Noel Malcolm - The Origins of English Nonsense

Two years later Taylor issued the first of his two large-scale nonsense works, Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes from No Place (poem II); and in 1630 all his hitherto published nonsense poems received a much wider circulation when he published a fat volume of his collected works, which, as he proudly announced on the title-page, were ‘Sixty and three in Number’. Taylor was now a celebrity, and his nonsense poetry was one of the things that helped to make him famous. A comedy by the minor playwright Henry Glapthorne, published in 1640, includes a scene in which a master instructs his servant to buy books. ‘ John Taylor , get me his nonsense,’ he commands; to which the servant replies, “You mean all his workes sir.’ 36And three years after the republication of Sir Gregory Nonsence in Taylor’s Workes , another poet, the balladeer Martin Parker, published an explicit homage to Taylor, entitled The Legend of Sir Leonard Lack-Wit, sonne in law to Sir Gregory Nonsence. Most of this work was in nonsense prose, of a by now quite recognizable type:

The petty-foggers of Virginia set Hercules and Caucasus together by the eares, about the drinking of fryed Hartichokes. The blue bores of Islington Forrest leapt over Pancrasse Church to invade the Turkes Army in Bosworth Field: these things (with diligent negligence) were told to the Emperour of Pyramedes , who sent foure dripping pannes to tell great Tamberlaine , that London had never a Cuckold in it. 37

And so on, for all of eighteen pages. Parker’s one venture into nonsense poetry in this production (poem 12), on the other hand, illustrates the surprising difficulty of the genre: organized in rigid rhetorical patterns and constantly veering into sense, it may at least function as a tribute to Taylor by demonstrating the superiority of his own nonsense.

Another trace of Taylor’s influence can be found in a nonsense poem which can confidently be attributed to the minor poet James Smith (poem 25); first published in 1658, it was probably written in the mid 1640s. 38The mock-scholarly footnotes attached to this work place it in the tradition of academic self-parody to which the poem by John Sanford (poem 3) also belonged. But a comparison between the texts of these two poems clearly shows that, somewhere in between, the influence of Taylor’s own nonsense poetry has interposed itself. Smith’s line ‘But then an Antelope in Sable blew’ recalls Taylorian lines such as ‘With that grim Pluto all in Scarlet blue’; other lines, such as ‘And to the butter’d Flownders cry’d out, Holla ,’ or ‘And mounting straight upon a Lobsters thigh’, betray both Taylor’s habitual parodying of Marlowe (discussed below, pp. 42–4), and that gastronomic obsession with marine delicacies which characterizes so much of the nonsense poetry in the Hoskyns—Taylor tradition.

Smith’s involvement in writing nonsense poetry is significant too in the light of a recent discovery about a London literary club or coterie of the late 1620s and early 1630s, the ‘Order of the Fancy’, to which he belonged. A denunciation of Smith in a legal document of 1633 affirmed: ‘That for 4 yeares last past James Smith hath bin a Common and ordinary frequenter of tavernes alehouses playhouses, and players Companye … and he with them and others stiled themselves of the order of the fancye whose practise was to drinke excessively, and to speake non sence …’ Another witness declared: ‘That he heard James Smith say and … bragge that he was one of the Cheifest and first founders of that societye, and that he of that Company that could speake best non sence was Counted the best man, which was him selfe …’ 39The modern scholar who discovered this evidence has painstakingly reconstructed the possible membership of the ‘Order’, which probably included the playwright Philip Massinger, the poets John Mennes, Robert Herrick and William Davenant, and several other known London wits and members of the Inns of Court. 40There is thus a clear similarity (though not, it seems, a direct connection) between this group and the grouping of wits at the Mitre tavern which helped give rise to the first nonsense poem by Hoskyns. Nor is this surprising, since the self-parodic routines of nonsense poetry are characteristic products of enclosed, self-conscious institutions such as clubs. The ‘non sence’ spoken by Smith and his friends may of course have been closer to the ‘fustian’ style of Hoskyns’s nonsense speech (a style which, as we shall see, was by now becoming almost an obligatory party trick for undergraduates in at least one Oxford college) than to the concentrated nonsense poetry practised by Taylor. 41But it is quite inconceivable that any gathering of London wits and players in the 1630s could have been ignorant of John Taylor’s well-known contributions to the genre.

Thanks to his tremendous efforts at self-publicizing, Taylor was by now almost a public institution. He was famous not only for his poetry and pamphlets but also for his ‘travels’ – journeys to different parts of the British Isles, announced by prospectus in advance and described in pamphlet-form soon after their completion. Most of these had the nature of stunts, such as his much-trumpeted journey to Edinburgh and back without spending, borrowing or stealing any money on the way. One stunt, reminiscent of the famous wager-journeys of Elizabethan comedians such as Will Kemp, might almost be described as a nonsense journey: he attempted to scull from London to Queenborough (on the Isle of Sheppey, off the Kentish coast) in a brown paper boat with oars made out of salted dried fish. 42But many of Taylor’s travelogues supply valuable descriptions of ordinary English life, and two of his more entrepreneurial publications are important source-materials for modern historians: his catalogue of taverns in the Home Counties, and his directory of carrier services from all the provincial towns of England to their terminus-points at different London inns. 43

A few months after the outbreak of the Civil War Taylor was publicly accused of royalism and ‘popery’; and in early 1643 he refused to pay a parliamentary tax. Soon afterwards he fled, first to Windsor and then to Oxford (the royalist garrison town and seat of government), where he remained until 1646. 44Taylor’s own royalism was not in doubt; he wrote elegies on Charles I after his execution in 1649, and later that year was arrested for espionage and/or corresponding with the King’s friends. 45Taylor’s devotion to the Crown spurred him into another literary feud, this time against an old friend, the Puritan poet George Wither. Wither had supported the King against the Scots in 1639, but by 1642 he had gone over to the parliamentary side. When the Civil War broke out he raised his own troop of cavalry; his next book of poems, entitled Campo-Musae (1643), was written while serving in the field as a captain. 46Taylor, in one of his several pamphlets written in the form of proclamations by the Devil and ironically praising the war, referred in 1644 to ‘our dear sons Mercurius Britannicus, George Wither (the Gull’s Darling) and Booker , the Aetheriall Planeteriall learned Preterpluperfect Asse-trologian, with the rest of our English and Scottish Doves, Scoutes, Scoundrells and Lyurnall-makers’. 47In the same year he issued his Aqua-Musae: or, Cacafogo, Cacadaemon, Captain George Wither Wrung in the Withers , which concluded with a brief nonsense poem (poem 15). A final quatrain following this poem made – for the first time in Taylor’s output – a claim about the ideological significance of nonsense poetry:

And is not this rare Nonsence, prethee tell,