The Origins of English Nonsense. Noel Malcolm

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.

CHAPTER 2

       Fustian, bombast and satire: the stylistic preconditions of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry

      THE ‘FUSTIAN’ SPEECH performed by John Hoskyns in the winter of 1597–8 (above, pp. 9–11) belonged to a genre which formed an important part of the background to the nonsense poetry of this period. Many seventeenth-century writers would use the terms ‘nonsense’ and ‘fustian’ almost interchangeably. This may surprise the modern reader, to whom it is obvious that most instances of fustian prose have a definite sense, albeit one expressed in needlessly obscure or elaborate terms. But the association of fustian with nonsense must be taken seriously. It helps to show that in this period nonsense writing was thought of primarily in terms of a parodic stylistic exercise: to write nonsense was not to express the strangeness of unconscious thought but to engage in a highly self-conscious stylistic game. The history of fustian prose still waits to be written; a brief account can be given here.

      The phenomenon itself was older than its name. Many writers in the sixteenth century were acutely conscious of the fact that large quantities of vocabulary were being lifted out of Latin (either directly or via French) and added to the English language. A few (such as the Bible translators William Tyndale and John Cheke) deliberately resisted this trend; others welcomed the enrichment of the language, but were aware at the same time that English was acquiring new registers of ornate and lofty diction which could easily be abused. Two varieties of misuse could be distinguished: the excessively ‘aureate’ language of the would-be courtier, and the deliberate obscurity of the would-be scholar. Since both of these involved the use of cumbersome Latinate terminology, they were easily conflated into a single stylistic fault: the use of ‘inkhorn terms’. One very influential English handbook, Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (first edition 1553; revised edition 1560), put it as follows:

       The unlearned or foolish phantasticall, that smelles but of learning … will so Latin their tongues, that the simple can not but wonder at their talke, and thinke surely they speake by some revelation. I know them that thinke Rheorique to stande wholie upon darke wordes, and hee that can catch an ynke home terme by the taile, him they coumpt to be a fine Englisheman, and a good Rhetorician.¹

      To illustrate his point, Wilson printed a preposterous letter, sent (as he claimed, with tongue in cheek) by a Lincolnshire man to an acquaintance in the household of the Lord Chancellor:

       Pondering, expending, and revoluting with my selfe, your ingent affabilitie, and ingenious capacity for mundane affaires: I cannot but celebrate, & extol your magnifical dexteritie above all other. For how could you have adepted such illustrate prerogative, and dominicall superioritie, if the fecunditie of your ingenie had not been so fertile and wonderfull pregnant …²

      This still retains some power to impress the modern reader; it requires an effort of the imagination, however, to realize now just how outlandish this sounded in the mid sixteenth century, when so many of these words were newly minted.

      Wilson may not have invented this parodie genre in English, but he certainly helped to ensure its widespread popularity. By the 1590s, as we have already seen, it was standard fare at the Inns of Court revels; and it is quite certain that Hoskyns had studied Wilson’s book carefully, since some of the word-play in his own ‘fustian speech’ is taken from another section of The Arte of Rhetorique.³ But Wilson was not the only popularizer of the genre. Sir Philip Sidney, writing in the 1580s, had also given a fine specimen of it in the person of Rombus, the learned fool in his Arcadia:

       Why you brute Nebulons have you had my corpusculum so long among you, and cannot tell how to edifie an argument? Attend and throw your ears to me, for I am gravidated with child, till I have endoctrinated your plumbeous cerebrosities. First you must divisionate your point, quasi you would cut a cheese into two particles, for thus must I uniforme my speeche to your obtuse conceptions …⁴

      So popular was this passage that an allusion to ‘plumbeous cerebrosities’ became a common hallmark of later fustian speeches.

      At the time when Sidney was completing his Arcadia, English prose was experiencing a huge intensification of stylistic self-consciousness as a result of the influence of John Lyly’s Euphues. Ornate, mellifluous and elaborate, ‘Euphuistic’ prose was a nonstop succession (and superimposition) of stylistic devices,