Nashe, Thomas (Vol. 88) | Lorna Hutson (essay date 1989)
Lorna Hutson (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: Hutson, Lorna. “Festivity and Productivity.” In Thomas Nashe in Context, pp. 72-99. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
[In this essay, Hutson provides the social and economic context for Nashe's writing. The critic finds in Nashe a transitional figure between new and old economies, comparing his work to that of Jonson, Herrick, and other contemporaries.]
We have seen how the need to inculcate responsible social attitudes through literature produced a schematically pre-fabricated or compendious style of discourse which could not but frustrate a writer whose special talent was, as was Nashe's, for improvisation. Prompted by his dissatisfaction with the costive, rhetoric-laden style of academic writing, Nashe initially located the opportunity for a more spontaneous creativity in the position of a commercial writer such as Robert Greene, who could respond flexibly to the market and, as Nashe wrote in the...
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