barber-surgeon; born in 1580, he was briefly educated at Gloucester Grammar School before being packed off to London and apprenticed to a waterman (the Thames equivalent of a gondolier).30 During his apprentice years he also served several times in the Navy: the Thames watermen were frequently used as a kind of naval reserve. In 1598 Taylor took up the waterman’s trade. Resident in Southwark, the play-house and low-life district on the south bank of the river, he formed many friendships with actors and writers. In 1612 he joined the ranks of the latter when he published the first of what was to become a torrent of minor literary productions, many of them in humorous quasi-doggerel verse. Although the title of this pamphlet was probably designed to cash in on the fame of Coryate’s book (The Sculler, rowing from Tiber to Thames: with his Boat laden with a Hotch-potch, or Gallimawfrey of Sonnets, Satyres, and Epigrams), it was not primarily directed against Coryate; Taylor was not pretending to have travelled to Italy himself, the reference to the ‘Tiber’ merely alluding to the fact that the first group of epigrams consisted of fierce attacks on the Papacy and the Roman Catholic clergy. But one of the poems in this work was entitled ‘To Tom Coriat’, and it addressed him in tones of genial disrespect:
What matters for the place I first came from
I am no Duncecomb, Coxecomb, Odcomb Tom
Nor am I like a wool-pack, crammed with Greek,
Venus in Venice minded to goe seeke …31
This seems to have cut Coryate to the quick: ‘it was one thing for the wits and gallants to flatter him with their notice by laughing at his antics and quite another to be publicly called a dunce by an upstart waterman.’32 Although he did not stoop to reply in print, his reaction was reported by Taylor in a later work:
He frets, he fumes, he rages and exclaimes,
And vowes to rouze me from the River Thames.33
Taylor had a talent for self-publicizing, and would not allow the opportunity to slip. He quickly turned out another pamphlet, entitled Laugh, and be Fat: or, a Commentary upon the Odcombyan Banket, in which he supplied a humorous running commentary on the prefatory verses to Coryate’s Crudities. His reaction to Sanford’s poem was one of bemusement rather than emulation:
Thou fatall impe to Glastonburie Abbey,
The Prophecie includes thou art no baby …34
To Peacham’s poem in ‘the Utopian Tongue’ he responded in kind, filling his own version of gibberish with semi-submerged fragments of abuse (poem 5). And on reaching Hoskyns’s poem he paused only to indulge in a little trans-linguistic pun (‘Cabalistical, or Horse verse’) before launching himself into headlong imitation:
Mount Malvorn swimming on a big-limb’d gnat,
And Titan tilting with a flaming Swanne …35
This was Taylor’s induction into the art of nonsense poetry, an art of which he was to become, in his own time if not in ours, the acknowledged master.
In 1613 Taylor renewed his ridicule of Coryate with another poetical pamphlet, Odcombs Complaint. Coryate had set out in October 1612 on his second great adventure, a journey to India, and Taylor’s new work was a set of spoof elegies, based on the supposition that Coryate had drowned on his way to Istanbul. These included an ‘Epitaph in the Barmooda tongue, which must be pronounced with the accent of the grunting of a hogge’ (poem 6 – this resembles a later gibberish poem by Taylor ‘in the Barbarian tongue’, ridiculing tobacco-taking: poem 9), another in the ‘Utopian tongue’ (poem 7), and finally an exuberant sextet of sonnets in the high Hoskyns nonsense style (poem 8). Thomas Coryate did eventually die on his travels, succumbing to a ‘flux’ at Surat in December 1617; and within a few years Taylor had emancipated his own nonsense writing from the narrow confines of his feud with Coryate. At the end of a humorous prose pamphlet on fasting and feasting published in 1620, Jack a Lent, Taylor added twenty-three lines of nonsense verse, entitled ‘Certaine Blanke Verses written of purpose to no purpose’ (poem 10). The genre was now a firmly established part of his repertoire.
Two years later Taylor issued the first of his two large-scale nonsense works, Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes from No Place (poem II); and in 1630 all his hitherto published nonsense poems received a much wider circulation when he published a fat volume of his collected works, which, as he proudly announced on the title-page, were ‘Sixty and three in Number’. Taylor was now a celebrity, and his nonsense poetry was one of the things that helped to make him famous. A comedy by the minor playwright Henry Glapthorne, published in 1640, includes a scene in which a master instructs his servant to buy books. ‘John Taylor, get me his nonsense,’ he commands; to which the servant replies, “You mean all his workes sir.’36 And three years after the republication of Sir Gregory Nonsence in Taylor’s Workes, another poet, the balladeer Martin Parker, published an explicit homage to Taylor, entitled The Legend of Sir Leonard Lack-Wit, sonne in law to Sir Gregory Nonsence. Most of this work was in nonsense prose, of a by now quite recognizable type:
The petty-foggers of Virginia set Hercules and Caucasus together by the eares, about the drinking of fryed Hartichokes. The blue bores of Islington Forrest leapt over Pancrasse Church to invade the Turkes Army in Bosworth Field: these things (with diligent negligence) were told to the Emperour of Pyramedes, who sent foure dripping pannes to tell great Tamberlaine, that London had never a Cuckold in it.37
And so on, for all of eighteen pages. Parker’s one venture into nonsense poetry in this production (poem 12), on the other hand, illustrates the surprising difficulty of the genre: organized in rigid rhetorical patterns and constantly veering into sense, it may at least function as a tribute to Taylor by demonstrating the superiority of his own nonsense.
Another trace of Taylor’s influence can be found in a nonsense poem which can confidently be attributed to the minor poet James Smith (poem 25); first published in 1658, it was probably written in the mid 1640s.38 The mock-scholarly footnotes attached to this work place it in the tradition of academic self-parody to which the poem by John Sanford (poem 3) also belonged. But a comparison between the texts of these two poems clearly shows that, somewhere in between, the influence of Taylor’s own nonsense poetry has interposed itself. Smith’s line ‘But then an Antelope in Sable blew’ recalls Taylorian lines such as ‘With that grim Pluto all in Scarlet blue’; other lines, such as ‘And to the butter’d Flownders cry’d out, Holla,’ or ‘And mounting straight upon a Lobsters thigh’, betray both Taylor’s habitual parodying of Marlowe (discussed below, pp. 42–4), and that gastronomic obsession with marine delicacies which characterizes so much of the nonsense poetry in the Hoskyns—Taylor tradition.
Smith’s involvement in writing nonsense poetry is significant too in the light of a recent discovery about a London literary club or coterie of the late 1620s and early 1630s, the ‘Order of the Fancy’, to which he belonged. A denunciation of Smith in a legal document of 1633 affirmed: ‘That for 4 yeares last past James Smith hath bin a Common and ordinary frequenter of tavernes alehouses playhouses, and players Companye … and he with them and others stiled themselves of the order of the fancye whose practise was to drinke excessively, and to speake non sence …’ Another witness declared: ‘That he heard James Smith say and … bragge that he was one of the Cheifest and first founders of that societye, and that he of that Company that could speake best non sence was Counted the best man, which was him selfe …’39 The modern scholar who discovered this evidence has painstakingly reconstructed the possible membership of the ‘Order’, which probably included the playwright Philip Massinger, the poets John Mennes, Robert Herrick and William Davenant, and several other known London wits and members of the Inns of Court.40 There is thus a clear similarity (though not, it seems, a direct connection) between this group and the grouping of wits at the Mitre tavern which helped give rise to the first nonsense poem by Hoskyns. Nor is this surprising, since the self-parodic routines of nonsense poetry are characteristic products of enclosed, self-conscious institutions such as clubs. The ‘non sence’ spoken