NONSENSE VERSES.
hen Bunthorne has recited his ‘wild, weird, fleshly thing,’ called ‘Oh, Hollow! Hollow! Hollow!’ the Duke of Dunstable remarks that it seems to him to be nonsense. ‘Nonsense, perhaps,’ replies the Lady Saphir, ‘but oh, what precious nonsense!’ And there really is a sense in which nonsense—genuine, diverting nonsense—is precious indeed. There is so little of it. The late Edward Lear bubbled over with true whimsicality. His ‘Book of Nonsense’ is what it professes to be—the most delightful non-sense possible. But of how much of that sort of thing does English literature boast? There is plenty of unconscious nonsense, of course, but it is not of the right quality. Dryden said of Shadwell that he reigned, ‘without dispute, throughout the realms of nonsense absolute’—he ‘never deviated into sense’—and yet he was the dullest of dull dogs. The fact is, that nothing is more difficult than to write amusing nonsense, and it is worth noting how few people, comparatively speaking, have ever attempted to produce it.
One of the earliest efforts of the kind in the language is a certain passage in Udall’s ‘Ralph Roister Doister,’ where Dame Christian receives from the hero a letter which seems, on the face of it, insulting:
‘Sweete mistresse, where as I love you nothing at all,
Regarding your substance and richesse chief of all,
To your personage, beauty, demeanour, and wit,
I commend me unto you never a whit,’
and so on—the joke lying, of course, in the incorrectness of the punctuation adopted. In general, the Elizabethans were too much in earnest to write absolute nonsense. Nonsense is to be found in Shakespeare, but usually in parody of the euphemists of his time. Some of the personæ are made to talk sad stuff, but it has not the merit of being ‘precious’ in the Lady Saphir’s sense. It is very tedious indeed, and one likes to think that Shakespeare, perhaps, did not write it, after all. Drummond, in his ‘Polemo-Middinia,’ gave an early example of a kind of jeu d’esprit which has since been frequently imitated—a species of dog-Latin in extremis: