The Origins of English Nonsense. Noel Malcolm

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СКАЧАТЬ to make the terms ‘fustian’ and ‘bombast’ almost interchangeable. This was encouraged too by another idiom, the origins of which are very obscure: ‘fustian fumes’, the special condition of the humours that prompted people to indulge in furious invective. As a speaker in Lodge and Greene’s A Looking-Glasse for London and England related, ‘At last in a great fume, as I am very cholericke, and sometimes so hotte in my fustian fumes, that no man can abide within twentie yards of me, I start up, and so bombasted the divell, that sir, he cried out and ranne away.’²³ Another work of 1600 explained: ‘Testines and furie, bee fonde effects that proceede from certaine fantasticall humours in their heades, whom wee commonly call testie 6c fustian fooles’.²⁴ It may be conjectured that this term derived not from the cloth but from an association with ‘fusty’. It may have meant the fumes given off by stale liquors which are undergoing fermentation – a process which can cause bottles (like testy fools) to explode. In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida Ulysses describes how Patroclus parodied the oratorical style of Agamemnon:

       ’Tis like a chime a-mending, with terms unsquar’d,

       Which, from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropp’d,

       Would seem hyperboles. At this fusty stuff

       The large Achilles, on his press’d bed lolling,

       From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause …²⁵

      The comparison here with the volcanic Titan of classical mythology suggests that ‘fusty’ must surely be intended here in the sense of ‘fustian fumes’, i.e. explosive bombast, rather than in the sense of ‘mouldy’ (which, the editor of the Arden text believes, ‘suits the rest of the food imagery in the play’). By the time this play was written (probably in 1602), bombast and fustian had almost fused into one.

      Some of the linguistic factors in that process have now been described: the original overlap between bombast and fustian in their use of latinate terms; the natural conflation of cloth metaphors; and the probably coincidental use of the word ‘fustian’ in ‘fustian fumes’. But the convergence between bombast and fustian can also be explained in terms of a literary development: the appropriation of elements of the Marlovian style by the satirical poet John Marston. And this in turn brings us close to the stylistic heart of seventeenth-century English nonsense. The development of nonsense poetry in the hands of its master, John Taylor, would have been unthinkable had it not been preceded by Marlowe and Marston. This is not just a matter of the models which Taylor parodied. The combination of Marston and Marlowe made possible a radical destabilizing of poetic diction; and of that resulting instability, Taylor’s nonsense poetry was both a parody and an even more radical expression.

      Marlowe’s declamatory style – above all, that of Tamburlaine – made a huge impression on his contemporaries. It was highly rhetorical; but the rhetoric was of a different kind from that employed by earlier English tragedians. In his use of blank verse, Marlowe not only dispensed with the end-stopping of rhymed couplets, but also turned away from the enclosed pattern-making rhetorical devices which that end-stopping had encouraged: devices of alliteration and word-symmetry within the line or the couplet. Instead, his rhetoric depended much more on the nature of the diction he employed. This, together with the motoric force which blank verse made possible (with the play of declamatory speech-rhythms against the metre), created effects which could best be placed in the category of ‘energy’ rather than that of ‘order’. One modern analysis, by Alvin Kernan, of the Marlovian grand style singles out the following seven characteristics, the majority of which are peculiarities of diction:

       (1) the steady, heavy beat of ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ … (2) the consistent use of present participles for adjectives – ‘shining’ for ‘bright’, ‘rising’ for ‘high’ – expressing a mind always in movement and always aspiring; (3)frequent appearance of such ‘rising’ words as ‘soar’, ‘mount’ and ‘climb’; (4) persistence of the rhetorical figure Hyperbole, conveying a constant striving for a condition beyond any known in this world … (5)parataxis, the joining together of several phrases and clauses by ‘and’ – and … and … and – to create a sense of endless ongoing, of constant reaching; (6)the use of the privative suffix in words which state limits – ‘topless’, ‘quenchless’, ‘endless’; (7)frequent use of ringing popular names and exotic geographical places to realise the sensed wideness, brightness and richness of the world.²⁶

      Readers of John Taylor’s nonsense verse will recognize many of these characteristics in it. The steady onward movement of Marlowe’s mighty line is the least obvious of these in Taylor’s verses, whose movement tends to be more steady than onward. For most of his nonsense poems he could not resist the comic-doggerel potentialities of rhyme; and in any case the fragmentation of sense in such writing was not conducive to large-scale cumulative effects. (Hence also the general lack of cumulative ‘and … and’ parataxis in these verses.) Taylor first made use of blank verse for his nonsense writing in Jack a Lent: here the diction is certainly Marlovian, but the rhythmical effects are undistinguished and the thinking still comes in couplets:

       Great Jacke-a-Lent, clad in a Robe of Ayre,

       Threw mountaines higher then Alcides beard:

       Whilst Pancradge Church, arm’d with a Samphier blade,

       Began to reason of the businesse thus:

       You squandring Troglodites of Amsterdam,

       How long shall Cerberus a Tapster be?

      ‘You squandring Troglodites of Amsterdam’ is, however, a piece of pure mock-Marlowe, with a participial adjective, an exotic term and a resonant place-name, all wrapped up in the declamatory vocative. The most sustained piece of Marlovian nonsense achieved by Taylor was in the opening section of Sir Gregory Nonsence his Newes from No Place (poem II); and there the management of large-scale syntactical structure through whole paragraphs of verse is much more assured, with the rhythmical character of the poetry also gaining in the process.

      But it was Marlowe’s diction that Taylor imitated most closely. Grandiose participial adjectives recur in his six sonnets in praise of Coryate: ‘Conglomerating Ajax, in a fogge’; ‘And with conglutinating haughty pride’; ‘Whilst thunder-thwacking Ossa limps and halts’. These sonnets also exhibit the ‘rising’ syndrome (‘’gan to swell’; ‘leaps and vaults’), as does the opening section of The Essence of Nonsence upon Sence (poem 17):

       Then mounted on a Windmill presently

       To Dunstable in Derbyshire I’le flie …

       From thence I’le soare to silver Cynthia’s lap,

       And with Endimion take a nine years nap …

      As for hyperbole, one of the most essential techniques of this type of nonsense poetry is to out-hyperbolize hyperbole, doing to hyperbole what hyperbole itself does to ordinary speech. The privative suffix does not play a prominent part in these poems, but exotic geographical (and classical) names are omnipresent:

       Then shall the Perecranians of the East …

       All knuckle deep in Paphlagonian Sands,

       Inhabite Transylvanian Netherlands …

      And one other stylistic tic of Marlowe’s poetry (not mentioned by Kernan) is also picked up by Taylor: the citing of large numbers. Where Marlowe had written

       My lord, the great commander of the world,

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