The Origins of English Nonsense

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.’36 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.37

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.38 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 …’39 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.40 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.41 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.42 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.43

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 1646.44 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.45 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.46 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 and Scottish Doves, Scoutes, Scoundrells and Lyurnall-makers’.47 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.48

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.49

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 …50

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.51 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’.52 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).53 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.54 (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.55

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’.56 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’.57 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

Fustian, bombast and satire: the stylistic preconditions of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry

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.1

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 …2

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.3 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 …4

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 …5

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: