Thomas Nashe
Polemical woodcut deriding Nashe as
jailbird
born 1567, Lowestoft, Suffolk, Eng.
died c. 1601, Yarmouth, Norfolk?
pamphleteer, poet, dramatist, and author of The
Unfortunate Traveller; or, The Life of Jacke
Wilton (1594), the first picaresque novel in
English.
Nashe was educated at the University of
Cambridge, and about 1588 he went to London,
where he became associated with Robert Greene
and other professional writers. In 1589 he wrote
The Anatomie of Absurditie and the preface to
Greene’s Menaphon. Both works are bold,
opinionated surveys of the contemporary state of
writing; occasionally obscure, they are
euphuistic in style and range freely over a
great variety of topics.
In 1589 and 1590 he evidently became a paid
hack of the episcopacy in the Marprelate
controversy and matched wits with the
unidentified Puritan “Martin.” Almost all the
Anglican replies to Martin have variously been
assigned to Nashe, but only An Almond for a
Parrat (1590) has been convincingly attributed
to him. He wrote the preface to Thomas Newman’s
unauthorized edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s
Astrophel and Stella (1591). Though Nashe penned
an extravagant dedication to Sidney’s sister,
the countess of Pembroke, the book was withdrawn
and reissued in the same year without Nashe’s
foreword.
Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the
Divell (1592), a satire focused on the seven
deadly sins, was Nashe’s first distinctive work.
Using a free and extemporaneous prose style,
full of colloquialisms, newly coined words, and
fantastic idiosyncrasies, Nashe buttonholes the
reader with a story in which a need for
immediate entertainment seems to predominate
over any narrative structure or controlling
objective. Having become involved in his friend
Greene’s feud with the writer Gabriel Harvey,
Nashe satirized Harvey and his brothers in
Pierce and then joined the combat in an exchange
of pamphlets with Harvey, Strange Newes (1592)
and Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596). If
Harvey is to be credited, Nashe was a hack for
the printer John Danter in 1593. The controversy
was terminated in 1599, when the archbishop of
Canterbury ordered that “all Nasshes bookes and
Doctor Harveyes bookes be taken wheresoever they
maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee
ever printed hereafter.”
Apparently Nashe wrote Strange Newes while he
was living at the home of Sir George Carey, who
momentarily relieved his oppressive poverty. In
Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), Nashe
warned his countrymen during one of the
country’s worst outbreaks of bubonic plague
that, unless they reformed, London would suffer
the fate of Jerusalem. The Terrors of the Night
(1594) is a discursive, sometimes bewildering,
attack on demonology.
Pierce Penilesse excepted, Nashe’s most
successful works were his entertainment Summers
Last Will and Testament (1592, published 1600);
his picaresque novel The Unfortunate Traveller;
or, The Life of Jacke Wilton; Dido, Queen of
Carthage (1594; with Christopher Marlowe); and
Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599). The Unfortunate
Traveller is a brutal and realistic tale of
adventure narrated with speed and economy. The
book describes the travels through Germany and
Italy of its rogue hero, Jacke Wilton, who lives
by his wits and witnesses all sorts of historic
events before he is converted to a better way of
life. Lenten Stuffe, in praise of herrings,
contains a charming description of the town of
Yarmouth, Norfolk, a herring fishery. Nashe
retreated to Yarmouth when he and Ben Jonson
were prosecuted as a result of their satirical
play The Isle of Dogs (1597).
Nashe was the first of the English prose
eccentrics, an extraordinary inventor of verbal
hybrids. The Works were edited by R.B. McKerrow,
5 vol. (1904–10; reprinted and reedited by F.P.
Wilson, 1958).
