eye be diametarily fixt upon my right heele, with quasi vestigias nostras insistere.
Clown God forgive me, he speakes Dutch fustian.
There are several possible levels of allusion here. Wagner was himself ‘Dutch’ (high Dutch, i.e. German). German fustian was the coarsest and cheapest of all the commonly imported varieties: so substituting ‘Dutch fustian’ for velvet would be the height of false pretension.17 It is also conceivable that some word-play on ‘Faustian’ was intended.
The use of cloth-metaphors for speech features prominently in another play, written probably in 1593–4: Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost. Here it the poetical wooer Berowne finally abjures
Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-pil’d hyperboles, spruce affection,
Figures pedantical
and declares:
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes …18
(‘Three-pil’d’ refers to the deepest-piled variety of plush velvet; ‘spruce’ is used in its ordinary sense of ‘neat’ or ‘dapper’, as applied to dress; and ‘affection’ here means ‘affectation’.) Taffeta was a fine material made of glossy silk, worn by the ostentatious and the fashion-conscious: in Thomas Overbury’s ‘character’ of ‘an Innes of Court man’ we read that ‘His very essence he placeth in his outside, and his chiefest praier is, that his revenues may hold out for taffeta cloakes in the summer, and velvet in the winter’.19 Shakespeare varies the metaphor according to the type of language: shimmering cloths for fine, poetic or courtly speech, and soft plush fabric for hyperbole (where the metaphor, as with ‘bombast’, works on tactile or three-dimensional, rather than visual, qualities).20 The metaphor of ‘taffeta’ here operates in a quite different way from that of ‘fustian’: it is meant as a genuinely pretty and luxurious material.
‘Tuft-taffeta’ or ‘tufftaffeta’, however, brought further implications into play. This was a ‘tufted’ variety of the material, which meant that it was woven with raised stripes or spots. ‘These stripes, upon being cut, left a pile like velvet, and, since the tufted parts were always a different colour from the ground, beautiful colour combinations were possible.’21 Tufftaffeta could also appear to change its colour, according to the angle at which it was viewed or the way in which it was brushed. The mixture of colours could be associated, in the metaphor, with a mixture of different meanings. (‘Motley’ was similarly used as a metaphor for absurd speech: this was not the parti-coloured fool’s costume we now associate with the term, but a variegated cloth made from different colours of wool.)22
When Hoskyns made his ‘fustian’ oration at Christmas 1597 he began with the apology: ‘I am sorry that for your Tufftaffeta Speech, you shall receive but a Fustian Answer.’ Since the tufftaffeta speech itself does not survive, we cannot tell whether he was alluding to any difference in style, or merely playing on the fact that fustian was the cheaper material. Already, any original distinctions between terms such as ‘fustian’, ‘taffeta’ and ‘bombast’ had begun to break down. Earlier that year, Shakespeare had written the scene in Henry IV Part Two where Doll Tearsheet complains of Pistol, who has been declaiming mangled passages from Marlowe: ‘I cannot endure such a fustian rascal’ (II. iv. 184).
The association of Marlovian poetic oratory with fustian was a powerful one, and it helped 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