The Origins of English Nonsense

I saw thre hedles playen at a ball;

On hanles man served them all;

Whyll thre mouthles men lay and low

Thre legles away hem drow.18

I saw three headless men playing ball;

One handless man served them all;

While three mouthless men lay and laughed

Three legless men drove him away.

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

Apart from these two examples, it is doubtful whether any of the small number of medieval English nonsense poems which have come down to us were known to writers of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.19 The torch of nonsense poetry seems to have been more or less extinguished in England after its brief flaming in the fifteenth century. When it was re-lit by Hoskyns in 1611, he may well have been writing under the influence of continental nonsense genres; if so, seventeenth-century English nonsense poetry was in part the final product of a more circuitous transmission, in which literary nonsense had travelled in relays from Germany, first to France, and then to Italy.

The earliest French nonsense poetry which has come down to us was written in northern France (in Artois and the Île-de-France region) during the second half of the thirteenth century. Known as ‘fatrasies’, these early poems survive in two main collections, one by the poet Philippe de Rémi, sieur de Beaumanoir (1250–96), and the other, a group of poems called ‘Les Fatrasies d’Arras’, by an unknown writer (or writers).20 One example from the latter group will give the flavour of the genre:

Vache de pourcel,

Aingnel de veël,

Brebis de malart;

Dui lait home bel

Et dui sain mesel,

Dui saiges sotart,

Dui emfant nez d’un torel

Qui chantoient de Renart,

Seur la pointe d’un coutel

Portoient Chastel Gaillart.21

Cow born of a pig,

Lamb born of a calf,

Sheep born of a duck;

Two ugly handsome men

And two healthy lepers,

Two wise idiots,

Two children born of a bull,

Who sang about Reynard,

Carried Château Gaillard

On the point of a knife.

The precise origins of this type of poetry are obscure. One modern scholar has tried to show that these poems were riddles with specific personal and political meanings.22 It is possible that they developed in connection with some kind of literary game, perhaps involving the parodying of gnomic or over-elaborate courtly poetry; this may have been the work of Philippe de Rémi, whose verses are probably earlier than those of the Arras collection.23 These French nonsense poems have a distinctive character: they lack the unifying narrative structure of the German poems, and their impossibilia are generally less visual or physical, less energetic and not so densely packed. But on the other hand the basic similarity with the German poems of the thirteenth century is inescapable. The very idea of putting together strings of impossibilia, not for their traditional rhetorical purpose but simply for the effect of comic absurdity which they produced on their own, is fundamental to both the German and the French poems, and it is very unlikely that this idea was just invented independently on two occasions, within the same century, in two neighbouring countries.24 Literary influences flowed to and fro between the French and German vernaculars throughout the Middle Ages (as the complex development of the Roman de Renart shows). The universities of northern France were frequented by large numbers of German students; one fourteenth-century German lament for the decay of Orléans University says that the sound of the German language was once so loud in the streets of Orléans that one would have thought oneself in the Fatherland.25 It is highly likely that an ingenious new style of poetry invented by German Minnesingers, even though it may have been a minor experimental genre known only through a few examples, should eventually have percolated into French poetic culture too.

As the genre developed in France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (in a slightly different verse-form, known as the ‘fatras’), it was treated simply as a form of humorous poetry, and described also as a ‘frivole’ or ‘folie’. Not all of the ‘fatras’ were nonsense poems putting together impossible collocations of ideas; such versions of the ‘fatras’ died out in the early fifteenth century.26 Nonsense poetry thus enjoyed a much shorter continuous history in France than it did in Germany. But something of the spirit of the ‘fatras’ was revived in the sixteenth century by the poet Clément Marot, in a form of his own invention known as the ‘coq-à-l’âne’.27

The French literary historian Paul Zumthor has made a useful distinction between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ nonsense poetry.28 In relative nonsense, each line or couplet makes sense in itself, and it is only the juxtaposition of them in the verse that is without meaning; whereas in absolute nonsense the transgressions of sense occur within the smallest units of the poetry. As the example given above makes clear, the ‘fatrasie’ was capable of thorough-going absolute nonsense. Other types of French medieval poetry exploited the techniques of relative nonsense: foremost among them was the ‘resverie’, which put together a pointless sequence of personal statements, sententious remarks or fragments of conversation.29 Each statement was a distich of unequal length, linked to the next by rhyme (ab, bc, cd, etc.): this strongly suggests that the form had its origin in a dialogue-game between two poets. Thus, for example:

Nul ne doit estre jolis

S’il n’a amie.

J’aime autant crouste que mie,

Quant j’ai fain.

Tien cel cheval par le frain,

Malheüreus! …30

No-one should be happy

Without a girl he loves.

I like the crust as much as the dough,

When I’m hungry.

Take this horse by the bridle,

Miserable man! …

This kind of poem seems to have been, originally, a peculiarly French phenomenon. Its most ambitious development took place on the French stage, where the writers of comic drama during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries delighted in stringing together such sequences of inconsequentialities, known as ‘menus propos’; one classic work, the Sottie des menus propos, consists quite simply of three speakers playing this game for a total of 571 lines.31 But this French nonsense genre in turn gave rise to similar types of nonsense in two other countries. One was Germany, where a form of inconsequential platitude poem known as the ‘quodlibet’ grew up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It consisted, as the classic modern study by Hanns Fischer puts it, of a succession of small units, containing general statements of the obvious and ironic pieces of moral instruction, ‘the comedy of which lies above all in the inconsequentiality with which they are put together’.32 Thus:

Nu hör wie gar ain tor ich bin

Ich trunck durch die wochen win

Für laster wiche wasser

Von baden wirt man nasser …33

Now hear what an utter fool I am:

I drank wine for weeks;

In order to be vicious, avoid water.

Bathing makes you wetter …

The standard view, formulated by Fischer, is that the quodlibet was the overall genre, of which the Lügendichtung was a peculiar sub-species. (He therefore renamed the Lügendichtung the ‘Lügenquodlibet’.) However, the Lügendichtungen were more common than these platitude-quodlibets, of which only three instances are known.34 It makes more sense, surely, to suppose that these German platitude-poems reflected an importation into Germany of the French resverie. The fact that the French version has a slightly more complicated ab, bc, cd rhyme-scheme, while the German has the simpler aa, bb, cc form (in which each unit of sense usually occupies one couplet), strongly suggests that if there were any relation between the two, it was the German version which was an adaptation of the French, and not vice-versa.

The other country which seems to have been influenced by the resverie was Italy. Two types of relative nonsense developed in Italian poetry in the fourteenth century: the ‘motto confetto’ and the ‘frottola’. Both operated by stringing together inconsequential series of remarks, the former in elegantly sententious literary language, and the latter in a much more personal and colloquial style.35 The frottola never crossed the frontiers of absolute nonsense, but it did expand in its subject-matter into four large areas: the descriptive, the gnomic, the political, and the poem of personal confession.36 And it attracted the interest of major poets of the fourteenth century, such as Franco Sacchetti (c.1332–1400), who were exploring various kinds of ostentatiously anti-‘poetic’ poetry – ‘burlesque’ or ‘realist’ poetry which used colloquial language and described the real conditions of the poet’s often poverty-stricken life.37

It is quite possible that Sacchetti had also come across specimens of absolute-nonsense fatrasies; this cannot be proved, though it is known that French ‘jongleurs’ did visit Florence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.38 Whether prompted in this way or not, Sacchetti seems to have developed what was, for Italian readers, a new form of nonsense poetry: something much more concentratedly nonsensical than any verses in the resverie-frottola tradition. His most famous poem in this style was the following:

Nasi cornuti e visi digrignati,

nibbi arzagoghi e balle di sermenti

cercavan d’Ipocrate gli argomenti

per mettere in molticcio trenta frati.

Mostrava la luna a’ tralunati,

che strusse già due cavalier godenti;

di truffa in buffa e’ venian da Sorenti

lanterne e gufi con fruson castrati.

Quando mi misi a navicar montagne

passando Commo e Bergamo e ’1 Mar rosso,

dove Ercole ed Anteo ancor ne piagne,

alor trovai a Fiesole Minosso

con pale con marroni e con castagne,

che fuor d’Abruzzi rimondava il fosso,

quando Cariodosso

gridava forte: ‘O Gian de’ Repetissi,

ritruova Bacco con l’Apocalissi’.39

Horned noses, teeth-gnashing faces,

Sophistical kites and bales of vine-branches

Were seeking arguments from Hippocrates

For putting thirty friars in tanning vats.

The moon was showing itself to staring eyes;

It had already melted two pleasure-taking gentlemen;

From Truffa in Buffa and from Sorrento there came

Lanterns and owls with castrated finches.

When I began to navigate mountains

Passing Corno and Bergamo and the Red Sea,

Where Hercules and Antaeus are still weeping,

I then found Minos at Fiesole

With shovels, mattocks and chestnuts,

Cleaning up the ditch outside the Abruzzi,

When Cariodosso

Cried out loud: ‘Oh, Giovanni de’ Repetissi

Rediscovers Bacchus with the Apocalypse!’

This style of absolute nonsense was developed in a desultory way by a few other late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century poets, notably Andrea Orcagna (who died in 1424).40 Later in the fifteenth century, however, it became almost a popular fashion, thanks to the talents of one highly idiosyncratic poet who took up the genre and made it his own: the Florentine Domenico di Giovanni, who was known by his nickname, ‘il Burchiello’.

Born in 1404, Burchiello developed some contacts with literary circles in Florence while plying his trade as a barber in the 1420s. He had to leave the city (either for political reasons or, more probably, because of unpaid debts) in the early 1430s; in 1439 he was imprisoned in Siena for theft and brawling. He later moved to Rome, where he resumed his trade before dying in early 1449.41 In addition to his nonsense poems, he also wrote comic and satirical poetry of extraordinary vividness and verbal density. All his poems seem to have been written for the delight of his friends; they were collected only after his death (in many cases from people who had learned the verses by heart). Once his poetry began to be published in 1475, its wider popularity was assured: there were ten further editions in the fifteenth century, and eleven during the sixteenth.42 Lorenzo de’ Medici kept only seven books in his bedroom: the Gospels, Boethius, a medical treatise, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Burchiello.43

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