The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

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From Coryate’s Crudities (1611), ‘Certain Opening and Drawing Distichs’

[From Coryate’s Crudities, 1611]

  Certain Opening and Drawing Distichs

To be applied as  mollifying cataplasms to the tumours,  carnosities, or difficult

pimples full of matter appearing in the  author’s front, conflated of  styptic and

glutinous vapours arising out of the  Crudities, the  heads whereof are particularly

pricked and pointed out by letters for the reader’s better understanding.


[Verses by Laurence Whitaker follow]. 5


Here follow certain other verses, as charms to unlock the mystery of the Crudities:

A

 Here, like  Arion, our Coryate doth draw

All sorts of fish with music of his maw.

B

 Here, not up  Holborn, but down a steep hill

He’s carried ’twixt  Montreuil and Abbeville. 10

C

 A horse here is saddled, but no Tom him to  back;

It should rather have been Tom that a horse did lack.

D

 Here, up the Alps (not so plain as to  Dunstable)

He’s carried like a cripple, from  constable to constable.

E

 A punk here pelts him with eggs. How so? 15

For he did but kiss her, and so let her go.

F

 Religiously here he bids ‘Row from the stews!’

He will expiate this sin with converting the Jews.

G

And there, while he gives the zealous bravado,

A  rabbin confutes him with the  bastinado.20

H

 Here, by a boor too, he’s like to be beaten

For grapes he had gathered before they were eaten.

I

 Old hat here, torn hose, with shoes full of gravel,

And louse-dropping case, are the arms of his travel.

K

 Here, finer than coming from his punk you him see,25

∗F shows what he was, K what he will be.

L

 Here, France and Italy both to him shed

Their horns, and Germany pukes on his head.

M

 And here he disdained not in a foreign land

To lie at livery, while the horses did stand.30

N

 But here, neither trusting his hands nor his legs,

Being in fear to be robbed he most learnedly begs.

Certain Opening and Drawing Distichs Prefixed to Coryate, Crudities. Thomas Coryate (?1577–1617), from Odcombe in Somerset, made a profession out of being the butt of others’ wit. For biography, see Strachan (1962). It appears he popped out of a trunk in one Jacobean court entertainment (see Nichols, Progresses (James), 2.400). He is mocked in Epigr. 129.17 and Und. 13.129–31. Between 14 May and 3 Oct. 1608 he travelled almost two thousand miles across Europe, chiefly on foot. Crudities is part autobiographical account of the journey and part guidebook to Europe. Coryate could not obtain a publisher, and so solicited a vast number of dedicatory verses for his volume. Among the fifty-nine contributors of dedicatory verses were Sir John Harington, Lewis Lewkenor, Henry Goodere, Dudley Digges, John Donne, Hugh Holland, Christopher Brooke, John Hoskins, Inigo Jones, Richard Corbett, Thomas Campion, John Owen, Thomas Farnaby, Michael Drayton, John Davies of Hereford, and Henry Peacham. Many of the contributors were associated with the Mermaid Tavern (see Epigr. 133.37n.). The dedicatory verses were pirated as a separate volume in The Odcombian Banquet (1611). Most of these represent Coryate as a mock-heroic traveller. Jonson’s verses figure prominently, but there is no reason to suppose that he edited the volume as Winstanley, Lives, 124 does (although Coryateon on p. 159 generously wishes that Jonson were as well rewarded as Sannazzaro); a more likely candidate is Laurence Whitaker (c. 1577/8–1654) whose distichs precede Jonson’s, and whose epistle opens The Odcombian Banquet. The letters of the alphabet in Jonson’s poem refer to individual scenes in William Hole’s title-page of Crudities (Illustration 60), which was probably circulated to the authors of dedicatory matter before the publication of the volume (Strachan, 1962, 114).
1 Title Opening and Drawing Both ‘beginning and attractive’ (OED, Drawing a. 4) and ‘that open a wound and draw out foreign matter from it’ (OED Drawing a. 3).[Editor: Colin Burrow]
1 mollifying cataplasms soothing poultices.
1 carnosities fleshly growths.
2 author’s front (1) the author’s forehead; (2) the frontispiece of the volume (for which, see Illustration 60).
2 styptic astringent, able to make wounds and skin contract.
3 Crudities Uncooked things (also ‘undigested’, hence ‘crude’ or not properly assimilated by the author).
3 heads (1) headings; (2) inflamed tops of the pimples.
7–8 On the crossing to France in Chapter 1, Coryate ‘varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excremental ebulitions of my tumultuous stomach [he was sick], as desiring to satiate the gormandizing paunches of the hungry haddocks’ (Coryate, Crudities, 1).
7 Arion A great musician (sixth century bc), who was to have been robbed by the crew of his ship as he returned to Corinth; he sang to them and jumped over the side, where a dolphin (charmed by his music) rescued him. Cf. Neptune, 133 and n.
9–10 Coryate was carried from Montreuil to Abbeville on a cart (Coryate, Crudities, 9) similar to those used to take condemned criminals up Holborn to Tyburn.
9 Holborn] Crudities (Holdborne)
10 Montreuil] Crudities (Montrell)
11–12 i.e. Coryate was supposed to be making his travels on foot. Laurence Whitaker’s couplets on this picture plays on horse and ‘drab’ or prostitute.
11 back ride.
13–14 Coryate was compelled by wily porters to be carried up the Alps for 18d. (Coryate, Crudities, 69–70).
13 Dunstable This road was so straight and clear that it gave rise to the proverb ‘As plain as Dunstable highway’ (Tilley, D646).
14 constable in each parish the officer responsible for the welfare of the indigent.
15–16 Coryate took a dispassionate interest in the ‘punks’, or whores, in Venice: he supposedly talked to them but departed ‘nothing contaminated therewith’ (Coryate, Crudities, 271).
17–20 Coryate had a debate with a rabbi in the Jewish ghetto in Venice, from which he was rescued by the Ambassador Sir Henry Wotton (Coryate, Crudities, 230–7). He notes (234) ‘pitiful it is to see that few of them living in Italy are converted to the Christian religion’.
20 rabbin rabbi.
20 bastinado stick. (An exaggeration: the Jews simply threatened Coryate after he abused their religion.)
21–2 Coryate took some grapes from a vineyard between Franckendal and Worms, and a ‘German boor’ seized his hat and threatened him in revenge (Coryate, Crudities, 524–6).
23–4 Coryate hung up his shoes as a trophy in Odcombe Church, where they remained until the eighteenth century. They were illustrated (tied together with a laurel wreath) by Henry Peacham in Crudities, sig. k4. The title-page shows the rest of his clothes (‘case’) hung up as trophies. Cf. Informations, 515. Farnaby’s dedicatory verse also noted that Coryate’s clothes were ‘shelter for herds of lice’ (sig. g5), which are indeed shown dropping from his clothes in Hole’s engraving.
25–6 Jonson’s note: ‘Not meaning by F and K as the vulgar may peevishly and wittingly mistake, but that he was then coming from his courtesan a freshman, and now having seen their fashions and written a description of them he will shortly be reputed a knowing, proper, and well-travelled scholar, as by his starched beard and printed ruff may be as properly insinuated.’
27–8 Of the three women who surmount Coryate’s picture on the title-page, France and Italy offer horns of plenty, while Germany vomits on his head, which elaborates the account of heavy drinking in that nation on pp. 438–9.
29–30 Coryate had to sleep in the stables at Bergamo (Crudities, 350).
31–2 Fearing that he would be robbed by two German ‘boors’, Coryate pretended to be a beggar. They gave him 4½d (465).