The Origins of English Nonsense. Noel Malcolm
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, and seditious deprecation for a Tribune? it is apparent it was not Tabacco. What moved me to address this Expostulation to your iniquity? it is plain it is not Tabacco. So that to conclude, Tabacco is not guilty of so many faults as it is charged withal; it disuniteth not the reconciled, nor reconcileth the disunited; it builds no new Cities, nor mends no old Breeches; yet the one, the other, and both are not immortal without reparations: Therefore wisely said the merry-conceited Poet Heraclitus, Honourable misfortunes shall have ever an Historical compensation. You listen unto my speeches, I must needs confess it; you hearken to my words, I cannot deny it; you look for some meaning, I partly believe it; but you find none, I do not greatly respect it: For even as a Mill-horse is not a Horse-mill; nor Drink ere you go, is not Go ere you drink; even so Orator Best, is not the best Orator. The sum of all is this, I am an humble Suitor to your Excellency, not only to free him from the danger of the Tower, which he by his demerits cannot avoid; but also to increase dignity upon his head, and multiply honour upon his shoulders, as well for his Eloquence, as for his Nobility. For I understand by your Herald that he is descended from an Ancient house of the Romans, even from Calpurnius Bestia, and so the generation continued from beast to beast, to this present beast. And your Astronomer hath told me that he hath Kindred in the Zodiack; therefore in all humility I do beseeche your Excellency to grant your Royal Warrant to the Lo. Marshal, and charge him to send to the Captain of the Pentioners, that he might send to the Captain of the Guard to dispatch a Messenger to the Lieutenant of the Tower, to command one of his Guards to go to one of the Grooms of the Stable, to fetch the Beadle of the Beggars, ut gignant stultum, to get him a stool; ut sis foris Eloquentiae, that he may sit for his Eloquence. I think I have most oratoriously insinuated unto your apprehension, and without evident obscurity intimated unto your good consideration, that the Prince hath heard your Oration, yea marry hath he, and thinketh very well of it, yea marry doth he.15
The generic relation of this sort of prose to nonsense literature is obvious: it plays on a contradiction between form and content, the form being that of an oration arguing strenuously about high matters, and the content being perversely inconsequential. But most of the sentences or phrases in this composition are not in themselves nonsensical; they merely use a tightly packed succession of comic devices such as stilted diction, bathos, puns and exaggerated intensification. Here and there, however, one sees touches of a more radically nonsensical sensibility: the phrase ‘to take Tabacco in Ramus Method’, for instance, 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,