Fontana Press
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Published by Fontana Press 1998
First published by HarperCollins Publishers 1997
Copyright C Noel Malcolm 1997
Noel Malcolm asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Source ISBN: 9780006388449
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007483099
Version: 2016-03-22
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From the reviews of The Origins of English Nonsense:
‘In this most original study, Noel Malcolm has discovered the first stirrings of English nonsense … it is a work of some wit, and itself tends towards parody of more solemn studies. Malcolm’s book has all the elaborate paraphernalia of scholarship, complete with learned footnotes and a lengthy bibliography designed to promote the cause of nonsense. This book is as rare, then as hedgehog’s feathers or baskets of water.’
PETER ACKROYD, The Times
‘Brilliant scholar, political journalist, an expert both on Bosnia and Thomas Hobbes, Noel Malcolm is a sort of Renaissance man himself: far-ranging in the scope of his learning, rational, elitist, impervious to the claims of political correctness or trendy jargon. His prose has a satirical edge which is a continual intellectual challenge, if not always warmly sympathetic; his quirky facts are extraordinary; and he has produced an elegant, enjoyable book which is a real contribution to literary history.’
JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER, Financial Times
‘Never happier than when he is writing against the grain of received opinion, Noel Malcolm takes full delight in making a coterie cult of poems which more solemn scholars have dismissed as irrelevant doodlings. Malcolm’s immensely erudite introduction, which explains the vogue for nonsense poetry at the turn of the seventeenth-century and traces its origins in Classical and European literature, measures its tone perfectly, managing to sound as serious and at the same time as frivolous as much of the best verse in the anthology … Malcolm’s book is a delight, in which he recovers something genuinely rich and strange about our poetic ancestors. If the best history compels our attention by making the past not more but less familiar, The Origins of English Nonsense succeeds.’
MARK ARCHER, Spectator
For Euthymia,
and in memory of her father,
John
Estrangement
Se fet mun quer dolent,
Quant me purpens,
Que jo ai gaste mun tens
Sanz rimer de aucun sens
The poet ‘Richard’, in E. M. Stengel (ed.) Codicem manu scriptum Digby 86 in bibliotheca bodleiana asservatum (Halle, 1871), p. 118
Nonsense (when all is said and done) is still nonsense. But the study of nonsense, that is science.
Saul Lieberman, introducing Gershom Scholem’s lectures on the Cabbala: quoted in S. Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995), p. 134
CONTENTS
The origins and development of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry
A short history of nonsense poetry in medieval and Renaissance Europe
The sources and resources of nonsense: literary conventions, parodic forms and related genres
1 JOHN HOSKYNS, ‘Cabalistical Verses’
2 HENRY PEACHAM, ‘In the Utopian tongue’
3 JOHN SANFORD, ‘Punctures and Junctures of Coryate’
4 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Cabalistical, or Horse verse’
5 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Poem in the Utopian Tongue’