Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Popular Culture
By Frederick 0.Waage
590
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark! what discord follows
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then every thing includes itself in ower,
Power into will, will into appetite.
The latter voice, which here includes everything, in a sense, into appetite,
is the Jacobean popular writer I have chosen to discuss, John Taylor,
waterman, poet, and adventurer, whose mass appeal and the integrity
of whose vision of cosmic harmony bring up the vexing question of
how much both he and Shakespeare have been misunderstood through
neglect of the popular arts of their time.
In the above verses, Shakespeares glossary of synonyms for
order suggests that his figurative language (untune that string) is
but amplificatio of a place, an abstract truth about the world, which
is the first thing his creating mind comes to; t o a mental pattern of the
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of state.
A form similarly employed by Taylor to satirize itself is the
paradoxical encomium.20 Although Taylor places himself, at the
beginning of the Praise of Hemp-seed,2 in a long line of illustrious
paradoxical encomiasts, this pamphlet and the others praising the
extreme, social outcasts (beggar, whore, bawd, thief) and the ultimately common (laundry, geese, sheep), are ironic because the praise
is paradoxical only t o a reader out of touch with the reality his
peers accept. The fact that his praise is true, and that there are
many who think it is false and credit Taylor as a clever paradoxist,
is the most devastating paradox of all-that so many literate consciousnesses can be so alienated from reality.22 For example, the
humorous dedication of The Praise of Cleane Linnen is to the most
modifying, clarifying, purifying, and repurifying, cleanser, clearer,
and reformer of deformed and polluted linnen, Martha Legge, Esquiresse, transparent, unspotted, Snow-Lilly-White Laundresse to the
Right worshipfill and generous the Innes of Court . . .23 which
recalls t o the Puritanical lawyers what they would rather forget:
their luxury, their exploitation of and dependence on the common
mans labors, and the inevitable physicality of all their metaphorical
expressions of spirituality. As t o the laundress herself:
Her liuing is on two extremes relying,
Shees euer wetting, or shees euer drying.
As all men dye to liue, and liue to dye,
So doth shee dry to wash, and wash to drye.
She runnes like Luna in her circled spheare,
As a perpetual1 motion shee doth steare.%
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Taylors pamphlets attack this belief. For example, The Great Eater
o f K e n t celebrates one Nicholas Wood, who could eat anything in
infinite quantities. The pamphlet begins with a list of great figures
in history remembered for some outstanding feat or quality, but the
ideal of the exceptional quickly degenerates into the commonplace
of mere Variety: And as every one hath particular qualities t o themselues, and dissonant from others, so are the manners of liues . . . of
all men and women various one from another . . . Amongst all these
before mentioned, and many more which I could recite, this subject
of my Pen is not . . . inferiour to any.32 So not only is the heros
area of superiority one ridiculously common t o all men, b u t he is not
really superior in it; he is as good at eating more than others as the
ploughman is at ploughing. Taylor proceeds with bombast and heroic
allegory applied t o the dinner table (cThis inuincible Ale, victoriously
vanquishd the vanquisher, and ouer our Great Triumpher, was Trium~ h a n t and
) ~ ~recounts his plan t o hire Wood to enrich them both by
having an eating performance at the Bear Garden, which Wood declines
not from modesty or fear of being exploited. but because if his stomack
should f i l e him publickely, and lay his reputation in the mire, it might
haue beene a disparagement to him for e ~ e r . But
~ ~above all. Taylor
heroically inflates Nicholass stomach so that it contains the entire
British economic system and embodies it in the prelapsarian Golden
Ages of which the hero-concept is a degradation:
He hath (within himselfe) a stall for the Oxe, a roome for the
Cow, a stye for the Hogge, a Parke for the Deere, a warren
for the Coneies, a storehouse for fruit, a dayery for Milke,
Creame, Curds, Whay, Butter-milke, and Cheese, his mouth
is a Mill of perpetual1 motion, for let the wind or the water
rise or fall, yet his teeth will euer bee grinding; his guts are
the Rendez-vous or meeting place or Burse for the Beasts of
the fields, the Fowles of the Ayre, and Fishes of the Sea; and
though they be neuer so wild or disagreeing in Nature, one to
another, yet hee binds or grindes them to the peace, in such
manner, that they neuer fall a t odds againe.35
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the opposites, industry and idleness, and the heroic concept that
tries t o contain them.
Similarly, Taylors nonsense-writing, of which so much has
been made, affirms an assumed order while seeming to deny it, but
in a way that a mind that imposed a classically-derived model on the
universe might not appreciate. His best known and most accomplished
nonsense-pamphlet is Sir Gregory Nonsence His News from Noplace;
its aim is to deceive reader expectations by distorting the connotations
of words. What Taylor does is t o drive a wedge of seeming irrelevance
between a sequence of words and the sequence of thoughts and associations they would normally give rise to in the mind of a Shakespeare.
The pamphlet begins basically as a satire of the Heliodorian romance:
the nonsense element is not the accidental juxtaposition of distorted
mythological figures and romance conventions alone, but the fact
that the adventurer, wherever he wanders, cannot escape London,
its vulgar landmarks and familiar types:
As I vpon a Gnat was riding late,
In quest to parley with the Pleiades,
I saw the Duke of Hounsditch gaping close,
In a greene Arbour made of yellow starch,
Betwixt two Brokers howling Madrigales,
A Banquet was served in of Lampraies bones,
Well pickeld in the Tarbox of old time,
When Demogorgon saild to Islington . . .36
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urban subculture.
Perhaps the most interesting of Taylors individual works,
wherein he most positively takes up the mantle of advocate of a
popular philosophy, is Taylors Motto, an ironic rebuttal to George
Withers essay in fashionable stoicism, Withers Motto (1621). Withers
is Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo; Taylors is Et habeo, et careo, et
curo. The difference defines, as far as any phrase can, the values of
Taylors audience. The basic hypocrisy Taylor discerns in Withers
philosophy is characteristically that he is a Sicophant, a flattring
Knave38 who meretriciously uses an exposition of what he Zacks to
gain the favor and patronage of courtly devotees of C h a p m a n i ~ m . ~ ~
The function of Withers pamphlet refutes its content; I care not
for Preferments which are sold,/and bought (by men of common
worth) for gold;40 but Taylor knows that Wither has made his philosophy into a commodity for sale, so the seeming epicurism of Taylors
own motto, and his open admission that he writes for money, are inversely an actual selflessness, truth to the self and not to an idol, an
emblem. To Withers nec habeo, referring to the goods of the
world, Taylor replies with et habeo referring to the things of the
spirit and knowledge of his own imperfection; to Withers nec
careo referring to worldly desires, Taylor responds with et careo
in its sense of want as lack: And as I want a Regall power and
fame,/I want Reuenues to maintaine the same4 literally describes
the conditions of life rather than an abstracted system of ideals. To
Withers nec cateo proclaiming his freedom from contingency (I
care not whether it be calme, or blow/Or raine, or shine, or freeze, or
haile, or snow)42 Taylor replies with an et careo which recognizes
that man as a psychological entity is a creature of contingency:
I care when I want money, where to borrow,
And when 1 haue it, then begins new sorrow;
For the right Anagram of woe is owe.
And hes in woe that is in debt I know;
For as I curd before to come in debt,
so being in, my cure is out to get.
Thus being in or out, or out or in,
Where one care ends, another doth begin?3
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the Puritan of his time God, the maker of systems, manifested himself most not in Sabbath observances but in fortuitous and intimate
dialogue with the soul of man. Taylors I may have been Anglican
in faith but it is Puritan in self-definition, caught as a moment of
motion, not constructed, formed by a creed. And his have is not
one of static possession but of impulses, potentials of possession:
judgment, credulity, hope. His known universe is not structured
and complete outside of him but is constantly reshaped by his interaction with it.
In essence, Taylor represents a constituency we must define as
popular in terms of such criteria within itself-named by Talcott
Parsons as elements of a shared symbolic system serving as a criterion or standard of selection44-not external ones we have imposed on it as viewed through the distorted glass of history. Taylors
unique literary problem is the one posed by a popular self-consciousness like our own: how t o be a spokesman of the people without
ceasing to be of the people. This problem is the one faced on the
level of action by all revolutionary leaders, and in particular by
those of the faction Taylor opposed so bitterly in the Revolution
-they would make Cromwell king. The Levellers resolved it by the
sacrifice of tribuneship. Taylor did, I feel, by his perverse insistence
on loyalty t o the King despite the fact that the popular attitudes
he expressed in his pamphlets, if conceptualized t o the level of doctrine, would have allied him with the receivers of faith against the
givers of form. Taylor anticipated the popular will that produced
the Restoration, accepting form as a provisional bulwark against chaos.
Nothing more beautifully illustrates this than the moment in his very
last voyage in 1653, when, 75 and soon to die, he lies at an inn, in a
room where hangs a painted cloth dating, he estimates, from forty
years before when he was young and kings flourished, and on it the
following verses :
N o flower so fresh, but frost may it deface,
None sits so fast, but hee may lose his place:
Tis Concord keeps a Realme in Stable stay,
But Discord brings all Kingdomes to decay.
No Subject ought (for any kinde of Cause)
Resist his Prince, but yeeld him to the Lawes.
Sure God is just, whose stroake, delayed long,
Doth light at last, with paine more sharp, and strong,
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1sTaylor, p. 499.
1 6 very
~ Merry Wherry-Ferry-Voyage, one of his aims in York being
to see that reverend Metropolitan, Tobie Mathew, the Archbishop; typically,
and ironically, the interview is fulfilled when He a t his Table made me haue a
place (p. 174).
18Zbid., p. 148.
17Zbid., p. 143.
19The ultimate irony here is that, safely arrived in Quinborough, the
adventurers have their paper boat torn apart as souvenirs by the admiring mob
of their peers.
20See Henry K. Miller, The Paradoxical Encomium with Special Reference to its Vogue in England, 1600-1800. M P LIII (1955), 145-178.
21Taylor, p. 546.
22Paradoxically this did not for Taylor, as for so many of his station, include the king and court.
24Zbid., p. 331
23Taylor, p. 326.
251bid., p. 535.
261bid., p. 537.
27One among many examples: anonymous, Pasquils Palinodia and His
progresse to the Taverne, ed. A, B. Grosart, OccasiomlZssues, V (Edinburgh,
1877).
29Zbid., p. 113.
30Ibid., p. 121.
28Taylor, p. 111.
31Taylors Urania, Ibid., 20.
32Zbid., p. 153.
33Ibid., p. 155.
XiZbid., p. 157.
35Ibid., p. 155.
36Zbid., p. 161.
37For the mystical connotations of green in such instances, see Stanley
Stewart, The Enclosed Garden (Madison, Wis., 1966).
38Taylor, p. 203.
39To be substantiated two years later in Withers famous quarrel with the
Stationers about his royal patent, in clear abuse of civic authority. It is of course
ironic that in the Revolution Wither was the object of Taylors wrath as a mainstay of the Puritans.
40George Wither, Poems, S enser Society, XI (London, 1871), p. 681.
12Wither, p. 673.
43Taylor, p. 214.
41 Taylor, p. 21 1.
44Quoted in Hoggart, op. cit., p. 46.
45The Certaine Travailes of an uncertaine Journey, in Works ofJohn
Taylor the Water Poet not included in the Folio of 1630, Spenser Society (London, 1873), p. 20 (sep. pag.).
Professor Waage received his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University;
he is a Junior Research Associate at the Huntington Library and Lecturer in
English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Los Angeles;
and is preparing a book on popular culture of Jacobean and Caroline England.