The Origins of English Nonsense

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.’7

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.8 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 …9

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 …10

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.11 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’.12 He obliged with a speech which was a classic example of the ‘fustian’ style of parodic prose.13 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’.14 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.15

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.’16 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.17 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.18

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’.19 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.’20 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.21

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 …22

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.23 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.24 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.)25 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 …26

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.27 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.28

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.’29 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).30 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 …31

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.’32 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.33

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 …34

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 …35