References in brackets are to endnotes, those in parentheses
to the 1905 Macmillan reprint of the original edition of Coryat’s Crudities
in two volumes, accessible on archive.org.
"OH to what height will love of greatnesse drive/ Thy leavened spirit, Sesqui-superlative?" (37) With these mock-heroic lines, John Donne salutes Thomas Coryat, the author of Coryat’s Crudities (1611) [1]. While “height” and “leavened spirit” refer to conventional ideas of sublimity dating from Longinus, the over-ingenious invention of the nonce word “sesqui-superlative” introduces a hyperbolic tone that implies satire. Donne concludes on a witty and clearly ironic note. "Thy Gyant wit o'erthrowes me, I am gone;/ And rather then reade all, I would reade none."
The work that
inspired this dubious tribute is a curious object even before the reader opens
the book. Whatever can the name mean,
since the volume offers neither improper jokes nor salad recipes? The title page explains that it instead
contains Coryat’s observations as a traveler “hastily gobled up in five Moneths,”
then “newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset,
and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling Members of the
Kingdome.” Apparently he meant by the
term crudities to refer to the rushed pace of his trip in which he covered five countries in as many months, much of the time walking. Apart from the fact that a raw diet was at
the time thought prone to upset the stomach, the notion of eating material that
has been already digested and then
dispersed by another is enough to induce aa slight nausea [2].
In fact the book
is entertaining, a readable if offhand travel narrative that in some ways
anticipates Robert Byron or Bruce Chatwin.
Whereas most earlier accounts of distant places were either by explorers
who had visited very remote or exotic locations, relating history and sometimes
legend, about sites the reader would never visit, Coryat provides information
useful for future travelers, precisely like the guidebooks of more recent
times. His own journey was a prototype
for the Grand Tour which became de rigeur for the sons of the wealthy for
two hundred years following the publication of the Crudities [3].
To Coryat are
attributed the importation of the use of the table fork and the word umbrella from
Italy as well as the popularization of the Swiss story of William Tell. The contemporary reader may be more
impressed, however, with the book’s elaborate presentation, preceded by multiple
layers of text that condition the reader’s first acquaintance with the author’s
actual trip. The inclusion of these
apparently extraneous materials reveals a great deal about the intentions of
the work and, more broadly, the literary values of the age.
Before coming to
the first of the author’s impressions of the Continent his reader must make his
way through a number of preliminary stages amounting to over a hundred and
fifty pages. This leisurely route leads
first to the title page, a grand mélange of Baroque decoration [4]. Architectural elements structure the space
with the title and a portrait of the author surrounded by vignettes from scenes
described within while bits of Latin and a few words of Greek are strewn about
as further ornaments.
While this design
layout suggests formality and serious purpose, the incidents illustrated depict
the author in less than flattering moments.
In the lower right corner Coryat appears as he escapes in a gondola
while a Venetian prostitute pelts him with eggs, implying quite a different
tone. Known as an eccentric – his
lengthy treks on foot are enough alone to justify the term – he had occupied a
position in the court of Prince Henry, son of James I as a kind of jester or
buffoon. In private life among his peers
in the “right Worshipful Fraternitie of Sireniacal Gentlemen” that met at the
Mermaid Tavern, he held a similar position as a joker who is as well the butt
of others’ teasing [5]. He was doubtless
something of an odd duck who gained access to elite gatherings by playing the fool. He was surely cultivating this identity when
he distributed his book by visiting aristocrats with his copies borne by a donkey
who carried a sign saying “asinus portans mysteria” [6].
This reputation was
preserved by Thomas Fuller’s account: “He carried folly (which the charitable
called merriment) in his very face. The
shape of his head had no promising form, being like a sugar-loaf inverted, with
the little end before, as composed of fancy and memory, without any common
sense.” He was popular because “Sweetmeats
and Coryate made the last course at all court entertainments. Indeed, he was the courtiers’ anvil to try
their wits upon.” [7]
At any rate the
first feature of his book is a series or verses which he describes in his
characteristically metaphorical manner as “Certaine Opening and Drawing
Distiches, to be applied as mollifying Cataplasmes to the Tumors, Carnosities,
or difficult Pimples, full of matter, appearing in the Authors front, conflated
of Stiptike and Glutinous Vapours arising out of the Crudities : The heads
whereof are particularly pricked and pointed out by letters for the Readers
better understanding.” If the digestive
analogies of his title had made some queasy, the notion of his content as
tumors and pimples seems designed to unsettle the rest.
Though beginning
a book with commendatory verses was a common convention, here the praise is
ironic at best. The tone of mockery is evident
from the first couplet in a group described as “an explication of the emblems
of the frontispiece” attributed to Laurence Whitaker.
First, th' Author here glutteth Sea, Haddocke and Whiting
With spuing, and after the world with his writing.
(xv)
A second group of rhymes providing humorous commentary on
the title page is signed by Ben Jonson.
One concerns the Venetian affair illustrated on the title page.
A punke here pelts
him with egs. How so?
For he did but kisse her, and so let her go. (xix)
Then succeeds a second title page, noting
that, in addition to the travel reportage (the “crudities”) the volume contains a translation
of “a most elegant Oration” by a certain learned Professor Hermannus Kirchnerus
as well as a concluding section containing the “Posthume Poems of the Authors
Father, coming as neere Kinseman to the worke, being next of blood to the Booke,
and yonger brothers to the Author himself.”
Next follows a six-page dedication to Coryat’s patron, Prince Henry. In the fulsome manner of such addresses he
calls Henry “the Orient Pearle of the Christian world” and refers to his work
as “green” and “silly,” signing himself “Your Highnesse poore Observer, Thomas
Coryate, Peregrine of Odcom.”
Next one finds an “Epistle to the
Reader” signed T. C. “The Odcombian Legge-stretcher” teeming with Latin tags
and seeking to justify his publishing “the abortive fruits of my travels” (7).
Then comes a sketch of “the Character of
the Author,” now called “Odcombian, or rather Polyptopian” by Coryat’s “charitable
Friend” Ben Jonson who calls him an “odde Joviall Author” (19) and teases him
gently: “He is alwaies Tongue-Major of the company, and if ever the perpetuall
motion be to be hoped For, it is from thence.” (18) Jonson concludes with an exercise in
ingenuity, an acrostic spelling Coryat’s name.
The reader is still remote from the start
of the book proper to reach which it is first necessary to make way through a
hundred and seven pages of “encomiastick and panegyrick Verses” by fifty-five
poets including Ben Jonson, John Donne, Inigo Jones, and Sir John Harington [7],
preceded by an introduction which boasts that such a collection of blurbs
constitute “a great multitude of Verses as no booke whatsoever printed in
England these hundred years” (20). Many
of the tributes seem little like praise, and Coryat drily comments that many
had felt free to make “free and mery jests” to such an extent that he must ask
that the reader “to suspend thy censure of me till thou hast read over my whole
booke.” (21) He pleads that the prince
himself had mandated these tongue-in-cheek tributes which cast the entire work
in an ironic light.
The tone of many may be evident from the
first, its writer concealed behind a Greek pseudonym, which says that
grammarians “stand in feare” when they hear his “uncouth” coinages (22). He seemed to his courtly peers an odd man
out.
His name is Coryate I wis,
But whether he be flesh or fish,
I cannot yet decide.
(23)
Several make jokes about his
weight [9]. Lewes Lewknor mentions that,
during the five months Coryat spent writing the book “he seldome changed his
shirt or shoes” (28).
Some of the poetry is remarkable enough in
other ways. Donne contributed a
macaronic poem using no less than five languages (39). Laurence Whitaker contributed bits in both
Latin and French (40-43), Hugo Holland in Greek and Italian (43-44), Joachim
Vadian (Glarianus Vadianus) in Spanish, Italian, French, and Latin. Several poems, those by Peacham, Glareanus Vadianus (tentatively John Sanford),
and Hoskyns approach nonsense.
An essay “In Praise of Travel” by the
German poet and lawyer Hermann Kirchner is next included in which travel (like
poetry) is said to provide both “incredible utility” and “admirable sweetness.”
There is, he says, “no nearer way to the
attayning of true wisedome” (123). The
traveler is “of a facill nature, modest, courteous, loving, gentle, kind in
entertainment, and by the very bent of vertue inclined to good discipline,” (131). Travel is in fact our very nature since “surely
all living creatures that are to be found in this most wide and vast world are
delighted with running abroad & free motion.” (141)
The patient reader has, after this learned
disquisition, still not reached Coryat’s account of his travels. An “Elogie of the Booke” by Laurence Whitaker
is the next feature, included by Coryat “though the Author thereof be disposed
in some places to be merry with me.” (149)
Indeed Whitaker notes that, though in “this garment were found some
rent, in this garden some weeds, in this ship some trash” there is yet in it
“no disgrace” (150).
Then succeeds the actual book, but the
apparatus is not yet exhausted. At the
end is appended the Latin poems, by George Coryat, the author’s father, which
have no relation tom the rest of the volume apart from the fact that some
describe English, Scots, and Irish scenes.
As the book was privately published under
the patronage of Prince Henry, he and the author presumably had control over
the contents, but they may not have entirely agreed. Coryat mentions that he had preferred to omit
a good many of the “encomiastick” verses but the great lord “gave me a strict
and expresse commandement to print all” (21).
Much of the poetry as well as Jonson’s “Character of the Author” and Whitaker’s
“Elogie” depend on Coryat as a comic figure, yet this is not the sole appeal of
the substantial added elements which do indicate his acquaintance with
prominent figures of the court as well as (in Kirchner’s essay) a serious apologia
for recreational travel.
The use of a variety of languages and of
elaborate conceits is exhibited throughout the book. To illustrate the playful tone and ingenious
use of metaphor as well as Coryat’s own self-mocking rhetorical play a single
passage from Coryat’s first page
relating his seasickness on the crossing will suffice.
I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the
excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach, as desiring to satiate the
gormandizing paunches of the hungry Haddocks {according as I have
hieroglyphically expressed it in the front of my booke) with that wherewith I
had superfluously stuffed my selfe at land, having made my rumbling belly their
capacious aumbrie.” (152)
That final word, which denotes a
storage place or cupboard, particularly in a church, is an example of Coryat’s
fondness for out-of-the-way words and neologisms such as hyperaspist,
refocillated, and tatterdemalion.
There is indeed a certain leisurely
relaxation to Coryat’s prose. As
Chapman’s tribute notes, “Here is not stifled much stuffe in few wordes;/ His
little matter many lines affordes.” (72) His delight in lush verbiage, so familiar to
readers of Shakespeare, recalls the ancient and medieval figure of amplificatio,
the restatement of a given idea multiple times, weaving what was thought a sumptuous
texture, but would now seem tedious to many.
A similar taste underlay Euphuism, and later Baroque and rococo
ornamentation [10].
Like his elaborate syntax and his references
to Classical literature and history, these lexical choices contribute to
representing Coryat as a particular type of the comic character, the slightly
absurd oddball professor [11]. The
introductory materials reinforce this role, allowing the reader to identify
with his presumably normative critics even before the first word of the text
proper. Apart from the comic stereotype,
the very profusion of classical allusions, bookish vocabulary, and figurative
language creates a high-spirited ludic verbal texture. Keeping up with the often oblique
signification becomes an entertainment in itself, something like constantly
working crossword puzzles or rebuses. Subject
to a whirl of images and words, the reader exercises his hermeneutic abilities
recreationally, exhilarated with the richness of the world and the language,
while all the time maintaining the distance that allows for comedy. We are like Coryat, but not to his ridiculous
degree, and laughter is the end result. The book appeals to those with a taste either
for travel or laughter, according to one of the introductory verses (72), for both
are pure amusements as is, very often, reading, even, might I dare say, reading
literary criticism, for otherwise the gracious reader and I would never have
met.
1. The author’s name
is variously spelled Coryate and Coriat.
2. Further discussion
of the medical usage of “crudities” is found in Katharine A. Craik, “Reading ‘Coryats
Crudities’ (1611),” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 44,
No. 1, The English Renaissance (Winter, 2004).
3. Also influential
was the trip a few years later of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel who traveled
with Inigo Jones as cicerone and who assembled a magnificent art
collection. The convention remained
strong until the nineteenth century when European tourism became more available
to the middle class.
4. The version
reproduced above cannot show sufficient detail, but the image is readily
viewable online.
5. His role was
similar to that of a παράσιτος in Greek symposia, a scurra at Roman
feasts or a jester in a court.
6. Philip S. Palmer,
“'The progress of thy glorious book': material reading and the play of paratext
in ‘Coryats Crudities’ (1611),” Renaissance Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3
(June 2014).
7. In A History of
the Worthies of England (1662) George Allen & Unwin, 1952, p. 502.
8. Harington is the
celebrated inventor of the water closet.
9. See the poems by Henricus
Nevill de Abergevenny in which he is said to have a “grievous bulke” (23) and
by Henricus Goodier which speaks of the difficulty of lifting him (27).
10. The rhetorical
manuals were often repetitive or imprecise.
Similar figures are sometimes called commoratio or expolitio. In other countries similar post-Renaissance
movements were called by different names: culteranismo in Spain, Marinismo
in Italy, and préciosité in France.
11. Some might be
reminded of Athenaeus or Robert Burton though in these cases the humor is far
more understated. Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh
is a later parallel.
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