7 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Epitaph on Coryate’
8 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Certaine Sonnets’
9 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Barbarian verses’
10 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Great Jacke-a-Lent’
11 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes from No Place’
12 MARTIN PARKER, ‘Sir Leonard Lack-wit’s speech to the Emperor of Utopia’
13 RICHARD CORBET, ‘A Non Sequitur’
14 RICHARD CORBET, ‘A mess of non-sense’
16 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘Mercurius Nonsensicus’
17 JOHN TAYLOR, ‘The Essence of Nonsence upon Sence’
18 JOHN TAYLOR AND ANON., ‘Non-sense’
20 ANON., ‘A sonnett to cover my Epistles taile peece’
21 T. W., ‘I am asham’d of Thee, ô Paracelsie’
24 T. C., ‘Thou that dwarft’st mountains into molehill sense’
25 JAMES SMITH, ‘Ad Johannuelem Leporem, Lepidissimum, Carmen Heroicum’
27 ANON., ‘Interrogativa Cantilena’
31 ANON., ‘From the top of high Caucasus’
32 ANON., ‘Cure for the Quartain Ague’
33 ANON., ‘How to get a Child without help of a Man’
34A MARTIN PARKER, ‘A Bill of Fare’
34B JOHN TAYLOR, ‘A Bill of Fare’
35 MARTIN PARKER, ‘An Excellent New Medley (i)’
36 MARTIN PARKER (?), ‘An Excellent New Medley (ii)’
37 ANON., ‘A New Merry Medley’
39 JOSEPH BROOKESBANK, ‘Monosyllables’
40 GEORGE DALGARNO, ‘Mnemonic verses’
Index of authors of the nonsense poems
Index of titles and first lines of the nonsense poems
ONE MIGHT ASSUME that the period of English literature which lies between the major works of Shakespeare and Milton was a peculiarly well-ploughed field, where little remained to be explored. Yet the purpose of this volume is to make known a genre which enjoyed real popularity in precisely that period, and which has never yet been discussed in any detail. I am not aware of a single study, not even a short article, that sets out to describe or explain the history of this minor but fascinating literary phenomenon.
It would not be true to say that the poetry itself is entirely unknown. Individual poems have been printed in anthologies such as John Broadbent’s Signet Classic Poets of the Seventeenth Century and Alastair Fowler’s New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse.1 Several of the poems printed and discussed in this volume have appeared in general nonsense anthologies, the fullest selection being provided by Hugh Haughton’s valuable Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry. But I know of no collection specifically devoted to these seventeenth-century nonsense poems.
Nor would it be fair to suggest that literary scholars have never noticed or alluded to the existence of such a genre. Some acknowledgements of the presence of this vein of nonsense writing can be found in the scholarly literature; but notices and allusions are all that they amount to. Thus Wallace Notestein, in his path-breaking study of John Taylor,