Nashe, Thomas
Nashe, Thomas (1567–c.1601),pamphleteer and playwright. Born in East Anglia, he went to Cambridge, and took up writing as a profession after gaining his BA in 1586. His tragedy Dido Queen of Carthage (1594), written with his fellow student Christopher Marlowe, is sometimes dated to their Cambridge years; the speech on the death of Priam performed by the First Player in Shakespeare's Hamlet (2.2.452–520) has sometimes been identified as a parody of it. His preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon (1589) alludes to the ur-Hamlet. In the late 1580s he was employed by the Church to write pamphlets against the Puritan satirist Martin Marprelate, and much of his time in the 1590s was devoted to composing a series of excoriating attacks on the scholar Gabriel Harvey, such as Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596). His best-known work, The Unfortunate Traveller (1595), is a fictional travelogue...
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