Thomas Nashe

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Nashe was baptised in Lowestoft on the 30th of November 1567, the son of a curate who would eventually be awarded the living at the church of All Saints in West Harling. That modest Suffolk beginning gave little sign of what was coming: a writer who would pick fights with half of London's literary world, co-write a play so scandalous it landed his collaborator in jail, and produce some of the most energetic prose of the Elizabethan age. Nashe arrived in the capital sometime after leaving Cambridge around summer 1588, carrying a single manuscript under his arm. He died around 1601, probably still in his early thirties, in a place nobody recorded. Between those two dates, he published pamphlets that sold in multiple editions, circulated an erotic poem so explicit it was never printed, and somehow found time to write three short lyrics that anthologists keep reprinting four centuries later. The questions worth asking are: what drove a man of such obvious ability into endless controversy rather than steady patronage? What made Pierce Penniless one of the most popular pamphlets of its era? And what does a book about nightmares, written in 1594, tell us about how one Elizabethan mind pushed back against superstition?

• 2. From Lowestoft to London

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  William Nashe, the father, held his first post as curate in Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast. In 1573 the family moved inland to West Harling, near Thetford, after he secured the living at All Saints church. Of the seven children Janeth Nashe bore, only two survived childhood: Israel, born in 1565, and Thomas. Around 1581 Thomas entered St John's College, Cambridge, as a sizar, a student who earned his place partly through service to wealthier scholars. He took his bachelor's degree in 1586. Whether he intended to go further is unclear, but he never proceeded to a Master of Arts. His name appeared on a list of students due to attend philosophy lectures in 1588, and most biographers take that as the last firm evidence of his Cambridge presence. The reasons he left remain murky. His father may have died the year before. Richard Lichfield later claimed, with evident malice, that Nashe had fled possible expulsion for his role in a rowdy student theatrical called Terminus et non-terminus. William Covell, writing in Polimanteia, put it more gently: Cambridge had been "unkind to the one to wean him before his time." Nashe himself maintained, in Have With You to Saffron-Walden, that he could have become a fellow if he had chosen to stay. He arrived in London carrying a single work in the fashionable euphuist style, The Anatomy of Absurdity, and his first appearance in print came not with his own name on the cover but as the author of a preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon, offering what he described as a brief definition of art and an overview of contemporary literature.

• 3. The Pamphlet Wars

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  Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Divell, published in 1592, was among the most popular Elizabethan pamphlets ever printed. It was reprinted in 1593 and again in 1595, and in 1594 it was translated into French. The pamphlet is a prose satire narrated by Pierce, a man who has met with no good fortune and who addresses his bitter complaints directly to the devil. At times the line between Pierce and Nashe himself blurs; at other times Nashe portrays his narrator as an arrogant fool. The prose is complex, witty, anecdotal, and full of newly coined words and Latin phrases. The satire sharpens into genuine bite, and Nashe's style occasionally seems to relish its own difficulty. Nashe's friendship with Robert Greene pulled him into a separate quarrel with the Harvey brothers, Richard and Gabriel. In 1590, Richard Harvey's The Lamb of God took a swipe at the Menaphon preface. Greene's A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, two years later, included a passage on rope-makers that clearly targeted the Harveys, whose father had worked in that trade. The passage was removed from later editions, and Nashe may have written it. When Gabriel Harvey mocked Greene's death in Four Letters, Nashe answered with Strange News in 1592. He tried to make peace in the preface to Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem in 1593, but the appearance of Pierce's Supererogation shortly afterward reignited the dispute. Nashe's reply, Have with You to Saffron-Walden in 1596, was dedicated, possibly with sardonic intent, to Richard Lichfield, a Cambridge barber who had earlier attacked Nashe in print. Lichfield's tract, "The Trimming of Thomas Nash," appeared in 1597 and included a crude woodcut showing Nashe poorly dressed and wearing fetters.

• 4. Controversy and Suppression

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  In 1590 Nashe contributed a preface to an unlicensed edition of Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella. The edition was called in and the authorised second edition removed Nashe's contribution entirely. He was also drawn into the Martin Marprelate controversy, which pitted Puritan pamphleteers against the bishops of the Church of England. Nashe sided with the bishops. His precise role is hard to pin down; the three "Pasquill" tracts of 1589-1590 were once attributed to him and included in R. B. McKerrow's standard edition, but McKerrow himself later argued strongly against that attribution. An Almond for a Parrot, published in 1590 under the name "Cutbert Curry-knave," is now accepted as Nashe's work. Its dedication to the comedian William Kempe humorously claims that its author met Harlequin in Bergamo while returning from Venice in the summer of 1589. No evidence supports the idea that Nashe ever left England, and he never mentioned such a trip in any of his subsequent writing. In 1593, Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem, a pamphlet dedicated to Lady Elizabeth Carey, provoked the London civic authorities despite its outwardly devotional title, and Nashe was briefly imprisoned in Newgate Prison. Lady Elizabeth's husband, Sir George Carey, secured his release. The most serious episode came in 1597, when Nashe co-wrote The Isle of Dogs with Ben Jonson. The play was suppressed for its seditious content and never published. Jonson was jailed; Nashe's house was raided and his papers seized. Nashe had already fled to the country. He spent time in Great Yarmouth before eventually returning to London.

• 5. Plays and Poetry

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  In October 1592, while staying at Croydon Palace in the household of Archbishop John Whitgift, Nashe wrote Summer's Last Will and Testament. He called it a "show" with some resemblance to a masque. The plot follows Summer, who, sensing he is dying, reviews the performance of his servants before passing the crown to Autumn. The play was not published until 1600. Its frame narrator, William Sommers, was the historical jester of Henry VIII. Three poems drawn from the play have been reprinted often in anthologies of Elizabethan verse: "Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss," "Fair summer droops," and "Autumn hath all the summer's fruitful treasure." Beyond his own acknowledged works, Nashe may have had a hand in Henry VI, Part 1. Gary Taylor has argued that Nashe was the principal author of the play's first act. Nashe himself promoted the play in Pierce Penniless. His name also appears on the title page of Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, though the precise nature of his contribution is uncertain. Some editions of that play, still circulating in the eighteenth century but now lost, apparently contained memorial verses on Marlowe by Nashe, who counted the playwright as a friend. After the Isle of Dogs debacle Nashe retreated to Great Yarmouth, and that coastal town became the subject of his last known published work, Nashes Lenten Stuffe, which appeared in 1599.

• 6. The Erotic and the Rational

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  Sometime in the early 1590s Nashe produced The Choise of Valentines, an erotic poem that begins with a sonnet addressed to "Lord S." Two candidates have been proposed for that dedication: Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby, then known as Lord Strange, and the Earl of Southampton, to whom Nashe also dedicated The Unfortunate Traveller as "Lord Henry Wriothesley Earl of Southampton." The poem circulated only in manuscript and was never printed. It describes a Valentine's Day visit by a young man called Tomalin to a brothel where his lover, "Mistris Francis," has recently gone to work. The narrative is frank about Tomalin's failures and the resourcefulness of Mistress Frances. Contemporary authors Joseph Hall and John Davies of Hereford criticised it sharply for obscenity. Nashe tried to pre-empt such attacks by placing the work in the tradition of classical erotica, invoking Ovid. When accused more broadly of prostituting his pen, he acknowledged in 1596 that when "the bottom of my purse is turnd downeward" he had written erotic material for pay, for those he called "new-fangled Galiardos and Senior Fantasticos." His biographer Charles Nicholl observed that whatever the poem says about Nashe's own sexuality, there is "nothing second hand" about his evocations of sex. That same restless, empirical mind turned in a different direction in 1594 with The Terrors of the Night; Or A Discourse of Apparitions. Nashe dismissed dreams as "a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy which the day hath left undigested," and mocked attempts to read symbolic meaning into them: "What sense is there that the yolk of an egg should signify gold?" He set aside figures like "Robbin-good-fellowes, elves, fairies, hobgoblins" as creatures of superstition. The rationalist scepticism he expressed there invites comparison with Act 5 of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Theseus describes "the poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling" in terms that echo Nashe's own description of the "wheeling and rolling on of our braines."

• 7. Legacy and Remembrance

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  Nashe was still alive in 1599 when Nashes Lenten Stuffe was published, and dead by 1601, when Charles Fitzgeoffrey memorialised him in a Latin verse in Affaniae. Nobody recorded where he died or where he was buried. Thomas Dekker featured him in News from Hell in 1606, five years after his death. The anonymous Parnassus plays, dated 1598-1602, offered a eulogy. His output from first preface to final pamphlet spans a little over a decade: The Anatomy of Absurdity in 1589, through Strange News, Christ's Tears, The Unfortunate Traveller, and Have with You to Saffron-Walden, to Nashes Lenten Stuffe in 1599. The Isle of Dogs, co-written with Jonson in 1597, remains entirely lost. What survives is a body of work that ranges from devotional pamphlet to erotic poem, from anti-Martinist polemic to lyric verse, produced by a writer who, as William Covell noted, was weaned from Cambridge before his time and spent the rest of his short life making up for it in print.