Читать книгу The Origins of English Nonsense - Noel Malcolm - Страница 12
ОглавлениеA 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:
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
