nonsense speech (a style which, as we shall see, was by now becoming almost an obligatory party trick for undergraduates in at least one Oxford college) than to the concentrated nonsense poetry practised by Taylor.41 But it is quite inconceivable that any gathering of London wits and players in the 1630s could have been ignorant of John Taylor’s well-known contributions to the genre.
Thanks to his tremendous efforts at self-publicizing, Taylor was by now almost a public institution. He was famous not only for his poetry and pamphlets but also for his ‘travels’ – journeys to different parts of the British Isles, announced by prospectus in advance and described in pamphlet-form soon after their completion. Most of these had the nature of stunts, such as his much-trumpeted journey to Edinburgh and back without spending, borrowing or stealing any money on the way. One stunt, reminiscent of the famous wager-journeys of Elizabethan comedians such as Will Kemp, might almost be described as a nonsense journey: he attempted to scull from London to Queenborough (on the Isle of Sheppey, off the Kentish coast) in a brown paper boat with oars made out of salted dried fish.42 But many of Taylor’s travelogues supply valuable descriptions of ordinary English life, and two of his more entrepreneurial publications are important source-materials for modern historians: his catalogue of taverns in the Home Counties, and his directory of carrier services from all the provincial towns of England to their terminus-points at different London inns.43
A few months after the outbreak of the Civil War Taylor was publicly accused of royalism and ‘popery’; and in early 1643 he refused to pay a parliamentary tax. Soon afterwards he fled, first to Windsor and then to Oxford (the royalist garrison town and seat of government), where he remained until 1646.44 Taylor’s own royalism was not in doubt; he wrote elegies on Charles I after his execution in 1649, and later that year was arrested for espionage and/or corresponding with the King’s friends.45 Taylor’s devotion to the Crown spurred him into another literary feud, this time against an old friend, the Puritan poet George Wither. Wither had supported the King against the Scots in 1639, but by 1642 he had gone over to the parliamentary side. When the Civil War broke out he raised his own troop of cavalry; his next book of poems, entitled Campo-Musae (1643), was written while serving in the field as a captain.46 Taylor, in one of his several pamphlets written in the form of proclamations by the Devil and ironically praising the war, referred in 1644 to ‘our dear sons Mercurius Britannicus, George Wither (the Gull’s Darling) and Booker, the Aetheriall Planeteriall learned Preterpluperfect Asse-trologian, with the rest of our English and Scottish Doves, Scoutes, Scoundrells and Lyurnall-makers’.47 In the same year he issued his Aqua-Musae: or, Cacafogo, Cacadaemon, Captain George Wither Wrung in the Withers, which concluded with a brief nonsense poem (poem 15). A final quatrain following this poem made – for the first time in Taylor’s output – a claim about the ideological significance of nonsense poetry:
And is not this rare Nonsence, prethee tell,
Much like thy writing, if men marke it well:
For Nonsence is Rebellion, and thy writing,
Is nothing but Rebellious Warres inciting.48
If this were the only surviving specimen of nonsense poetry, it would be tempting to take this comment and construct on its foundation a whole theory about the political significance of nonsense as an expression of the satirical-political ‘world turned upside-down’ theme during the Civil War. That this theme appealed to Taylor is evident from a poem he wrote to accompany a woodcut (of which it provides a full and accurate description) in 1642:
This Monstrous Picture plainely doth declare
This land (quite out of order) out of square.
His Breeches on his shoulders do appeare,
His doublet on his lower parts doth weare;
His Boots and Spurs upon his Arms and Hands,
His Gloves upon his feet (whereon he stands)
The Church or’eturnd (a lamentable show)
The Candlestick above, the light below,
The Cony hunts the Dogge, the Rat the Cat,
The Horse doth whip the Cart (I pray marke that)
The Wheelbarrow doth drive the man (oh Base)
And Eeles and Gudgeon flie a mighty pace.49
But possessing, as we do, the earlier history of nonsense poetry, we can see that it was a literary phenomenon long before it became an ostensibly political one; Taylor’s remarks about nonsense and rebellion at the end of poem 15 are just another example of his talent for turning whatever materials he had at hand to an immediate topical use.
This poem was followed by two brief extensions of the same theme (poem 16), added at the start and finish of a pamphlet which Taylor published in the form of a mock-news-sheet in 1648, Mercurius Nonsensicus. These verses are of interest for two other reasons. The first is their curious mixture of literary aims and conventions, which makes them unlike the rest of Taylor’s nonsense output. Some of the lines are examples of the ‘impossibilia’ tradition, which is discussed below (pp. 78–88). At the same time they are a direct parody (again, untypical of Taylor) of a popular poem on man’s mortality:
Like as the damask rose you see,
Or like the blossom on the tree,
Or like the dainty flower of May,
Or like the morning to the day …50
The second point of interest here is that the original idea for subjecting those trite lines to nonsensical parody seems to have come from another minor poet, Richard Corbet – who was probably, therefore, the third writer of such concentrated nonsense poetry in English. In 1641 a collection of humorous verse had published a similar parody in three stanzas (poem 14); the author’s name was not stated there, but some of the early manuscripts containing this poem ascribe it to Corbet. A later collection, published in 1658, included another nonsense poem (poem 13) under the title ‘A non sequitur, by Dr. Corbet’. Both poems show the evident influence of Taylor, containing some of his own most characteristic images, such as lobsters and bag-puddings; but the second poem is in an elaborate classical form (the Pindaric ode) which Taylor seems never to have attempted. Since the two poems are clearly quite closely connected, their separate attributions to Corbet can be taken as mutually reinforcing evidence of his authorship of both.51 Although he rose to be Bishop first of Oxford (1628) and then of Norwich (1632; he died in 1635), Corbet was best known for his wit and high spirits; Aubrey described him as ‘very facetious, and a good fellowe’.52 He may have read Taylor’s Workes and the first printed version of the mortality poem at roughly the same time (1630); or he may have been familiar with the latter as it circulated, like so much of the poetry of this period, in manuscript. His own nonsense verses had evidently been circulating in this way for many years before they appeared in print.
Also circulating in manuscript were several more or less close imitations of Taylor. One of these (poem 21), which seems never to have been published, appears in a manuscript together with a copy of Taylor’s verses from Jack a Lent: it is so close to Taylor’s style that it could indeed be attributed to him, were it not for the fact that the manuscript attributes it to ‘T. W.’. Another (poem 20) in a much more bitter and scatological vein than anything that survives from Taylor’s own pen, is entitled ‘A sonnett to cover my Epistles taile peece’. This suggests that it was intended to be printed at the end of a dedicatory epistle; but it has not yet been located in any printed work. Two other reasonably successful imitations of Taylor’s style were printed in collections of humorous poetry which appeared in 1641 (poem 22) and 1655 (poem 23); a more elementary fragment in a similar vein appeared in another such collection in 1656 (poem 26). As always with anonymous poems printed in miscellanies of this kind, it is impossible to know for how long they had been circulating, by manuscript or by word of mouth, before they were finally printed.
The one fragment of nonsense by Taylor which seems to have undergone widespread circulation in manuscript (and, evidently,