The Origins of English Nonsense

No; teach thy incubus to poeticize;

And throw abroad thy spurious snotteries …36

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.37 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’.38

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 …39

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’.40 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.41

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.42 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,43 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’,44 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.45 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’.46 The comic fragmentation of sense could hardly go any further than that.

CHAPTER 3

A short history of nonsense poetry in medieval and Renaissance Europe

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.1

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.2

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.3

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.4 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.5

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).6 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.7 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.8

The ‘Lügendichtung’ genre of German nonsense poetry enjoyed a long life; but its high point was undoubtedly reached in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.9 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.10 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 …11

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 …12

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 …13

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 …14

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.’)15 Humorous-miraculous narratives were not unknown either, the most famous being the early fourteenth-century poem ‘The Land of Cockaygne’.16 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’.17 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: