Coryat's Crudities - "Commendatory" Verses

"Commendatory" Verses

A custom of Renaissance humanists was to contribute commendatory verses that would preface the works of their friends. In the case of this book, a playful inversion of this habit led to a poetic collection that firstly refused to take the author seriously; and then took on a life of its own. Prince Henry as Coryat's patron controlled the situation; and willy-nilly Coryat had to accept the publication with his book of some crudely or ingeniously false panegyrics. Further, the book was loaded with another work, Henry Peacham's Sights and Exhibitions of England, complete with a description of a perpetual motion machine by Cornelis Drebbel.

Coryat, therefore, was jokingly mocked by a panel of contemporary wits and poets of his acquaintance. At the behest of the teenage prince, a series of verses was commissioned, of which 55 were finally included for publication. The authors of these verses, which included John Donne, Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and Sir Thomas Roe, among others, took especial liberties with personal anecdotes, finding Coryat's self-importance a ripe source of humour. The literary men known to Coryate were typically courtiers, or those whom he had met through Edward Phelips of the Middle Temple, a patron from Somerset. A full list of the authors (translated from Latin originals) is given in the margin in a 1905 edition.

There were poems in seven languages. Donne wrote in an English/French/Italian/Latin/Spanish macaronic language. Peacham's was in what he called "Utopian", which was partly gibberish, and the pseudonymous Glareanus Vadianus (tentatively John Sanford) wrote something close to literary nonsense. The contribution of John Hoskyns is called by Noel Malcolm "the first specimen of full-blown literary English nonsense poetry in the seventeenth century".

Coryat had to take this all in good part. The book appeared with engravings by William Hole, and the author received a pension. Shortly a pirate version of the verses appeared, published by Thomas Thorpe, under the title The Odcombian Banquet (1611).