The Origins of English Nonsense. Noel Malcolm

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’,