The Origins of English Nonsense

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 …6

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.7

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…’8 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’.9 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 …10

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’.11 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’.12 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?’13 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’.14 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.15

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.16 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.17 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 …18

(‘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’.19 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).20 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.’21 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.)22

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.’23 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’.24 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 …25

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.26

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 …27

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 Mares28

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.29

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’),30 rhetorical questions (‘Nay, shall a trencher slave extenuate, / Some Lucrece rape? and straight magnificate / Lewd Jovian lust?’),31 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?32

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’).33 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’),34 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.35

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.