Thomas Nashe

English writer

• Born: November 1, 1567
• Birthplace: Lowestoft, Suffolk, England
• Died: c. 1601
• Place of death: Yarmouth(?), England

A versatile writer of satiric pamphlets, plays, lyric poetry, and a novel, Nashe had a marked influence on many of his contemporaries, including William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, who admired his powers of wit and observation and his inventive use of language.

Early Life

Thomas Nashe was born the third son of William Nashe, a clergyman. In 1573, when Thomas was six, the family moved to West Harling, Norfolk, where Thomas’s father took up a position as rector. Since the nearest school was seven miles away, it is likely that Nashe received his early schooling from his father.

In October, 1582, Nashe matriculated as a sizar scholar of St. Johns College, Cambridge University, although he may have been in residence at St. Johns for two terms before this. A sizar was a poor student who performed menial tasks such as making beds and serving at table in return for free food rations.

Student life at Cambridge was strict. The academic day began at dawn; students were expected to attend college for all but three weeks a year and were allowed to leave the college only twice a week. Punishments were severe, including whippings and fines; lodgings were crowded, and in winter were damp and cold.

In spite of these privations, Nashe seemed to flourish at Cambridge, and in 1584, he was appointed as a scholar of the Lady Margaret Foundation of the University. In Nashe’s later writings, he praised St. John’s College highly, although he did lament the strong Puritan influence there, which gave him a lifetime aversion to Puritanism.

While at Cambridge, Nashe was a close friend of the dramatist Christopher Marlowe, and he probably had a hand in producing some satirical plays during his student years. In 1586, Nashe was awarded the degree of bachelor of arts. He continued at St. Johns to work on a master of arts degree, but he never completed it, leaving Cambridge for London in the early fall of 1588. The reason for his departure is not known, but it may have been because his father, who had helped to support him at the university, died the previous year, leaving Nashe without the financial means to continue. Nashe’s intention in London was to follow his fellow Cambridge graduate Robert Greene and make a living as a writer. In Elizabethan England, the idea of pursuing a career as a professional writer was a novel one, but Nashe, full of youthful confidence, was prepared to give it a try.

Life’s Work

Once Nashe reached London, he registered his first literary piece, a dull pamphlet entitled The Anatomie of Absurditie, which he had written during a vacation in 1587. Not published until 1589, it received almost no attention. Shortly thereafter, Nashe wrote a preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589); that he was commissioned to write such a piece for an established author suggests that he already had something of a reputation in literary London. Yet it was not until the publication of his pamphlet An Almond for a Parrat in the spring of 1590 that Nashe found his true voice: a satirical, colloquial, vivid, journalistic style that was to make him the most popular of the Elizabethan pamphleteers. An Almond for a Parrat was Nashe’s contribution to the controversy surrounding the Puritan pamphlets of “Martin Marprelate,” which were attacks on the Church of England written in colloquial language to appeal to public opinion. Nashe’s reply successfully imitated the style of the Martin pamphlets and also identified for the first time in print the name of their author.

Armed with his new style, Nashe produced his greatest popular success, the social satire Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Divell (1592), which went through at least five editions between 1592 and 1595. In this book, Nashe’s persona, Pierce Penilesse, grumbles that his talents go unrewarded and that in the society in which he lives, money goes to those least deserving of it. He therefore decides to send a supplication to the devil, asking him for a loan. The supplication takes up most of the book, in which contemporary social abuses are described in terms of the seven deadly sins. Nashe’s purpose appears to have been to entertain rather than to moralize, however, and Pierce Penniless is memorable for its lively anecdotes, the feeling of spontaneity it conveys, the poetic imagery, and the realistic detail taken from the streets of the Elizabethan London that Nashe walked every day. It is notable also for its defense of literature and of the theater.

Thin and long-haired, with a boyish appearance, Nashe was a well-known figure in London, and his self-cultivated notoriety was only increased by a long-running literary quarrel between himself and Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey. It was Harvey who had first attacked Nashe in print, and Nashe responded later in the same year with Strange Newes of the Intercepting of Certain Letters (1592). So began an exchange of slanderous pamphlets that showed Nashe at his most boisterous and vituperative.

Strange Newes of the Intercepting of Certain Letters was written in the country at Croydon, where Nashe, eager to escape the plague that was sweeping London, took refuge as guest of the Archbishop John Whitgift. While in Croydon, he also wrote his only surviving play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament , which was probably performed in Croydon in 1592 but was not published until 1600. After returning to London, Nashe wrote the long Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1593), in which he made a comparison between the sins of the Jews that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the decayed morals of contemporary London, which, he argued, would bring a similar calamity. A born controversialist, Nashe had much to say about greedy merchants and corrupt public officials, and the outcry was such that he was forced to issue a denial that he was attacking any particular individual. This did not stop the London city council from taking action against him in December; Nashe was extricated from his ensuing difficulties only by the intervention of his influential acquaintance, Sir George Carey. Nashe stayed at the Carey family castle on the Isle of Wight until early 1594.

Returning to London once again, he published The Unfortunate Traveller: Or, The Life of Jack Wilton (1594), which he had completed the previous year. Describing the picaresque adventures of its protagonist, this book is sometimes called the first English novel. Later that year Nashe published The Terrors of the Night (1594), which he described as an “incredible narration” of a series of visions that came to a man in his last illness. Intended as an attack on superstition, the work discusses dreams and spirits in a rambling and digressive style that is typical of Nashe generally.

During 1595, Nashe worked on his final reply to Harvey, Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596). In this period, he was also trying to write plays, but on his own admission with little success. In 1597, Nashe was again involved in a dangerous controversy when he collaborated with Ben Jonson and others on a satirical play, The Isle of Dogs , now lost. When performed in July, the play was declared seditious by the authorities. Nashe’s lodgings were searched and his papers confiscated. Nashe claimed to have written only the induction and the first act, the remaining four acts being supplied by the players without his consent. Several of those involved in the play, including Jonson, were imprisoned, a fate Nashe avoided by fleeing to the coastal town of Yarmouth, in Norfolk. He arrived probably in December and remained there for six weeks.

After leaving Yarmouth, Nashe wrote his last pamphlet, Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe (1599), during Lent. The book arose out of his desire to thank the town of Yarmouth for its hospitality to him. It is not known where Nashe was living at the time, although he does comment that the book was written “in the country.” Nashe was certainly back in London by February, 1599, when he wrote the preface to Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe.

Several months later, in June, 1599, another disaster struck Nashe. The authorities issued an order confiscating Nashe’s books wherever they might be found and banning any further printing of them. The order also applied to Nashe’s adversary, Gabriel Harvey, as well as a number of other satirical writers. After the edict, little more was heard of Nashe, and in Charles Fitzgefrey’s Affaniae (1601), he is referred to as already deceased. No other facts about his death or place of burial are known.

Significance

Perhaps more than any other Elizabethan writer, Thomas Nashe had his finger on the pulse of the times. He kept his eyes and ears close to the chatter and bustle of the London streets, and his writings catch the rawness of life as it was lived in the 1590’s.

Although Nashe is usually described as a pamphleteer, the term gives little indication of the range of his work; the form in which his writing would have flourished best, journalism, had not yet been invented. Many of his pieces would qualify today as investigative reports or magazine feature articles. Not only did Nashe have a nose for news, he also possessed the ability to write quickly, with a helter-skelter style (which he called his “extemporall veine”) that was easily recognizable. Such a rapid style seemed to come naturally to him, but it was also necessitated by the conditions under which he lived. Lacking a wealthy patron, he chose to make a living from the popular press, which yielded small financial rewards and demanded a quick output.

Harassed by poverty and government censors and dying young, Nashe did not achieve all that his talents merited. As a satirist however, he influenced other Elizabethan writers such as Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. For example, Nashe’s distinctive use of language finds an echo in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (pr. c. 1593-1594); the character Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost (pr. c. 1594-1595) is widely believed to be based on Nashe; and Shakespeare also drew extensively, in Henry IV, Part I (pr. c. 1597-1598), on Nashe’s observations of the idiosyncrasies of speech and behavior.

Nashe’s Major Works

c. 1586-1587

• Dido, Queen of Carthage (with Christopher Marlowe)

1589

• The Anatomie of Absurditie

1589

• Preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon

1590

• An Almond for a Parrat

1591

• Preface to Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella

1592

• Preface to Robert Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier

1592

• Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters (also known as The Four Letters Confuted)

1592

• Summer’s Last Will and Testament

1592

• Pierce Penilesse, His Supplication to the Divell

1593

• Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem

1594

• The Unfortunate Traveller: Or, The Life of Jack Wilton

1594

• The Terrors of the Night

1596

• Have with You to Saffron-Walden

1597

• The Isle of Dogs (with Ben Jonson; no longer extant)

1599

• Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe

1899

• The Choise of Valentines, pb. 1899

Bibliography

Hibbard, G. R. Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. The most detailed critical study of Nashe, written with the intention of rescuing him from critical neglect. Contains some errors of chronology regarding Nashe’s writings, which are corrected in McGinn. Concludes that there was a gap between Nashe’s talents and what he was able to achieve with them.

Lewis, C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. London: Oxford University Press, 1954. Describes Nashe as the greatest of the Elizabethan pamphleteers and one of the most original writers in the English language. Lewis portrays Nashe as a literary showman who could keep a crowd entertained by his sheer virtuosity.

McGinn, Donald J. Thomas Nashe. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Probably the best place to start for an overall understanding of Nashe’s life and work. McGinn analyzes the works in chronological order and, in a concluding chapter about Nashe’s place in English literature, describes him as a sixteenth century H. L. Mencken. Includes a chronology of Nashe’s life and an annotated bibliography.

Moulton, Ian Frederick. Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Looks at the relationship between masculinity and English national identity in the erotic writings of Nashe, Ben Jonson, and several other Renaissance authors.

Nicholl, Charles. A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. The only full-length biography of Nashe, this work is so comprehensive it is unlikely to be superseded. Meticulous research sheds new light on many episodes in Nashe’s life and also gives a picture of London literary life in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Includes ten illustrations and twelve reproductions of documents.

Nielson, James. Unread Herrings: Thomas Nashe and the Prosaics of the Real. New York: P. Lang, 1993. An examination of the relationship between rhetoric and the real in Nashe’s pamphlets. Written in an extremely dense and playful style meant at once to mimic and to contest deconstructionist readings of Nashe. Includes bibliographic references.

Wells, Stanley, ed. Thomas Nashe: Selected Writings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965. Contains four of Nashe’s books in their entirety (with spelling modernized) and extracts from five others. Also contains a glossary and an introductory critical essay.

Wheeler, Laura Scavuzzo. “The Development of an Englishman: Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler.” In Historicizing Christian Encounters with the Other, edited by John C. Hawley. Washington Square: New York University Press, 1998. Study of Nashe’s representation of conversion to Christianity in The Unfortunate Traveler. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Yates, Julian. Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. This study of the misuse and outright failure of Renaissance objects includes a chapter on Nashe’s use of the printing press. Discusses both the rise of Renaissance printing and the effects of typographical errors on Nashe’s work. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.