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IV
In a culture of some sophistication, any popular literary genre may stimulate the burlesque spirit. The tradition of the mock-commendatory poem, the apparatus of ridicule, may—for the sake of proportion—be sketched rather than discussed in detail. The manifestations are various. They range from the high-spirited and playful to the vindictive. They may be prompted by a book's levity or by an attitude to the author or the author's opponent. The ostensible puffs may be authentic or the author's fictions (some mentioned below are ignored in my Index because they are transparent hoaxes).
In an age when the vogue of the mock-encomium overlapped the survival of the flyting, humanists sometimes took pleasure in jesting with their scholarly panoply. An instance among More's works has been cited (18089). More elaborate is William Lily's attack on Whittinton in Antibossicon, 1521, with contributions by a monstrous tribe (Ichnobates Gnosius, Ladon Sicyonius, etc.).[18] There are traces of the mock-commendatory among the Marprelate pamphlets (17452, 22645), especially in Richard Harvey's Plaine Perceuall, to which the "parish vestry" append parody Latin puffs initialed by a carter, shepherd, farmer, cobbler, botcher, and "Schollard." A daring innovation in technique is implied in Marston's charge that Joseph Hall pasted verses in Cambridge copies of Marston's Pigmalion; unfortunately no example is known to have survived.[19] More influential was the series of mock-commendations Englished by Thomas Shelton in his 1612 edition of Don Quixote, for although this translation postdates Coryate, the verses by Amadis of Gaule, Don Belianis of Greece, Orlando Furioso, etc., were probably known to Coryate's friends in the original.
The term mock-commendatory, for the average Renaissance student, inevitably suggests Thomas Coryate's Crudities, 1611. Presumably more people did, and still do, read the fantastic anthology of preliminary poems than plow through the huge volume of travels, though it was mean of Richard Brome to suggest that the text was forgotten before the prelims.[20] Never has such a galaxy of writers, wits, and men about town joined in verse comments upon a single book. Counting a few tardily netted in a supplement (5807), fully sixty men participated in the game (the number of poems is much greater). Jonson, Donne, Drayton, Campion, Hoskins, Bastard, Peacham, Corbet, John Owen, Davies of Hereford, and numerous lesser lights: few notables are missing. When I once indulged the whim of organizing a semester course in Jacobean literature about this Coryate circle, there was no dearth of material. Good natured raillery, rather than contempt, mark most of these comic tributes to the droll personality of the pedestrian of Odcombe. The sequel was in the same spirit. Some malicious soul—as enterprising as unscrupulous—induced a rival bookseller to pirate the whole apparatus of the Crudities as a cheap, though still substantial, pamphlet, adding the barbed note that the 654 pages of actual travels might have been condensed to a four-page epitome if one had taken the trouble.[21] This Odcombian Banquet, 1611, drew an angry but fruitless retort from Coryate (5807). The reference to an epitome leads some to suspect that the perpetrator of the Banquet was Taylor the Water Poet, since Taylor was busy on a Reader's Digest condensation of the Crudities puffs, published in 1612 as Laugh and Be Fat. Lacking Coryate's skill in tongues, Taylor ignores all the poems in foreign languages.
The fact that Laugh and Be Fat was incorporated in Taylor's 1630 Works may be evidence of Taylor's vanity rather than a continuing interest in Coryate. But although Tom had been resting in his grave in distant India since 1617, the mock-epic accolade to the Crudities lived in tradition. Coryate is mentioned by more than one wit in the apparatus to the rare pamphlet Joanereidos, 1645. Feminine valor at the roundhead defense of Lyme Regis had inspired some two hundred lines of verse by the Parliamentarian chaplain James Strong. Falling into the hands of Royalists at Oxford, the poem was published in derision, with preliminary matter far outweighing the text. The ridicule
Meanwhile the playful nature of their texts had inspired facetious preliminaries in a number of minor works after Coryate, such as Robert Anton's parody romance Moriomachia, 1613, the anonymous Exchange Ware, 1615 (1356), and John Gower's mock-epic Pyrgomachia, 1635. The commenders of Exchange Ware are fictitious; those of Gower were his students and friends. Whether the writers were people or fictions is uncertain in some instances. The poems before Sir Edward Hoby's Curry-combe for a Coxe-combe, 1615, appear a mixed lot, and I suspend judgment in the case of the pseudonymous New-yeeres Gift of 1636 (22631). This amusing pamphlet about the court dwarf Jeffrey Hudson has verses by T. Little, W. Loe, and W. Short: the evidence is weak, but these plausible names may be actual men carefully solicited for the purpose. One may rely on the names before William Hawkins' Corolla Varia, 1634, and the initials in Samuel Austin's Naps upon Parnassus, 1658.[22]
Two more memorable chapters of literary history may suffice to complete this sketch of the years beyond 1640, leaving other Restoration examples for future research. The first is the flurry of excitement accompanying the publication of Sir William Davenant's unfinished epic Gondibert, 1651. An initial shower of compliments by Waller, Cowley, Hobbes, and others, both within and outside the book, aroused derisive opposition from Denham, young Jack Donne, and other satirists of Royalist views. Many of these were gathered in two dozen pages published in 1653 as Certain Verses Written by severall of the Authors Friends; to be reprinted with the Second Edition of Gondibert. Alluding with tiresome repetition to poor Davenant's nose, the poems run to abuse more than to literary criticism. The ill-spirited pamphlet went into four printings within a year, to one of which was attached a mock-reply, The Incomparable Poem Gondibert Vindicated (reprinted 1655). England had never seen such an extensive and light-hearted critomachia, as Arthur H. Nethercot terms it.[23] This Davenant feud presumably inspired the similar onslaught at the end of
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