An Annotated Edition
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
John Taylor’s Nonsence upon Sence, or Sence upon Nonsence: An Annotated Edition By Emily Cock Supervised by K.K. Ruthven Submitted in part-fulfillment of the BA(Hons) Discipline of English and Creative Writing The University of Adelaide November 2007 To Ken and Kirsty, who’ve had to live with Taylor and me. 2 Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 5 Note on the Text ..................................................................................................................... 12 The Text: Part One (1651) .................................................................................................... 13 Appendix 1: Facsimile of Nonsence (1651) ........................................................................ 137 Appendix 2: ‘The Second Part’ (1651b) ............................................................................ 138 Appendix 3: ‘The Third Part’ (1654) ................................................................................. 151 Works Cited ......................................................................................................................... 162 Publications by John Taylor .............................................................................................. 162 General .............................................................................................................................. 170 3 Abstract This annotated edition of John Taylor’s Nonsence upon Sence, or Sence Upon Nonsence is the first of its kind. Nonsence was originally published in three parts between 1651 and 1654, and, as with the majority of Taylor’s writings, has not yet been produced in a scholarly edition. Taylor’s works have also received very little critical attention, although within his highly productive career he produced prose and verse compositions on politics, religion, travel writing, local history and culture, the mid-seventeenth century gender debate, and a number of paradoxical encomia. He also produced several pieces of what he considered ‘nonsense verse’, including Nonsence Upon Sence, and I investigate his use of the genre, and evaluate the accuracy of this description. Most particularly, through extensive annotation of the text, I identify Taylor’s engagement with contemporary politics, culture and religion, his use of classical and popular literature, and his tactical reuse and revision of material from his own earlier texts. I argue that such close examination of the text reveals the strong political content acknowledged, but as yet undiscussed by critics such as Warren Wooden and P.N. Hartle, and implicitly denied by the text’s as yet most substantial critic, Noel Malcolm. 4 Introduction John Taylor (1578-1653) was a London waterman who achieved fame as the “Water Poet”. Between 1612 and 1654 he published over 150 works of prose and poetry on subjects ranging from religion and politics, to travel, humour, and local culture. These were particularly popular among the increasingly literate lower and middle classes, while even members of court, and James I himself, complimented the work of “the sculler” (Capp 46). For the most part, however, Taylor styled himself as a popular writer, and has unfortunately remained so. Derided in Pope’s Dunciad as the “swan of Thames” (Evans 1178), he was regarded by playwright Henry Glapthorne as an author only of nonsense (Hartle 166). His claim to the title of “Poet” was always contentious; writers of his class and poor education were more commonly termed “rhymers”, and Ben Jonson (whom Taylor idolised) referred to him always as “the water-rhymer”, because “a rhymer / And a poet, are two things” (Capp 75). While placing Taylor a step above the anonymous balladeers and “pot poets”, posterity has found him too timebound and artistically conservative to be worth studying. Taylor’s works are omitted from major anthologies of English literature published by Longman, Norton and Oxford University Press, although a few pieces are now accessible in some specialist and revisionist collections.1 Not one of his works is currently available in a stand-alone edition. 1 The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (1991), edited by Alastair Fowler, contains some of Taylor’s ‘Epigrams’ from The sculler (1612) and the opening of Sir Gregory Nonsence (1622) (164- 8); Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus’ Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England 1540-1640 (1985) includes Taylor’s Juniper (1639), and its reply pamphlet, The womens revenge (1640) (290-327), which Capp attributes to Taylor himself (118- 119); Paul Keegan’s New Penguin Book of English Verse (2000) includes ‘Non-sense’ by Taylor and “Anonymous” (322); Noel Malcolm, includes a number of Taylor’s nonsense works in The Origins of English Nonsense (137-52, 184-212) (1997). 5 In a cheery aside on the British television show, Time Team, Taylor appears as “an eccentric Thames ferryman”, whose once-famous trip from London to Queenborough in a paper boat was found “in the footnote of a very dusty history book in a very dusty corner of a library” (Reynolds and Platt; Taylor’s account of the journey appears in his Praise of Hemp-seed [1620]). In actual fact, Taylor appears in the footnotes of many a “dusty history”. Inverting Jonson’s famous compliment to Shakespeare, James Mardock has remarked that Taylor was “not for all time, but an age” (1), and in many ways this is true: Taylor suited his age perfectly, and engaged wholeheartedly with the issues, styles and preoccupations of interest to his contemporaries. His work has thus been scoured for evidence of popular political opinion, religion and culture by historians of the seventeenth century such as William P. Holden and Robert Wilcher, whereas literary critics have largely ignored it. Despite increasing recent interest in early modern popular culture (thanks largely to the historian Peter Burke and the Shakespeare scholar Louis B. Wright) and English Civil War literature, Taylor’s writing is far less well known than his personality. Recent work on “self-educated” and “labouring class” poets – perhaps Taylor’s greatest hope for rediscovery – has as yet focussed on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most particularly with the poetry anthologies edited by John Goodridge (Ruthven, “Taylor”). Bernard Capp, who has published the most extensive study of the poet, restricts himself largely to biography, and Noel Malcolm, who includes a number of pieces by Taylor in his anthology of nonsense, locates them within a pre-Lear/Carroll history of the subject without offering a substantial critique of any. Of those who have looked critically at Taylor’s literary works, most offer a broad commentary on his work according to genre. Instead of looking as others have done at either Taylor the 6 man or his writing in general, I have decided in this project to highlight the intricate ingenuity of his poems by critically annotating a representative one: Nonsence. The text presented here was first printed in quarto, by an unknown London publisher as Nonsence upon Sence, or Sence upon Nonsence (1651). The “Second Part” (hereafter, 1651b) was printed later the same year, again in quarto by an unknown publisher, and probably in London (Wing 479; Capp’s “1652” [200] is probably due to Lady Day discrepancies in dating). In February 1654 the “Third Part” was published posthumously – again in London by an unknown publisher – as The Essence, Quintessence, Insence, Innocence, Lye-sence, & Magnifisence of Nonsence upon Sence: or, Sence upon Nonsence (hereafter, 1654). Printed this time in octavo, 1654 was the first to include a verse “In Laudem Authoris” by an unidentified “H.B.” (2). All three editions are printed in roman type, rather than in the black letter still widely used for popular works (Capp 67), and although their punctuation varies wildly, they contain relatively few printing errors for what would have been reasonably cheap books. The fact that Nonsence could have been printed on two-and- a-half sheets suggests that it would have cost no more than 3d to buy. The 1654 text has been republished by the Spenser Society (1870-78; reprinted 1967) and more recently by Noel Malcolm (1997). By far the most widely available, Malcolm’s text is in fact a composite of Nonsence and 1654 (210). Presented in an anthology of seventeenth- century “nonsense verse”, it lacks the lines on the death of the Galloway Nag on the grounds that they are “not . nonsense” (210), and is minimally – and sometimes erroneously – annotated. In his quest to prove Taylor “the acknowledged master” of nonsense “in his own time if not in ours” (19), Malcolm expressly rejects political interpretations of the work (24) and consequently excludes political references from his annotations. I have sought to rectify these and other omissions in my own edition. I would argue that Mardock is gravely mistaken in thinking that Taylor’s shift toward “the safer genre of 7 nonsense verse” in the early 1650s marked a departure from politics (12). Instead, as both Wooden and Hartle (164) claim without elaboration, the three parts of Nonsence present political and religious satire barely concealed beneath a “thin veneer of nonsense” (Wooden 172). While there was no shortage of anti-Parliament pamphlets published