Nashe, Thomas (Vol. 88) | John Berryman (essay date 1960)
John Berryman (essay date 1960)
SOURCE: Berryman, John. “Thomas Nashe and The Unfortunate Traveller.” In The Freedom of the Poet, pp. 9-28. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.
[In this essay, originally written in 1960 and reprinted in a posthumous collection of essays and stories, Berryman focuses on generic issues surrounding The Unfortunate Traveller and Nashe's strengths as a writer. The critic also discusses Nashe's public quarrel with Gabriel Harvey as providing instances of his best work.]
Considering how little we know of his short restless life, and how little we read his work, Thomas Nashe makes an oddly distinct impression. One sees a small man, passionate, racy, sharp (“young Juvenal, that biting Satirist, that lastly with me together writ a comedy”—so Robert Greene at the point of death1), Cambridge-trained, poor, writing like mad fantastic pamphlets, negligible plays, and parts of...
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