One of Taylor’s works even took the form of an account of a visit by Nashe from beyond the grave:

there appeared unto me a poore old swarty fellow, with stareing haire, Neglected beard, Ashy Gastly look, with a black Cloath Cloak upon his back, which hee had worne as thin as if it had been Searge (whereby I conceiv’d him to be a Poet) … Quoth he, my name is Thomas or Tom Nashe, who when this Ayerie shadow of mine had a corporeall substance, I had a yerking, firking, jerking, Satiricall and Poeticall veine …




Nashe had contributed to the ridicule of fustian, both in his polemic against Gabriel Harvey and in the bizarrely grandiloquent speech of one of the characters in his The Unfortunate Traveller, ‘a bursten belly inkhorne orator called Vanderhulke’.


In several of his writings, Nashe had pursued a method of fantastical metaphor-development which expanded the frontiers of the comic grotesque. And in his final (1599) and most extraordinary work, Lenten Stuffe (a kind of prose rhapsody in praise of Great Yarmouth and its smoked herrings), he had developed the mock-encomium to the point where it too, like Taylor’s nonsense poetry, contained a kaleidoscopic mixture of high and low styles, shaken together with almost manic linguistic energy:

A colony of criticall Zenos, should they sinnow their sillogisticall cluster-fistes in one bundle to confute and disprove moving, were they, but during the time they might lap up a messe of buttred fish, in Yarmouth one fishing, such a motion of toyling Mirmidons they should be spectators of and a confused stirring to and fro of a Lepantalike hoast of unfatigable flud-bickerers and foame-curbers, that they woulde not move or stir one foote till they had disclaimd and abjurd their bedred spittle-positions.




Even in his most energetic prose, Taylor never came close to this; but one may still sense the ghost of Tom Nashe hovering over many of Taylor’s works, including his nonsense poetry.

The purpose of this chapter has been to place the nonsense style of Taylor and his imitators in a particular literary context: a collocation of stylistic forces which came together in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth. Those were the two decades that contributed most to Taylor’s formation as a poet. He was evidently a voracious reader and theatre-goer with a very retentive memory; no doubt he absorbed a great deal of Shakespeare as well as Marlowe, Marston, Dekker, Middleton and Jonson. Some of his best lines, indeed, are pure nonsense-Shakespeare, such as ‘From out the heels of squemish magnitude’ or ‘Then smoth thy brow with milk-white discontent’. Although written by a Thames waterman rather than a sophisticated court wit, Taylor’s nonsense poetry was nevertheless a highly literary phenomenon, closely tied to the literary culture which it parodied and celebrated.

And this in turn helps to explain why the genre died away in the second half of the seventeenth century. After Taylor’s death in 1653, nonsense poetry was kept going by the comic anthologies or ‘drolleries’ which started up in Cromwellian England and became a major publishing industry after the Restoration.


If one looked only at the printing-history of the genre, one might even think that the writing of nonsense poetry underwent a revival during this period. But this impression is misleading; the truth is that the compilers of the Restoration drolleries were scouring all available manuscripts – and memories – for comic material to meet a seemingly insatiable public demand. (Similarly, it was during this period that printers made use of the manuscripts of the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn revels, which they published in 1660 and 1688 respectively.) In the process, the drollery-editors picked up quite a few nonsense verses; they seem also to have concocted one or two further poems in the same manner. But in terms of internal literary history, we can see that a genre which was so closely linked to poetic styles of the turn of the century could not properly flourish once those styles themselves had become antiquated and remote. For a while it was insulated by its own oddity; it may be true that by the 1670s it had, like its stylistic sources, become strange-sounding stuff, but of course it was in the very nature of nonsense poetry to sound strange. The point is not that it became unreadable, but that the impetus to write it had gone.

However, another part of the internal literary-historical explanation for the decline of nonsense poetry adds a further paradoxical twist. Far from distancing itself from nonsense poetry, ordinary poetry had, so to speak, encroached on the domain of nonsense itself. One of the stylistic mechanisms of nonsense poetry, namely the exploitation of remote and incongruous metaphors, had itself been absorbed into the mainstream of English poetry. Under the influence of continental theories of the special nature of creative ‘wit’, which emphasized the role of novelty and surprise,


the later metaphysical poets had developed techniques of metaphor-making which verged on self-parody – giving the nonsense poet little left to do. When John Cleveland can describe a girl’s hand as ‘So soft, ’tis ayr but once remov’d, / Tender, as ‘twere a Jellie glov’d’, or conjure up kisses with the lines, ‘Love prints his Signets in her smacks, / Those Ruddy drops of squeezing wax’,


it is not clear that the comic effects of such ingeniousness could be far overtaken by any attempt at incongruity for incongruity’s sake. Nor is it altogether absurd that one modern anthology of nonsense poetry should include some extracts from Marvell’s Upon Appleton House.


In her Poems and Fancies (1653), Margaret Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle, provided a kind of reductio ad absurdum of this new poetic, stringing together her conceits or ‘fancies’ with ostentatious disregard for the demands of congruity:

Life scummes the Cream of Beauty with Times Spoon,

And drawes the Claret Wine of Blushes soon.

There boiles it in a Skillet cleane of Youth,

Then thicks it well with crumbl’d Bread of Truth …

‘I must intreat my Noble Reader’, the Marchioness explained, ‘to read this part of my Book very slow, and to observe very strictly every word they read, because in most of these Poems, every word is a Fancy’.


The comic fragmentation of sense could hardly go any further than that.


CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_26f40b4a-6636-5358-8126-4145a120303e)

A short history of nonsense poetry in medieval and Renaissance Europe (#ulink_26f40b4a-6636-5358-8126-4145a120303e)

LITERARY NONSENSE POETRY was virtually unknown to readers of English when Hoskyns wrote his lines in praise of Coryate in 1611. But although this kind of nonsense poem was absent (so far as we know) from classical literature, various literary genres of nonsense or near-nonsense had existed in Germany, France, Italy and Spain in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Some of these forms (above all, the vigorous and elaborate Italian nonsense poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) are so close to the kind of poem Hoskyns introduced that it is hard to believe that he had no knowledge of them.

A full history of early European nonsense has never been written; many of the details remain very obscure. The general pattern which emerges from this material, however, is one of a complex and overlapping succession of styles and genres, undergoing the kind of development – through the ordinary mechanisms of individual invention, transmission to later poets, influence on (and from) neighbouring genres, and so on – which other literary forms also experienced. Nonsense poetry was, in other words, a typically or even a quintessentially literary phenomenon. It was not something dwelling, like dreams or madness, in the collective unconscious of Europe, liable to break out here, there or everywhere through its own spontaneous energies. On the contrary, it was something invented, learned and transmitted; something which existed only in a literary culture; and indeed something which, because of its essentially parodic nature, had a peculiarly intimate connection with the literary world – as intimate as that between a parasite and its host.

The earliest known nonsense poetry was written by a German Minnesinger, ‘Reinmar der alte’, who died in 1210. Just a few lines of unmistakable nonsense survive in his oeuvre, forming the first stanza of a three-stanza poem. They list a series of bizarre reversals of the natural order, using the traditional poetic-rhetorical device of ‘impossibilia’ (discussed more fully below, pp. 78–88).

Blatte und krone wellent muot willik sin,

so waenent topfknaben wislichen tuon,

So jaget unbilde mit hasen eber swin,

so ervliuget einen valken ein unmehtik huon,

Wirt dan[ne] der wagen vür diu rinder gende,

treit dan[ne] der sak den esel zuo der müln,

wirt danne ein eltiu gurre z’einem vüln:

so siht man’z in der Werlte twerhes stende.




Breastplate and crown want to be volunteer soldiers,

Boys playing with a top think they are acting wisely,

The boar hunts with hares, setting a poor example,

A feeble hen flies up and catches a falcon.

Then the cart goes in front of the oxen,

The sack drags the donkey to the mill,

An old nag turns into a filly:

This is what one sees in the world turned upside-down.

Since the rest of the poem is a love poem, the overall purpose of this initial stanza is clear: it is to set out a vision of a world in which the miraculous becomes the norm, in order then to describe the miracle of requited love. In the overall context of the poem, therefore, the first stanza is not free-standing nonsense but merely an extended rhetorical device. It even concludes by stating explicitly that it refers to that inversion of reality, the world turned upside-down, and any work which makes such a statement is confirming that it knows which way up the world really is. Nevertheless, the sheer bizarrerie and extended invention of this stanza make it possible for it to be read as if it were a piece of nonsense with no larger sense-making rhetorical purpose; and that indeed seems to be the way in which its influence was felt.

Several poets wrote similar pieces during the thirteenth century, establishing a kind of genre with its own stock forms and conventions. A typical piece is the following, by Reinmar von Zweter:

Ich kwam geriten in ein lant,

uf einer gense, da ich affen, toren vant,

ein kra mit einem habche die viengen vil der swine in einer bach;

Ein hase zwene winde zoch,

der jagte einen valken, den vienk er in den lüften hoch;

schachzabel spilten mukken zwo, meisen einen turn ich muren sach;

Da saz ein hirz unt span vil kleine sien;

da huote ein wolf der lember in den widen;

ein krebze vlouck mit einer tuben

ze wette, ein pfunt er ir ab gewan;

drie groze risen erbeiz ein han:

(unt) ist daz war, so naet ein esel huben.




I came riding on a goose

Into a land where I found apes and fools;

A crow and a hawk seized many pigs in a stream;

A hare who turned two windlasses

Hunted a falcon, which he caught high in the air;

I saw two flies playing chess, and titmice building a tower;

A stag sat there spinning many small silk threads;

The lamb kept watch over a wolf in the meadow;

A crab flew with a dove,

It made a bet with her, and won a pound;

Three big giants bit a hen to death;

And if that is true, then a donkey can stitch bonnets.

As this example shows, the overall pretext of the poem was usually that it was an eye-witness narrative, a tall story related by the poet: in this way the nonsense genre was able to stand more freely in its own right as a display of the poet’s own inventiveness, no longer limited by the function of a mere rhetorical device in a love poem. This medieval German genre is therefore known as ‘Lügendichtung’, or lie-poetry.




The general idea of a fibber’s or boaster’s narrative was not new, of course, either in literature or in folklore. One example of a lying tale comes in a Latin poem written in Germany in the tenth or eleventh century, the ‘Modus florum’: it describes how a king offered the hand of his daughter to whoever could tell the best lie, and presents the lying story of the man who won – a story which involves killing a hare, cutting it open and finding inside it huge quantities of honey and a royal charter.


This is bizarre, but it is not a nonsense poem; although scholars have traditionally identified this Latin poem as the origin of the ‘Lügendichtung’ genre, its relationship to the medieval German poems is remote and quite tangential.




The general idea of the tall story may have been absorbed by the Lügendichtung as, so to speak, its form, but its content came from adapting a range of other stock literary devices. These included, most obviously, several types of impossibilia: the reversal of roles by animals (hens seizing hawks), the animation – or, to be more precise, the animal-ization – of inanimate objects (flying millstones being particularly common), and the performance by animals of complex human activities (such as spinning or building).


Two other ways in which animals were treated in these poems seem to have reflected particular literary influences. First, the common imagery of animals playing musical instruments suggests a connection with the form of ecclesiastical-satirical writing in which church music and other functions were performed by animals.


And secondly, the increasingly frequent references to contests and battles between different animals (and/or inanimate objects) reflects the influence of a mock-heroic or burlesque tradition which stemmed from the pseudo-Homeric Batrachomyomachia, the battle of the frogs and the mice. Given the huge popularity of the Roman de Renart, which itself depended on the device of using animals as humorous substitutes for the heroes of epic or romance, it is not surprising that this particular literary-parodic function – the function of burlesque – should have grown in importance in these German nonsense poems. And at the same time more indirect or glancing parodic relationships may have been at work with several of the other forms of beast poetry which were so popular in the Middle Ages, including the most fundamental of them all, the fable.




The ‘Lügendichtung’ genre of German nonsense poetry enjoyed a long life; but its high point was undoubtedly reached in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.


One very popular example from the fourteenth century was the ‘Wachtelmäre’ or ‘quail-story’ (so called because of a refrain which counts quails in a sack, alluding to a proverbial saying about hunters who tell fibs). A long and elaborate narrative, it tells the story of a vinegar-jug who rides out to joust against the King of Nindertda in the land of Nummerdummernamen, which lies beyond Monday. Heroes of courtly epic such as Hildebrand and Dietrich of Bern also come into the story, which develops into a great battle between a hedgehog and a flying earthworm, a battle which is eventually decided by a swimming millstone.


This poem was unusual, however, in having such a unified narrative structure; most of the Lügendichtungen are little more than strings of impossibilia, with images which are built up over a few lines at most:

Ein schweizer spiss ein helnparten

Die tanczten in einem hopffengarten

Eins storchs pein und eins hasenfuss

Die pfiffen auf zum tancz gar suss …




A Swiss lance and a halbard

Were dancing in a hop-field;

A stork’s leg and a hare’s foot

Were playing sweet dance-tunes on the pipe …

This medieval German nonsense poetry seems to have influenced writers in both England and France. The transmission is easiest to see in the English case (though it has not apparently been noticed there before); the influence on France, which has been suggested by a number of modern writers, remains more shadowy and uncertain.

In the case of England, just a handful of narrative animal nonsense poems survive from the Middle Ages, written probably in the mid fifteenth century. They all bear a strikingly close resemblance to the German Lügendichtung. One is a brief account of an animal battle:

The krycket & the greshope wentyn here to fyght,

With helme and harburyone all redy dyght;

The flee bare the baner as a dughty knyght,

The cherubed trumpyt with all hys myghth …




The cricket and the grasshopper went out to fight,

Already dressed in helmet and coat of mail;

The fly carried the banner, as a doughty knight,

The scarab-beetle trumpeted with all his might …

Another is a short but more chaotic description of animals and other objects fighting and making music:

The hare and the harthestone hurtuld to-geydur,

Whyle the hombul-be hod was hacked al to cloutus

Ther schalmod the scheldrake and schepe trumpyd,

[The] hogge with his hornepype hyod hym belyve,

And dansyd on the downghhyll, whyle all thei day lasted …




The hare and the hearth-stone collided with each other,

While the bumblebee’s hood was hacked to shreds;

The salmon, the sheldrake and the sheep trumpeted,

The hog came on quickly with his hornpipe

And danced on the dunghill, so long as the day lasted …

Another poem is a more ambitious narrative. Beginning with the sort of brief introductory formula which one finds in the German poems of this period, it moves quickly into a dense mass of comic animal impossibilia:

Herkyn to my tale that I schall to yow schew,

For of seche mervels have ye hard bot few;

Yf any of them be ontrue that I schall tell yow aftur,

Then wax I as pore as tho byschop of Chestur.

As I rode from Durram to Dowre I fond by tho hee strete

A fox and a fulmarde had XV fete;

Tho scate scalldyd tho rydlyng and turnede of hys skyn;

At the kyrke dore called the codlyng, and badd lett hym yn.

Tho salmond sang tho hee mas, tho heyrying was hys clarke,

On tho orgons playde tho porpas, there was a mere warke …

I toke a peyny of my purse, and offerd to hom all.

For this offerand was made, tho sothe yf I schall sey,

When Midsomer evyn fell on Palmes sounnday.

Fordurmore I went, and moo marvels I founde;

A norchon by the fyre rostyng a greyhownde.

There was dyverse meytes, reckyn hom yf I schall;

Ther was raw bakon, and new sowrde all.

Tho breme went rownd abowte, and lette hem all blode;

Tho sow sate on hye benke, and harpyd Robyn-Howde …




Hearken to my tale, which I shall tell you,

For you have heard few such marvels;

If any of the ones I shall tell you are untrue,

Let me become as poor as the Bishop of Chester.

As I rode from Durham to Dover, I found in the high street

A fox and a polecat which had fifteen feet;

The skate scalded the redshank and skinned him;

The codling called at the church door, and asked to be let in.

The salmon sang the high mass, the herring was his clerk,

The porpoise played the organ, there were merry goings-on …

I took a penny from my purse, and offered it to them all.

Now, this offering was made, to tell the truth,

When Midsummer day fell on Palm Sunday.

I went further, and found more marvels:

A hedgehog by the fire, roasting a greyhound.

There were various things to eat, let me tell you what they were:

There was raw bacon, and new soured ale.

The bream went round and took blood from them all;

The sow sat on a high bench, playing ‘Robin Hood’ on her harp …

The close connection between these poems and the German genre is self-evident. Of course, the basic idea of listing animal or natural impossibilia was so widespread that it would have been known to English writers from many other sources too; but those other sources, and their English imitators, generally used it in a non-nonsensical way, as a rhetorical device to fortify satire or complaint – usually about the impossibility of female constancy. (One well-known example is a fifteenth-century poem which begins: ‘Whane nettuls in wynter bryng forth rosys red’; the end-line of each stanza is: ‘Than put women in trust and confydens.’)


Humorous-miraculous narratives were not unknown either, the most famous being the early fourteenth-century poem ‘The Land of Cockaygne’.


But that poem is a straightforward narrative description of extraordinary things; it lacks the density, energy and chaotic intermingling of different kinds of impossibilia which mark out the German poems and the small group of English poems which follow them so closely.

Finally, one other type of impossibilia cultivated by the German genre should also be mentioned, since it seems to have given rise to another short English poem: this type has been described as ‘the subcategory of adynata [i.e. impossibilia] in which incapacitated persons act as if they had full, or even extraordinary possession of their faculties’.


The lame dance (or, frequently, catch hares), the dumb sing, the naked put things in their pockets, and so on. This idea is taken up by another fifteenth-century English poem:

I saw thre hedles playen at a ball;

On hanles man served them all;

Whyll thre mouthles men lay and low

Thre legles away hem drow.




I saw three headless men playing ball;

One handless man served them all;

While three mouthless men lay and laughed

Three legless men drove him away.

This looks like a small fragment extracted from a Lügendichtung and turned into a free-standing pseudo-gnomic poem, which might then have entered the stock of orally transmitted folk poetry. The only other genre in medieval English literature which cultivated impossibilia for their own sake was that of the mock-recipe or mock-prescription: this genre, one instance of which was available in print to seventeenth-century readers, will be discussed in the next chapter.

Apart from these two examples, it is doubtful whether any of the small number of medieval English nonsense poems which have come down to us were known to writers of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.


The torch of nonsense poetry seems to have been more or less extinguished in England after its brief flaming in the fifteenth century. When it was re-lit by Hoskyns in 1611, he may well have been writing under the influence of continental nonsense genres; if so, seventeenth-century English nonsense poetry was in part the final product of a more circuitous transmission, in which literary nonsense had travelled in relays from Germany, first to France, and then to Italy.

The earliest French nonsense poetry which has come down to us was written in northern France (in Artois and the Île-de-France region) during the second half of the thirteenth century. Known as ‘fatrasies’, these early poems survive in two main collections, one by the poet Philippe de Rémi, sieur de Beaumanoir (1250–96), and the other, a group of poems called ‘Les Fatrasies d’Arras’, by an unknown writer (or writers).


One example from the latter group will give the flavour of the genre:

Vache de pourcel,

Aingnel de veël,

Brebis de malart;

Dui lait home bel

Et dui sain mesel,

Dui saiges sotart,

Dui emfant nez d’un torel

Qui chantoient de Renart,

Seur la pointe d’un coutel

Portoient Chastel Gaillart.




Cow born of a pig,

Lamb born of a calf,

Sheep born of a duck;

Two ugly handsome men

And two healthy lepers,

Two wise idiots,

Two children born of a bull,

Who sang about Reynard,

Carried Château Gaillard

On the point of a knife.

The precise origins of this type of poetry are obscure. One modern scholar has tried to show that these poems were riddles with specific personal and political meanings.


It is possible that they developed in connection with some kind of literary game, perhaps involving the parodying of gnomic or over-elaborate courtly poetry; this may have been the work of Philippe de Rémi, whose verses are probably earlier than those of the Arras collection.


These French nonsense poems have a distinctive character: they lack the unifying narrative structure of the German poems, and their impossibilia are generally less visual or physical, less energetic and not so densely packed. But on the other hand the basic similarity with the German poems of the thirteenth century is inescapable. The very idea of putting together strings of impossibilia, not for their traditional rhetorical purpose but simply for the effect of comic absurdity which they produced on their own, is fundamental to both the German and the French poems, and it is very unlikely that this idea was just invented independently on two occasions, within the same century, in two neighbouring countries.


Literary influences flowed to and fro between the French and German vernaculars throughout the Middle Ages (as the complex development of the Roman de Renart shows). The universities of northern France were frequented by large numbers of German students; one fourteenth-century German lament for the decay of Orléans University says that the sound of the German language was once so loud in the streets of Orléans that one would have thought oneself in the Fatherland.


It is highly likely that an ingenious new style of poetry invented by German Minnesingers, even though it may have been a minor experimental genre known only through a few examples, should eventually have percolated into French poetic culture too.

As the genre developed in France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (in a slightly different verse-form, known as the ‘fatras’), it was treated simply as a form of humorous poetry, and described also as a ‘frivole’ or ‘folie’. Not all of the ‘fatras’ were nonsense poems putting together impossible collocations of ideas; such versions of the ‘fatras’ died out in the early fifteenth century.


Nonsense poetry thus enjoyed a much shorter continuous history in France than it did in Germany. But something of the spirit of the ‘fatras’ was revived in the sixteenth century by the poet Clément Marot, in a form of his own invention known as the ‘coq-à-l’âne’.




The French literary historian Paul Zumthor has made a useful distinction between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ nonsense poetry.


In relative nonsense, each line or couplet makes sense in itself, and it is only the juxtaposition of them in the verse that is without meaning; whereas in absolute nonsense the transgressions of sense occur within the smallest units of the poetry. As the example given above makes clear, the ‘fatrasie’ was capable of thorough-going absolute nonsense. Other types of French medieval poetry exploited the techniques of relative nonsense: foremost among them was the ‘resverie’, which put together a pointless sequence of personal statements, sententious remarks or fragments of conversation.


Each statement was a distich of unequal length, linked to the next by rhyme (ab, bc, cd, etc.): this strongly suggests that the form had its origin in a dialogue-game between two poets. Thus, for example:

Nul ne doit estre jolis

S’il n’a amie.

J’aime autant crouste que mie,

Quant j’ai fain.

Tien cel cheval par le frain,

Malheüreus! …




No-one should be happy

Without a girl he loves.

I like the crust as much as the dough,

When I’m hungry.

Take this horse by the bridle,

Miserable man! …

This kind of poem seems to have been, originally, a peculiarly French phenomenon. Its most ambitious development took place on the French stage, where the writers of comic drama during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries delighted in stringing together such sequences of inconsequentialities, known as ‘menus propos’; one classic work, the Sottie des menus propos, consists quite simply of three speakers playing this game for a total of 571 lines.


But this French nonsense genre in turn gave rise to similar types of nonsense in two other countries. One was Germany, where a form of inconsequential platitude poem known as the ‘quodlibet’ grew up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It consisted, as the classic modern study by Hanns Fischer puts it, of a succession of small units, containing general statements of the obvious and ironic pieces of moral instruction, ‘the comedy of which lies above all in the inconsequentiality with which they are put together’.


Thus:

Nu hör wie gar ain tor ich bin

Ich trunck durch die wochen win

Für laster wiche wasser

Von baden wirt man nasser …




Now hear what an utter fool I am:

I drank wine for weeks;

In order to be vicious, avoid water.

Bathing makes you wetter …

The standard view, formulated by Fischer, is that the quodlibet was the overall genre, of which the Lügendichtung was a peculiar sub-species. (He therefore renamed the Lügendichtung the ‘Lügenquodlibet’.) However, the Lügendichtungen were more common than these platitude-quodlibets, of which only three instances are known.


It makes more sense, surely, to suppose that these German platitude-poems reflected an importation into Germany of the French resverie. The fact that the French version has a slightly more complicated ab, bc, cd rhyme-scheme, while the German has the simpler aa, bb, cc form (in which each unit of sense usually occupies one couplet), strongly suggests that if there were any relation between the two, it was the German version which was an adaptation of the French, and not vice-versa.

The other country which seems to have been influenced by the resverie was Italy. Two types of relative nonsense developed in Italian poetry in the fourteenth century: the ‘motto confetto’ and the ‘frottola’. Both operated by stringing together inconsequential series of remarks, the former in elegantly sententious literary language, and the latter in a much more personal and colloquial style.


The frottola never crossed the frontiers of absolute nonsense, but it did expand in its subject-matter into four large areas: the descriptive, the gnomic, the political, and the poem of personal confession.


And it attracted the interest of major poets of the fourteenth century, such as Franco Sacchetti (c.1332–1400), who were exploring various kinds of ostentatiously anti-‘poetic’ poetry – ‘burlesque’ or ‘realist’ poetry which used colloquial language and described the real conditions of the poet’s often poverty-stricken life.




It is quite possible that Sacchetti had also come across specimens of absolute-nonsense fatrasies; this cannot be proved, though it is known that French ‘jongleurs’ did visit Florence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.


Whether prompted in this way or not, Sacchetti seems to have developed what was, for Italian readers, a new form of nonsense poetry: something much more concentratedly nonsensical than any verses in the resverie-frottola tradition. His most famous poem in this style was the following:

Nasi cornuti e visi digrignati,

nibbi arzagoghi e balle di sermenti

cercavan d’Ipocrate gli argomenti

per mettere in molticcio trenta frati.

Mostrava la luna a’ tralunati,

che strusse già due cavalier godenti;

di truffa in buffa e’ venian da Sorenti

lanterne e gufi con fruson castrati.

Quando mi misi a navicar montagne

passando Commo e Bergamo e ’1 Mar rosso,

dove Ercole ed Anteo ancor ne piagne,

alor trovai a Fiesole Minosso

con pale con marroni e con castagne,

che fuor d’Abruzzi rimondava il fosso,

quando Cariodosso

gridava forte: ‘O Gian de’ Repetissi,

ritruova Bacco con l’Apocalissi’.




Horned noses, teeth-gnashing faces,

Sophistical kites and bales of vine-branches

Were seeking arguments from Hippocrates

For putting thirty friars in tanning vats.

The moon was showing itself to staring eyes;

It had already melted two pleasure-taking gentlemen;

From Truffa in Buffa and from Sorrento there came

Lanterns and owls with castrated finches.

When I began to navigate mountains

Passing Corno and Bergamo and the Red Sea,

Where Hercules and Antaeus are still weeping,

I then found Minos at Fiesole

With shovels, mattocks and chestnuts,

Cleaning up the ditch outside the Abruzzi,

When Cariodosso

Cried out loud: ‘Oh, Giovanni de’ Repetissi

Rediscovers Bacchus with the Apocalypse!’

This style of absolute nonsense was developed in a desultory way by a few other late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century poets, notably Andrea Orcagna (who died in 1424).


Later in the fifteenth century, however, it became almost a popular fashion, thanks to the talents of one highly idiosyncratic poet who took up the genre and made it his own: the Florentine Domenico di Giovanni, who was known by his nickname, ‘il Burchiello’.

Born in 1404, Burchiello developed some contacts with literary circles in Florence while plying his trade as a barber in the 1420s. He had to leave the city (either for political reasons or, more probably, because of unpaid debts) in the early 1430s; in 1439 he was imprisoned in Siena for theft and brawling. He later moved to Rome, where he resumed his trade before dying in early 1449.


In addition to his nonsense poems, he also wrote comic and satirical poetry of extraordinary vividness and verbal density. All his poems seem to have been written for the delight of his friends; they were collected only after his death (in many cases from people who had learned the verses by heart). Once his poetry began to be published in 1475, its wider popularity was assured: there were ten further editions in the fifteenth century, and eleven during the sixteenth.


Lorenzo de’ Medici kept only seven books in his bedroom: the Gospels, Boethius, a medical treatise, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Burchiello.







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