The Origins of English Nonsense. Noel Malcolm

Take this horse by the bridle,

       Miserable man! …

      This kind of poem seems to have been, originally, a peculiarly French phenomenon. Its most ambitious development took place on the French stage, where the writers of comic drama during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries delighted in stringing together such sequences of inconsequentialities, known as ‘menus propos’; one classic work, the Sottie des menus propos, consists quite simply of three speakers playing this game for a total of 571 lines.³¹ But this French nonsense genre in turn gave rise to similar types of nonsense in two other countries. One was Germany, where a form of inconsequential platitude poem known as the ‘quodlibet’ grew up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It consisted, as the classic modern study by Hanns Fischer puts it, of a succession of small units, containing general statements of the obvious and ironic pieces of moral instruction, ‘the comedy of which lies above all in the inconsequentiality with which they are put together’.³² Thus:

       Nu hör wie gar ain tor ich bin

       Ich trunck durch die wochen win

       Für laster wiche wasser

       Von baden wirt man nasser …³³

       Now hear what an utter fool I am:

       I drank wine for weeks;

       In order to be vicious, avoid water.

       Bathing makes you wetter …

      The standard view, formulated by Fischer, is that the quodlibet was the overall genre, of which the Lügendichtung was a peculiar sub-species. (He therefore renamed the Lügendichtung the ‘Lügenquodlibet’.) However, the Lügendichtungen were more common than these platitude-quodlibets, of which only three instances are known.³⁴ It makes more sense, surely, to suppose that these German platitude-poems reflected an importation into Germany of the French resverie. The fact that the French version has a slightly more complicated ab, bc, cd rhyme-scheme, while the German has the simpler aa, bb, cc form (in which each unit of sense usually occupies one couplet), strongly suggests that if there were any relation between the two, it was the German version which was an adaptation of the French, and not vice-versa.

      The other country which seems to have been influenced by the resverie was Italy. Two types of relative nonsense developed in Italian poetry in the fourteenth century: the ‘motto confetto’ and the ‘frottola’. Both operated by stringing together inconsequential series of remarks, the former in elegantly sententious literary language, and the latter in a much more personal and colloquial style.³⁵ The frottola never crossed the frontiers of absolute nonsense, but it did expand in its subject-matter into four large areas: the descriptive, the gnomic, the political, and the poem of personal confession.³⁶ And it attracted the interest of major poets of the fourteenth century, such as Franco Sacchetti (c.1332–1400), who were exploring various kinds of ostentatiously anti-‘poetic’ poetry – ‘burlesque’ or ‘realist’ poetry which used colloquial language and described the real conditions of the poet’s often poverty-stricken life.³⁷

      It is quite possible that Sacchetti had also come across specimens of absolute-nonsense fatrasies; this cannot be proved, though it is known that French ‘jongleurs’ did visit Florence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.³⁸ Whether prompted in this way or not, Sacchetti seems to have developed what was, for Italian readers, a new form of nonsense poetry: something much more concentratedly nonsensical than any verses in the resverie-frottola tradition. His most famous poem in this style was the following:

       Nasi cornuti e visi digrignati,

       nibbi arzagoghi e balle di sermenti

       cercavan d’Ipocrate gli argomenti

       per mettere in molticcio trenta frati.

       Mostrava la luna a’ tralunati,

       che strusse già due cavalier godenti;

       di truffa in buffa e’ venian da Sorenti

       lanterne e gufi con fruson castrati.

       Quando mi misi a navicar montagne

       passando Commo e Bergamo e ’1 Mar rosso,

       dove Ercole ed Anteo ancor ne piagne,

       alor trovai a Fiesole Minosso

       con pale con marroni e con castagne,

       che fuor d’Abruzzi rimondava il fosso,

       quando Cariodosso

       gridava forte: ‘O Gian de’ Repetissi,

       ritruova Bacco con l’Apocalissi’.³⁹

       Horned noses, teeth-gnashing faces,

       Sophistical kites and bales of vine-branches

       Were seeking arguments from Hippocrates

       For putting thirty friars in tanning vats.

       The moon was showing itself to staring eyes;

       It had already melted two pleasure-taking gentlemen;

       From Truffa in Buffa and from Sorrento there came

       Lanterns and owls with castrated finches.

       When I began to navigate mountains

       Passing Corno and Bergamo and the Red Sea,

       Where Hercules and Antaeus are still weeping,

       I then found Minos at Fiesole

       With shovels, mattocks and chestnuts,

       Cleaning up the ditch outside the Abruzzi,

       When Cariodosso

       Cried out loud: ‘Oh, Giovanni de’ Repetissi

       Rediscovers Bacchus with the Apocalypse!’

      This style of absolute nonsense was developed in a desultory way by a few other late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century poets, notably Andrea Orcagna (who died in 1424).⁴⁰ Later in the fifteenth century, however, it became almost a popular fashion, thanks to the talents of one highly idiosyncratic poet who took up the genre and made it his own: the Florentine Domenico di Giovanni, who was known by his nickname, ‘il Burchiello’.

      Born in 1404, Burchiello developed some contacts with literary circles in Florence while plying his trade as a barber in the 1420s. He had to leave the city (either for political reasons or, more probably, because of unpaid debts) in the early 1430s; in 1439 he was imprisoned in Siena for theft and brawling. He later moved to Rome, where he resumed his trade before dying in early 1449.⁴¹ In addition to his nonsense poems, he also wrote comic and satirical poetry of extraordinary vividness and verbal density. All his poems seem to have been written for the delight of his friends; they were collected only after his death (in many cases from people who had learned the verses by heart). Once his poetry began to be published in 1475, its wider popularity was assured: there were ten further editions in the fifteenth century, and eleven during the sixteenth.⁴² Lorenzo de’ Medici kept only seven books in his bedroom: the Gospels, Boethius, a medical treatise, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Burchiello.⁴³