Short answers, pulled from the story.
Thomas Nashe, baptised on the 30th of November 1567 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, was an Elizabethan playwright, poet, satirist, and pamphleteer. He is significant for his novel The Unfortunate Traveller, his widely reprinted pamphlet Pierce Penniless, his defences of the Church of England, and three lyric poems drawn from his play Summer's Last Will and Testament that have remained in literary anthologies for centuries.
Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Divell, published in 1592, is a prose satire narrated by Pierce, a man who has met with no good fortune and addresses his complaints to the devil. It was among the most popular Elizabethan pamphlets, reprinted in 1593 and 1595, and translated into French in 1594.
The Isle of Dogs, co-written with Ben Jonson in 1597, was suppressed by the authorities for its seditious content and never published. Jonson was jailed; Nashe's house was raided and his papers seized, but Nashe had already fled to the country and spent time in Great Yarmouth before returning to London.
Nashe sided with the Church of England bishops in the Martin Marprelate controversy. His definite contribution is An Almond for a Parrot, published in 1590 under the pseudonym "Cutbert Curry-knave," which is now universally accepted as his work. Three other tracts were once attributed to him but R. B. McKerrow, who edited them, later argued strongly against that attribution.
The Choise of Valentines is an erotic poem Nashe wrote in the early 1590s, addressed with a sonnet to "Lord S," a dedication linked to either Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby, or the Earl of Southampton. The poem circulated only in manuscript and was never printed. It was sharply criticised for obscenity by contemporary authors Joseph Hall and John Davies of Hereford.
In The Terrors of the Night, published in 1594, Nashe argued that dreams are "a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy which the day hath left undigested" and dismissed attempts to read symbolic meaning into them. He regarded figures such as elves, fairies, and hobgoblins as products of superstition, while allowing that heaven-sent visions, distinct from ordinary dreams, might carry some meaning.