The Origins of English Nonsense

Noel Malcolm

• Publisher: Fontana Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780006388449
• eBook ISBN: 9780007483099
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A major rediscovery and reevaluation of a lost strand of English literature from one of today’s most brilliant scholars.

CHAPTER 1

The origins and development of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry

THERE ARE TWO COMMON BELIEFS about the literary genre of nonsense poetry in England, and both of them are false. The first holds that nonsense poetry was the exclusive product of the nineteenth century, more or less the creation of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. ‘Considered as a genre’, argues a recent study by a specialist in this field, ‘we cannot, indeed, trace the origins of nonsense literature beyond the nineteenth century, when it first appeared in Victorian England.’¹ Another modern writer has argued in all seriousness that nonsense poetry began in 1846 and ended in 1898, after which date ‘it can no longer exist’.² The second common belief about this genre is that nonsense is not so much a cultural-historical product as a timeless, universal category, which therefore has only instances rather than origins. This was the view of some of the earliest modern writers on nonsense literature, G. K. Chesterton and Émile Cammaerts, and it seems to be implied by those modern studies of nonsense which explore its dependence on formal procedures of inversion, repetition, serialization, circularity and simultaneity.³

That those procedures in themselves are universal, to be found in the literature and folklore of different cultures from various times and places, is clear. They can be found too in English popular writing and folk materials: drinking songs, humorous ballads, folktales, nursery rhymes, and so on. But full-scale nonsense poetry as an English literary phenomenon is not a timeless thing, springing up here, there and everywhere of its own accord; still less is it something that wells up from folk culture. It is, rather, a literary genre with a particular history or histories, developed by individual poets and possessing a peculiarly close relationship – largely a parodic one – to the ‘high’ literary conventions of its day. After a brief flowering in the late Middle Ages (discussed in Chapter 3 of this Introduction), literary nonsense poetry in England was re-invented in the early seventeenth century. It then enjoyed an extraordinary vogue for more than fifty years, and was still being printed in the popular ‘drolleries’ of the Restoration period. This efflorescence was due partly to the stylistic conditions of English declamatory poetry in the early seventeenth century (discussed in Chapter 2 of this Introduction), which were so ideally suited to nonsensification. But the success of high literary nonsense poetry in this period was due above all to the skills and energies of the individual poets who created and developed the genre. As it happens, it is possible to attribute the origins of this genre to one poet in particular, and to explain how, when and why he created it. The literary nonsense poetry of the seventeenth century was invented by a lawyer, rhetorician, minor poet and wit, Sir John Hoskyns, in 1611. Since this fact has never been properly recognized hitherto, it is worth setting out in some detail the story of how nonsense poetry sprang, almost fully armed, out of Hoskyns’s head into the English literary world.

John Hoskyns was born in 1566, to a humble family of Welsh origins living in the Herefordshire village of Mounckton or Monnington.⁴ He was sent to Winchester College, where he displayed a prodigious memory as well as a special talent for Latin verse composition; at Winchester he was, in John Aubrey’s words, ‘the flower of his time’. His friends and contemporaries there included several who later became well-known poets and littérateurs: John Davies (also from Herefordshire), Henry Wotton, the epigrammatist John Owen, and the poet Thomas Bastard. With Wotton and Owen he went on to New College, Oxford, where he matriculated in early 1585. He proceeded BA in 1588 and MA in 1592; but at the ‘Act’ (the degree-giving ceremony) on that latter occasion he caused serious offence to the University authorities. He had been chosen to perform at the ‘Act’ as Terrae filius, the mock-orator whose role it was to make a humorous speech which might contain topical and personal allusions in a satirical vein. These traditionally elaborate and boisterous rhetorical performances, like much of the material in the comic University dramas of the period (the Cambridge Parnassus plays being the best known), cultivated parodic routines and in-jokes. But Hoskyns carried the joke too far, to the point where its humour was no longer apparent. One modern biographer has ingeniously reconstructed his offence, suggesting that his declamation satirized the recently deceased Chancellor of Oxford University, Sir Christopher Hatton.⁵ The punishment was severe: as Aubrey later put it, ‘he was so bitterly satyricall that he was expelled and putt to his shifts’.⁶

After a brief period as a schoolmaster in Somerset, Hoskyns travelled to London in early 1593 and was admitted as a student of the law at one of the Inns of Court, the Middle Temple. He may have been persuaded to take this step by his friend John Davies, who had been at the Middle Temple since 1588. The Inns of Court (Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple) formed a kind of legal counterpart to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; many sons of merchants and country gentry studied there, not in order to become professional lawyers, but merely to acquire a grounding in legal procedures which would see them through the innumerable lawsuits of their adult lives. But with so many connections between the lawyers, the parliamentarians and the court wits, the Inns of Court also formed the basis of much of the literary culture of London during this period. Not only did they produce lawyers with wide-ranging intellectual and literary interests (such as Francis Bacon and John Selden); but also whole coteries of poets and writers were fostered within their walls. Hoskyns and Davies were later joined at the Middle Temple by their old friend Henry Wotton, the poet and dramatist John Marston, the minor poet Charles Best, and the ‘character’-writer Thomas Overbury. Thomas Campion was at Gray’s Inn during this period, and John Donne was at Lincoln’s Inn. One modern critic has described Donne’s works of the 1590s as products of ‘a typical Inns of Court poet’, characterizing them as follows: ‘In his verse epistles occur many instances of his recondite learning and startling wit, but the tone is always that of an easy intimacy, of someone speaking to an audience of equals; often he appears to be improvising entertainment for their amusement.’⁷

The Inns were famous for their elaborate Christmas revels, whole sequences of speeches, mock-trials, comic plays, processions, banquets and dances, which extended through December and January. A leader of the revels was chosen before Christmas; he was given the title of ‘Prince d’Amour’ at the Middle Temple and ‘Prince of Purpoole’ at Gray’s Inn (after the parish in which the Inn was situated). He would appoint members of his princely ‘court’, and organize and preside over the revels; on Candlemas night (2 February) the Prince would die, and a final banquet would be held. Fortunately, texts survive from the Gray’s Inn revels of 1594–5 (Gesta Grayorum, first published in 1688), and from the Middle Temple revels of 1597–8 (Le Prince d’Amour, published in 1660), giving us the full flavour of these performances.⁸ The Gray’s Inn materials consist mainly of mock-edicts issued by the Prince of Purpoole, and mock-correspondence between him and the Russian Tsar. The edicts indicate the kind of legal-parodic word-play which was the staple of Inns of Court humour; one announcement excuses all those within the Prince’s domains of

all manner of Treasons, Contempts, Offences, Trespasses, Forcible Entries, Intrusions, Disseisins, Torts, Wrongs, Injustices, Over-throws, Over-thwartings, Cross-bitings, Coney-catchings, Frauds, Conclusions, Fictions, Fractions, Fashions, Fancies, or Ostentations:… All Destructions, Obstructions and Constructions: All Evasions, Invasions, Charges, Surcharges, Discharges, Commands, Countermands, Checks, Counter-checks and Counter-buffs: … All, and all manner of Mis-feasance, Nonfeasance, or too much Feasance …⁹

And the flourish of seigneurial titles with which the Prince begins each document strikes a typically mock-heroic note, with its conjuncture of aristocratic style and bathetic London place-names:

Henry Prince of Purpoole, Arch-Duke of Stapulia and Bernardia, Duke of High and Nether Holborn, Marquis of St. Giles’s and Tottenham, Count Palatine of Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell, Great Lord of the Canton of Islington, Kentish-Town, Paddington and Knights-bridge, Knight of the most Heroical order of the Helmet, and Sovereign of the same …¹⁰

The surviving text of the Middle Temple revels of 1597–8 is a similar affair, centring on a mock-trial before a grand jury. One of the speeches is attributed in two manuscript versions to Hoskyns; in the printed version its speaker is described as ‘Clerk of the Council’ to the Prince d’Amour – in other words, one of the senior figures chosen to help organize the revels by the Prince, who on this occasion was Hoskyns’s friend Richard Martin.¹¹ The same qualities of verbal dexterity which had qualified Hoskyns to be Terrae filius at Oxford must also have distinguished him at the Middle Temple; but this time he employed that talent not in biting satire but in something altogether more harmless and fantastical. After a speech by the Prince’s ‘Orator’, Charles Best, Hoskyns was (according to one of the manuscript sources) ‘importuned by ye Prince & Sr Walter Raleigh’.¹² He obliged with a speech which was a classic example of the ‘fustian’ style of parodic prose.¹³ The reputation of this speech lived on long after its author’s death. When compiling his notes on Hoskyns in the 1680s or 1690s, John Aubrey jotted down: ‘Memorandum: – Hoskyns – to collect his nonsense discourse, which is very good’.¹⁴ The speech is not in any strict sense ‘nonsense’, but it is so important as a preliminary to Hoskyns’s invention of English nonsense poetry that it is reproduced here in full:

Then (Mr. Orator) I am sorry that for your Tufftaffata Speech, you shall receive but a Fustian Answer. For alas! what am I (whose ears have been pasted with the Tenacity of your Speeches, and whose nose hath been perfumed with the Aromaticity of your sentences) that I should answer your Oration, both Voluminous and Topical, with a Replication concise and curtal? For you are able in Troops of Tropes, and Centuries of Sentences to muster your meaning: Nay, you have such Wood-piles of words, that unto you Cooper is but a Carpenter, and Rider himself deserves not a Reader. I am therefore driven to say to you, as Heliogabalus said to his dear and honourable servant Reniger Fogassa, If thou dost ill (quoth he) then much good do thee; if well, then snuffe the candle. For even as the Snow advanced upon the points vertical of cacuminous Mountains, dissolveth and discoagulateth itself into humorous liquidity, even so by the frothy volubility of your words, the Prince is perswaded to depose himself from his Royal Seat and Dignity, and to follow your counsel with all contradiction and reluctation; wherefore I take you to be fitter to speak unto stones, like Amphion, or trees, like Orpheus, than to declaim to men like a Cryer, or to exclaim to boyes like a Sexton: For what said Silas Titus, the Sope-maker of Holborn-bridge? For (quoth he) since the States of Europe have so many momentary inclinations, and the Anarchical confusion of their Dominions is like to ruinate their Subversions, I see no reason why men should so addict themselves to take Tabacco in Ramus Method; For let us examine the Complots of Polititians from the beginning of the world to this day; What was the cause of the repentine mutiny in Scipio’s Camp? it is most evident it was not Tabacco. What was the cause of the Aventine revolt,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The origins and development of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry
• Chapter 2: Fustian, bombast and satire: the stylistic preconditions of English seventeenth-century nonsense poetry
• Chapter 3: A short history of nonsense poetry in medieval and Renaissance Europe
• Chapter 4: The sources and resources of nonsense: literary conventions, parodic forms and related genres
• Poems
• Footnotes
• Notes, Bibliography, Indices
• About the Author
• Also by Noel Malcolm
• Credits
• About the Publisher