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CHAPTER 1

The origins and development of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry

THERE ARE TWO COMMON BELIEFS about the literary genre of nonsense poetry in England, and both of them are false. The first holds that nonsense poetry was the exclusive product of the nineteenth century, more or less the creation of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. ‘Considered as a genre’, argues a recent study by a specialist in this field, ‘we cannot, indeed, trace the origins of nonsense literature beyond the nineteenth century, when it first appeared in Victorian England.’¹ Another modern writer has argued in all seriousness that nonsense poetry began in 1846 and ended in 1898, after which date ‘it can no longer exist’.² The second common belief about this genre is that nonsense is not so much a cultural-historical product as a timeless, universal category, which therefore has only instances rather than origins. This was the view of some of the earliest modern writers on nonsense literature, G. K. Chesterton and Émile Cammaerts, and it seems to be implied by those modern studies of nonsense which explore its dependence on formal procedures of inversion, repetition, serialization, circularity and simultaneity.³

That those procedures in themselves are universal, to be found in the literature and folklore of different cultures from various times and places, is clear. They can be found too in English popular writing and folk materials: drinking songs, humorous ballads, folktales, nursery rhymes, and so on. But full-scale nonsense poetry as an English literary phenomenon is not a timeless thing, springing up here, there and everywhere of its own accord; still less is it something that wells up from folk culture. It is, rather, a literary genre with a particular history or histories, developed by individual poets and possessing a peculiarly close relationship – largely a parodic one – to the ‘high’ literary conventions of its day. After a brief flowering in the late Middle Ages (discussed in Chapter 3 of this Introduction), literary nonsense poetry in England was re-invented in the early seventeenth century. It then enjoyed an extraordinary vogue for more than fifty years, and was still being printed in the popular ‘drolleries’ of the Restoration period. This efflorescence was due partly to the stylistic conditions of English declamatory poetry in the early seventeenth century (discussed in Chapter 2 of this Introduction), which were so ideally suited to nonsensification. But the success of high literary nonsense poetry in this period was due above all to the skills and energies of the individual poets who created and developed the genre. As it happens, it is possible to attribute the origins of this genre to one poet in particular, and to explain how, when and why he created it. The literary nonsense poetry of the seventeenth century was invented by a lawyer, rhetorician, minor poet and wit, Sir John Hoskyns, in 1611. Since this fact has never been properly recognized hitherto, it is worth setting out in some detail the story of how nonsense poetry sprang, almost fully armed, out of Hoskyns’s head into the English literary world.

John Hoskyns was born in 1566, to a humble family of Welsh origins living in the Herefordshire village of Mounckton or Monnington.⁴ He was sent to Winchester College, where he displayed a prodigious memory as well as a special talent for Latin verse composition; at Winchester he was, in John Aubrey’s words, ‘the flower of his time’. His friends and contemporaries there included several who later became well-known poets and littérateurs: John Davies (also from Herefordshire), Henry Wotton, the epigrammatist John Owen, and the poet Thomas Bastard. With Wotton and Owen he went on to New College, Oxford, where he matriculated in early 1585. He proceeded BA in 1588 and MA in 1592; but at the ‘Act’ (the degree-giving ceremony) on that latter occasion he caused serious offence to the University authorities. He had been chosen to perform at the ‘Act’ as Terrae filius, the mock-orator whose role it was to make a humorous speech which might contain topical and personal allusions in a satirical vein. These traditionally elaborate and boisterous rhetorical performances, like much of the material in the comic University dramas of the period (the Cambridge Parnassus plays being the best known), cultivated parodic routines and in-jokes. But Hoskyns carried the joke too far, to the point where its humour was no longer apparent. One modern biographer has ingeniously reconstructed his offence, suggesting that his declamation satirized the recently deceased Chancellor of Oxford University, Sir Christopher Hatton.⁵ The punishment was severe: as Aubrey later put it, ‘he was so bitterly satyricall that he was expelled and putt to his shifts’.⁶

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

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.