The Origins of English Nonsense. Noel Malcolm

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ uses precisely that kind of category-mistake (applying a logical method to a physical object) which was to become one of the standard building-blocks of nonsense literature.

      In 1604 Hoskyns was elected a Member of Parliament for the city of Hereford. During the years in which this parliament sat (until 1611) he must have spent much of his time in London. ‘His great witt quickly made him be taken notice of’, writes Aubrey: ‘In shorte, his acquaintance were all the witts then about the towne.’¹⁶ A jocular Latin poem survives about a ‘convivium philosophicum’ (philosophical banquet) held at the Mitre tavern in London, probably in 1611. It lists fourteen individuals as participants, including Hoskyns, Richard Martin, John Donne, Christopher Brooke (a close friend of Donne and a known friend of Hoskyns) and the suddenly famous travel-writer, Thomas Coryate.¹⁷ This group of wits formed the nucleus of the original ‘Mermaid Club’, which romanticizing literary historians were later to populate with Raleigh, Shakespeare and other poets and dramatists. The only definite contemporary reference to any such club comes in one of Coryate’s letters from India, which is addressed to ‘the High Seneschall of the Right Worshipfull Fraternitie of Sirenaical Gentlemen, that meet the first Fridaie of every month at the signe of the Mere-Maide in Bread-streete in London’. In a postscript to this letter Coryate asked to be remembered to a number of writers and wits, including Jonson, Donne, Christopher Brooke, Richard Martin, William Hakewill (a member, like Brooke, of Lincoln’s Inn) and John Hoskyns.¹⁸

      Coryate himself appears to have played a strangely central part in this group – strangely, that is, because he was its least typical member, being neither a lawyer nor a poet. He was born in the Somerset village of Odcombe, where his father was rector of the parish. He studied at Oxford and acquired a considerable amount of classical learning, but seems never to have contemplated a university or church career. Instead, he was briefly employed in the household of the young Prince Henry, where his position ‘seems to have been that of an unofficial court jester’.¹⁹ Then, in May 1608, he began the first of the two adventures which were to ensure his fame: he sailed to Calais and travelled, mainly on foot, through France and northern Italy to Venice, returning via Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. On his return to London in October he began converting the copious travel-notes he had taken into a long, continuous narrative, which, thanks to ‘the importunity of some of my deare friends who prevailed with me for the divulging of the same’, he decided to publish. 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,

       СКАЧАТЬ