The importance of Nashe for Shakespeare's composition of his play and for his creation of Mercutio demands further investigation. To Evans's succinct account of dating Nashe's composition of Have with You, several points might be added for further consideration. McKerrow suggests that Nashe's allusion to writing for the press in his important letter to William Cotton, "which was evidently written about September, 1596.… probably refers to Have with You, which cannot yet have been published" (5:28-29). In this letter to Cotton, Nashe also refers to writing for the stage, but his hopes there have been thwarted because London's mayor and aldermen persecute the players who had known better days "in there old Lords tyme." McKerrow annotates this as apparently an allusion to the death of Lord Chamberlain Henry Carey, the first Lord Hunsdon, in July 1596, and he suggests that Nashe was probably associated "with the Chamberlain's men, for these alone would be affected by Hundson's death" (5:194). If so, Nashe's association with Shakespeare's company would increase the likelihood of Shakespeare's access to Nashe's Have with You.

Although Nashe's composition cannot be precisely dated and seems to have extended over a considerable period of time,³⁵ it appears that Nashe probably was busily at work finishing this piece in the late summer of 1596. Another overlooked allusion to Lord Hunsdon, this time not to the father but to the son, may help to substantiate this view. Nashe refers to the work of "a singular Scholler, one Master Heath, (a Follower of the right Honorable and worthie Lord of Hunsdon that now is)" (3:83). McKerrow explains that Thomas Heath dedicated his work against Harvey that appeared in 1583 to Sir George Carey (Baron Hunsdon) (4:342). But Nashe's explicit phrasing for the Lord of Hunsdon "that now is" (my italics) suggests that Sir George Carey is now the new or second Lord Hunsdon. He succeeded his father, Sir Henry Carey, the first Lord Hunsdon, who died on 23 July 1596, but he did not receive the title of Lord Chamberlain until March 1597. Consequently, as E. K. Chambers explains, Shakespeare's company "was properly known as the Lord Hunsdon's men from 22 July 1596 to 17 March 1597; before and after that period it was the Lord Chamberlain's men."³⁶ Sir George Carey was also a patron of Nashe (5:21). Nashe's reference to the present Lord Hunsdon here indicates that at least this passage was written after July 1596, and this reference would accord with the suggestion McKerrow offers from Nashe's letter to Cotton. Evans wisely cautions that the reference to performance of Romeo and Juliet by '"the L. of Hunsdon his Servants'" on the title page of the first quarto, published in 1597, might be "only a publisher's device to capitalise on the most recent performances and does not prove that the play was not acted earlier when Shakespeare's company was known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men." This reference, however, might also refer to the play's debut and its immediate popularity because the title page advertizes that the play "hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely."

Not only do Shakespeare's echoes from Nashe's Have with You appear scattered throughout Romeo and Juliet from its first to last scene, but also equally important to note is that Shakespeare's references from Nashe are culled from throughout the whole of his Have with You. McKerrow thinks that it is "not improbable that all the early part, as far as 33:30, was added just before it was sent to press" (4:302). If so, and if we accept Tobin's evidence from this early part of characterization hints for Shakespeare's Benvolio and Mercutio, then we must conclude that Shakespeare had access to either a nearly complete manuscript version or to its published version.

Several important points concerning Shakespeare's characterization of Mercutio might be added to Tobin's evidence taken from the supposedly latest part of Nashe's composition. Tobin stresses only Nashe's emphasis on "sportive wit" in his characterization of his interlocutor, Don Carneades, the boon companion to Domino Bentiuole, whose name probably serves for Shakespeare's Benvolio because that name appears in no other source.³⁷ But Nashe also describes Don Carneades as a good fighter—"who likewise is none of the unworthiest retainers to Madame Bellona" (3:22)—and there is an aggressive side to Shakespeare's Mercutio. Although McKerrow does not gloss Nashe's use of "Don Carneades," Nashe probably has in mind the famous Greek philosopher, Carneades, because later in Have with You Nashe mocks the praise given by Harvey's schoolmaster to Harvey's mind: "O acumen Carneadum" (3:64). Carneades's reputation for skepticism and rhetorical skill would suit Nashe's idea of this interlocutor as well as Shakespeare's own development of Mercutio.

Shakespeare's portrait of Mercutio is not far off the mark from Nashe and his inclination to loquaciousness, his claim to "frolicke spirits" (3:77), his skill in bawdry (3:30-31), his intolerance of vain fencing boasts, his resentment of boyish accusations, and his genius for personal satire replete with inventive name-calling and mock titles, all of which resonate in Nashe's wittiest and most scornful treatment of his quarrel against Harvey, Have with You to Saffron-Walden. In his quarrel with Harvey, Nashe opposes, as does Mercutio, airs and newfangledness (3:30-31). Nashe's hatred of fads—the "new fangled Goliardos and Senior Fantasticoes" (3:31) and Harvey's looking and speaking like an Italian and affecting "Italian puntilios" (3:76)—parallels Mercutio's animadversion against the "new tuners of accent," "fashion-mongers … who stand so much on the new form, that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench" (2.4.26-30). Like Mercutio's tirade against Tybalt, Nashe denounces Harvey as "idle and new fangled" (3:26), as a "swash-buckler" (3:55) whose "horrible insulting pride" (3:56) needs someone like Nashe "to humble him" (3:69). The princely airs of Harvey and Tybalt—that "spirit of Bragganisme" (3:109)—are precisely what Nashe and Mercutio claim to eschew. Mercutio's allegiance to male camaraderie in adopting a friend's cause in a quarrel is especially noteworthy because of the absence of such a motif from Brooke's poem, Shakespeare's chief source. In Brooke the briefly introduced element of youthful male friendship drops out after the unnamed counterpart to Shakespeare's Benvolio offers to Romeus his counsel about the cure for lovesickness (lines 101-48). Yet this very motif of a friend assuming the defense of another friend in a private quarrel undergirds the Elizabethan literary altercation with Nashe defending Lyly against Harvey.

Just as some critics have thought Nashe a model for Moth in Love's Labor's Lost,³⁸ it is tempting to suggest that Nashe, praised by Francis Meres as a "gallant young Iuuenall" (5:148), also provides some hints for Mercutio when Shakespeare seeks to enflesh a witty, aggressive, young masculine character who has a personal quarrel with another arrogant, quarrelsome enemy. Nashe's youthfulness was an issue in the quarrel, so that Harvey finds fault with Nashe's "minoritie of … beard" and calls him "Captarne of the boyes " (3:129). Nashe's reputation, as described by Izaak Walton, for "merry Wit," for being "a man of a sharp wit, and the master of a scoffing, Satyrical Pen" (5:47-48), lingers long after his premature death in 1601. Although Shakespeare inherited the name of "Mercutio" from Brooke's poem, for Shakespeare that name probably conveys nuances of ingenuity and eloquence derived from Mercury. Appropriately enough, mercurial Nashe associates himself especially with the winged Mercury, desiring "sprightly Mercury" to be his muse in Have with You (3:23-4). Nashe's nimble wit, capable of "a new kind of a quicke fight" (1:283), characterizes that of Mercutio as well, who also employs imagery of the fight in his "wild-goose chase" of matching wits with Romeo when he quips: "Come between us, good Benvolio, my wits faints" (2.4.57-60). Later in this same work, Nashe mocks Harvey's pretense to "attractive eloquence"—"the Mercurian heauenly charme of hys Rhetorique" (3:96)—and spoofs Harvey's desire to "stellifie" himself "next to Mercury" (3:107) when Nashe has invoked Mercury "to inspire [his] pen. "³⁹

Nashe's influence on Shakespeare's characterization of Mercutio also has provocative implications for recent critical discourse on Renaissance sexuality. Using mythographic evidence, Joseph A. Porter, for example, links Mercury to Mercutio through homosexuality, emphasizing the strongly phallic character of both. Porter stresses how Mercutio speaks to affirm male bonding against the incursions of women. He speculates that in killing off Mercutio, Shakespeare stifles that spokesman against romantic love as well as overcomes his own anxiety of influence in processing some of what is most disturbing in Marlowe, who can be seen as the embodiment of the Renaissance Mercury and Shakespeare's rival in several respects. Emphasizing what he sees as Mercutio's homosexual bawdry, Porter claims one of the prime textual examples to be what he finds an image of sodomy: "O Romeo, that she were / An open-arse, and thou a popp'rin pear" (2.1.37-38).⁴⁰ However, "open-arse" has been more compellingly glossed as an image of the pudendum on the basis of the known anatomical features of the medlar that cause it to be called the open-arse fruit.⁴¹ A definition from a sixteenth-century herbal suggests how this fruit could be so viewed: "the fruite … is of a browne russet colour, of a rounde proportion and some-what broade or flat … with a great broade nauel or Crowne at the toppe, or ende.… after they haue bene a while kept … they become soft and tender."⁴² Hence, Mercutio balances the female (medlar) and male (pear) genitalia for intercourse in his "fruitful" wordplay. However, the sense of Mercutio as the arch-advocate of male bonding does indeed pervade the play.

The topic of Mercutio's sexuality and aggression is a complex one. It can be argued that Mercutio's "phallocentrism" is not simply a "scorn of hetero-sexual love," nor is it simply "light intermittent misogyny," as Porter claims (197-98). Hatred of women is not so much at stake as is the use and abuse of women. Believing a man should "be rough with love," Mercutio advises Romeo: "You are a lover … / Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down" (1.4.17, 28), and Mercutio conjures Romeo "in his mistress' name" (2.1.28). Heterosexual activity is upheld as long as it remains at its lowest common denominator, at the brute level, the level of Sampson's and Gregory's sexual tyranny: "I will be civil with the maids; I will cut off their heads.… their maidenheads, take it in what sense thou wilt" (1.1.19-20, 22-23).⁴³ For the audience, the prince's opening denunciation of "mistempered weapons" (1.1.78) through bestial man's misuse of them may refer to more than one kind of foining and recall the "naked weapon" (1.1.29) wordplay that just preceded. Mercutio's preference for rough love serves as a foil to Romeo's romantic love until Romeo tragically adopts Mercutio's view of such love as "effeminate" (3.1.105) and embraces Mercutio's definition of manhood in terms of violence—fight and fury.

In evoking a male-dominance ethos where women are objects for male sexual pleasure and clearly take second place to male bonding, Mercutio differentiates himself from his friends Romeo and Benvolio, both of whom share a similarly described desire for romantic privacy (1.1.110, 117-21). Mercutio is never depicted as desiring such moody solitude, but rather he is ever the hub of his social wheel, the center of male conviviality. He even defines Romeo as becoming his true self once he stops groaning for love and resumes his male sociability: "Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo" (2.4.72-73). Mercutio's social definition of selfhood accords well with Nashe's own penchant because, as Hibbard reminds us, Nashe "lives wholly and only in society" (252). Although Porter argues that Shakespeare "conjures the god Mercury and also the raised spirit of Marlowe" (163) in Mercutio, Nashe's essential sociability complements the fraternal spirit of Mercury that Porter emphasizes (32) but that Marlowe does not typically exhibit.⁴⁴ Porter also associates Mercury, the classical deliverer of dreams, with Mercutio's Queen Mab so that in this speech "what we have is a kind of possession of Mercutio by the god" (104). But a Mercury-Mercutio linkage through dreams operates not by "possession" but by detachment. Mercutio, as a foil to Romeo, mocks dreams, and as a dream scoffer Mercutio resembles not Marlowe but Nashe who wrote a very clevery jeu d'esprit on dreams, The Terrors of the Night (1594).⁴⁵ Shakespeare's emphasis on Mercutio's pugnacity tends to contradict Porter's otherwise richly suggestive argument for Mercutio as an avatar of Mercury because pugnacity is not a trait typical of Mercury, despite the variety of his attributes. Mercutio's quarrelsomeness, so essential to the duels on behalf of friends at the play's tragic turning point, is not unlike Nashe's defensive posture for his friend Lyly. However, Mercutio's comic combativeness—his verbal sparring—does modulate into tragic aggression—his physical dueling—that costs his own life.

Although Nashe's own combative spirit is a quality he shares with his admired friend Marlowe, Shakespeare's particular expression of Mercutio's aggressiveness points to Nashe, who was as quarrelsome as he was witty and who itched to use a sword against Harvey (3:134). Even if we do not overrule but qualify Porter's argument for the influence of Marlowe on Mercutio, it would seem that Nashe makes an equally good, if not better, candidate for real-life influence. Porter claims that "in plot the most striking homology is between Mercutio's death and Marlowe's" (138), and he generates a Romeo-Shakespeare link from his Mercutio-Marlowe association, suggesting that Romeo's indirect responsibility for Mercutio's death presents "a trace of Shakespeare's unconscious assumption of responsibility for Marlowe's death" (141).⁴⁶ Mercutio does indeed resemble Marlowe in the fact of early death resulting from a quarrel. But the manner and motive of Marlowe's quarrel is very different from Mercutio's where the language and emphases, as we have seen, indicate Nashean influence. Inside a tavern room, with three other men present, Marlowe dies from a dagger wound during a quarrel with Ingram Frizer over the supper bill. This is no outdoor rapier duel in defense of a friend's reputation against an insulting enemy.

Even Marlowe's earlier duel in Hog Lane, not considered by Porter, might seem more apropos for Mercutio's duel but that it differs from Shakespeare's characterization of an intractable Mercutio who dies as a result of his duel. In this swordfight, Marlowe neither suffers a wound nor dies because he withdraws from his combat against William Bradley after his friend Thomas Watson arrives. Responding to the clamor the people raise against the fight, Watson seeks to part the combatants to keep the queen's peace, according to the coroner's jury, but as Mark Eccles suggests, he may also have intended to aid Marlowe against Bradley with whom he already was at odds.⁴⁷ Unlike the peacemaker Romeo, Watson does not raise his arm or interpose his body but rather draws his sword. When Bradley sees Watson with drawn sword, he attacks and severely wounds Watson. Defending himself, Watson retreats into a ditch whereupon he finally strikes Bradley a mortal blow. This historic duel is superficially suggestive for the duel in Romeo and Juliet, namely, the intervention of a third man to part two combatants with one being killed as a result. However, Marlowe's retirement from this skirmish, despite his bleeding friend's peaceful intervention and posture of self-defense, contrasts markedly with Mercutio's quarrelsome instigation against Tybalt as well as his refusal to withdraw. Nor does "newly entertain'd revenge" (3.1.171) motivate Watson to fight because his friend Marlowe has not been slain, unlike the much more problematic situation the avenger Romeo faces.

If we entertain the possibility that Shakespeare found Nashe suggestive for his characterization of Mercutio, what more might we glean from the Harvey-Nashe quarrel? Unlike Marlowe but like Mercutio, Nashe had a reputation for an effervescent satiric wit and for a decidedly bawdy bent reflected in his life and literature. As Bruce R. Smith has argued, what moderns term "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" may not have been necessarily opposed categories in Renaissance England.⁴⁸ Nashe, as a possible real-life model for Mercutio, would be an intriguing instance of this idea, and a consideration of him also raises provocative questions about the place of libertine sexuality in Elizabethan London.

Evidence about Nashe as a young rakehell in London who probably engaged with both sexes in wanton behavior parallels the sense of double play that Mercutio seems to convey through his heterosexual bawdry and his possibly implicit homosexual position as the keynoter for male bonds. Some of the evidence comes from Nashe's own pen, but the bulk comes from his adversary Gabriel Harvey. Concerning the latter, we must bear in mind the complex evolution of the Harvey-Nashe quarrel, traced so carefully by McKerrow (5:65-110), and the tendency in such personal satire to hyperbolic invective and fictitious embroidery of skeletal facts. It is worth observing that Harvey initially thought well enough of Nashe to describe Nashe as "a proper yong man if aduised in time" (1:170). Oddly enough in a letter directed against Nashe, Harvey evidently recognized Nashe's talents as a writer to group him with other accomplished writers, like Spenser and Daniel, for "their studious endeuours … in enriching, & polishing their natiue tongue, neuer so furnished, or embellished as of late" (1:218-19).⁴⁹ Nashe originally counterattacked Richard Harvey, Gabriel's brother, and did not attack Gabriel himself until his Strange News (1592), and then he did so violently. After this attack by Nashe, Gabriel begins his leveling of specific sexual accusations against Nashe in his Pierces Supererogation (1593) and his A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), the latter being a letter that McKerrow suggests Harvey never intended to publish (5:103-04). Even bearing in mind these provisos, the evidence is telling.

Nashe's Christ's Tears over Jerusalem (1593) precedes in print Harvey's attacks and records Nashe's religious "conversion," his turning away from his past "weake … deedes" (2:9).⁵⁰ Nashe repents his vain writings, including "some spleanatiue vaines of wantonnesse" written to supply his private needs (2:13). In his treatment of London's sins of lust, Nashe laments "this City-sodoming trade" of "priuate Stewes" (2:152-53), upbraiding both woman's self-debasement and man's contribution to that defilement (2:154). In so doing, Nashe reveals his own personal knowledge of such houses, confirming Harvey's accusation (2:91):

The worlde woulde count me the most licentiate loose strayer vnder heauen, if I shoulde vnrippe but halfe so much of their veneriall machiauelisme as I haue lookt into. We haue not English words enough to vnfold it. Positions & instructions haue they, to make theyr whores a hundred times more whorish and treacherous.… I am weary of recapitulating theyr roguery. I woulde those that shoulde reforme it woulde take but halfe the paynes in supplanting it that I haue done in disclosing it. (2:153)

Likewise, Nashe's brothel poem, The Choice of Valentines (3:403-16), runs in the same vein of hetero-sexual bawdiness native to Mercutio. Nashe concludes that "Ouids wanton Muse did not offend"; in following Ovid, his own mind is "purg'd of such lasciuious witt" (3:416). But in considering the bawdry of Nashe's The Choice of Valentines, or Nashe's Dildo, as it is sometimes entitled, Hibbard is puzzled why this poem acquired so much notoriety so quickly: "Its bawdry is of the elementary, direct, indecent kind. Nashe's attitude to sexual matters is too normal and healthy to be anything but dull" (57). Although Hibbard's assessment of the poem's bawdry is accurate enough, some Elizabethan sensibilities could be aggravated by Nashe's own personal reputation for loose living and his first-person narration of his visit to a brothel on St. Valentine's Day, coupled with his almost journalistic description of detail that is not at all acceptably filtered through any classical myth, such as the stories of Hero and Leander or Venus and Adonis.⁵¹ Hibbard rightly suggests that Nashe's poverty probably constrained him to be a ghostwriter of bawdy verses for other gentlemen, and The Choice of Valentines is cited as the surviving example (55). But both Nashe (3:30-31) and Harvey imply that many such rhymes came from Nashe's impoverished pen; therefore, Harvey rails that Nashe has written "his owne vanities in a thousand sentences, and whole Volumes of ribaldry; not to be read but vpon a muck-hill, or in the priuyest priuie of the Bordello" (2:233). Nashe's attitude to sexual matters is anything but dull if we are to accept as even partially true any of Harvey's accusations and Nashe's admissions.

Harvey condemns Nashe's disorderly erotic behavior with men and women. In Pierces Supererogation, Harvey indicts Nashe's "brothell Muse" that "needes be a young Curtisan of ould knauery" in writing "bawdye, and filthy Rymes, in the nastiest kind.… to putrify gentle mindes":

Phy on impure Ganimeds, Hermaphrodits, Neronists, Messalinists, Dodecomechanists, Capricians, Inuentours of newe, or reuiuers of old leacheries, and the whole brood of venereous Libertines.… the sonnes of Adam, & the daughers of Eue, haue noe neede of the Serpentes carowse to set them agogg: Sodome still burnetii; and although fier from heauen spare Gomorra, yet Gomorra stil consumeth itselfe. (2:91-92)

Harvey even objects to the moral harm of "amorous Sonnets," observing that the devil's dam is "an old bawde" who needs not "the broccage of a young Poet" (2:92). Later in this same text, Harvey complains against "the poulkat of Pouls-churchyard" (2:273):

Agrippa detesteth his [Nashe's] monstrous veneries, and execrable Sodomies.… the most-impudent Ribald, that euer tooke penne in hand.… the Ring leader of the corruptest bawdes, and miscreantest rakehells.… His wanton disciples … in their fantasticali Letters, and Bacchanall Sonnets, extoll him monstrously, that is, absurdly: as the onely Monarch of witt. (2:271-72)

In his New Letter, Harvey questions the sincerity of Nashe's "conversion" by pitting Nashe's words against his deeds:

but still to haunt infamous, or suspected houses, tauernes, lewd company, and riotous fashions, as before, (for to this day his behauiour is no turnecoate, though his stile be a changeling).… Though Greene were a Iulian, and Marlow a Lucian: yet I would be loth, He [Nashe] should be an Aretin: that … discoursed the Capricious Dialogues of rankest Bawdry: that penned one Apology of the diuinity of Christ, and another of Pederastice, a kinde of harlatry, not to be recited. (1:288-91)⁵²

Nashe's fantastically satiric wit and extremely bawdy lines are captured in Shakespeare's creation of Mercurio, whereas in Brooke's poem there is no satiric emphasis, and the only sexual clue is that Mercutio is bold among maids (lines 257-59). Nashe's response to Harvey is intriguing because it may also suggest something about the place of libertine sexuality in Elizabethan London. Nashe does not specifically defend his private life against Harvey's charges; perhaps he feared accusations of protesting too much.⁵³ But what Nashe is concerned about defending is his public image as a man of letters. In the opening pages of Have with You, Nashe immediately takes up the glove to rejoice that his poverty compelled him to prostitute his pen in writing bawdry for recompense from some of the "newfangled" gentlemen (3:31). The unidentified author of The Trimming of Thomas Nashe mocks Nashe's poverty by telling a story about how Nashe and his "fellow Lusher" lay together in coleharbor and had but one pair of breeches between them so that they had to take turns, one lying in bed while the other wore the breeches, to go cony catching for victuals.⁵⁴ However, the emphasis in this passage is not on sexuality but on humbling poverty. One could routinely expect charges of loose living in personal satire as vitriolic as the Harvey-Nashe quarrel becomes. But Nashe's own admissions give Harvey's charges particular heft.

However, it would be grossly misleading to intimate that these charges inform the core of Harvey's attack. As Nashe's response indicates, the main thrust of criticism always centers on the major sin of false pride; Nashe's "wild Phantasie," unschooled "in the shop of curious Imitation," needs more acquaintance "at the hand of Art" (2:277). It is "the ignorant Idiot" (2:275), far more than "the bumm of Impudency" (2:273), that galls Harvey, and this accords well with the medieval-Renaissance hierarchy of the seven deadly sins that ranks pride, the perversion of man's godlike reason, as a worse sin than lechery to which man's body so easily falls prey. Thus, of the five senses, the sense of touch is ranked the lowest, and King Lear voices this viable perspective: "Adultery? / Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery?"⁵⁵ By the time of the Victorians, however, this hierarchy of vices has been turned on its head, and sins of the flesh ranked most reprehensible. No small wonder then that the rough honesty and graphic articulation of Mercutio's Elizabethan bawdry has been continually cleaned up by later editors who have a new sensibility about such matters.

As bawdy as Mercutio's lines are, and they are probably the bawdiest in all of Shakespeare, Mercutio's nimble wittiness, like Nashe's, raises him up so that he is viewed by his male companions, as Nashe is by his, as a leader, indeed "the onely Monarch of witt," as Harvey complains (2:271). Nashe, who self-consciously imitates the Italian satirist Aretino (3:152), is so outrageously witty that it is hard to out-Nashe Nashe, as Harvey's own effort reveals when he tries that approach (2:275).⁵⁶ We need to understand better the emphases of a world where social privilege can out-weigh sexual indiscretion, where being poor and breechless or being born the son of a ropemaker levels more shame than being accused of lechery, where the use of one's wit overshadows the use of one's body. The dramatic history of the popular and disturbing Mercutio sheds light on real-life conditions then and now, as we seek to unravel our responses to Mercutio, whose base string of sexuality, like the Nurse's, predominately contrasts with, but also paradoxically parallels at points, the more refined love of Romeo and Juliet. Hibbard does not link Nashe to Mercutio, but his final assessment of Nashe emphasizes traits that are most appropriate to our discussion of Nashe's influence on how Shakespeare characterizes Mercutio: Nashe's impressiveness of personality on his peers; his calculated awareness of his impact on an audience; his sympathy for an audience of young men who, like Nashe, were "hostile to Puritanism and the middle-class ethos, witty, caustic, and dissatisfied"; his "biting satirical wit" in his mastery of burlesque and parody; and his playful fascination with language that renders some of his work a jeu d'esprit (250-53). Placing Shakespeare's first romantic tragedy within a historical context is a more complex business than we have usually persuaded ourselves.

It would appear that the burden of proof is rapidly shifting to those who would deny Nashe's influence on Shakespeare, particularly the influence from Have with You. The evidence presented here, like the evidence presented earlier by John Dover Wilson, J. M. M. Tobin, and G. Blakemore Evans, demonstrates Shakespeare's enduring interest in and use of Nashe's works. As a dramatist, Shakespeare would have been reasonably attracted to Nashe as "an improviser" in prose who "works in terms of what may be described as scenes" (Hibbard, 147). Nashe's Have with You, which he called a "Comedie" (3:69), is particularly attractive as a conversational script, a self-proclaimed dialogue wherein "Auditors" (3:42) are addressed and Harvey's written "Pedantisme" (3:42) is presented as the "Oration." Shakespeare had good reason to admire Nashe's style. Some of Nashe's talents as a writer include his inventiveness with the English language, his sharp rendering of London life, and his awareness of narrative voice. As a professional controversialist, Nashe cultivated a rich prose vocabulary in a style peculiar to himself—his "fantasticali Satirisme" (2:12). He scorned English affectations and used freely the vernacular for his burlesque effects. But when English monosyllables would not suffice, he compounded his words and coined words from foreign languages in order to create a style that "must bee swelling and boystrous" if it, like a strong wind, is to have "any power or force to confute or perswade" (2:183-84).

What I wish to indicate here is that Shakespeare found Nashe, the man and his work, a creative stimulus for his own artistic imagination. Shakespeare's interest in Nashe goes beyond verbal echoes to include subject matter, stylistic flair, personal attitudes, and even Nashe's self-styled literary role as a professional jester that Hibbard has so aptly analyzed (251-52). It is Nashe's professional performance as the witty jester, always keenly aware of his audience, who could stingingly satirize contemporary types, much as Mercutio depicts the fashionable Tybalt, that contributes most to influencing Shakespeare's creation of his self-conscious performer of verbal acrobatics. Mercutio entertains his audience, much like Nashe, by using his versatile wit to make much of little as he always lands on his feet. But the darker side is also there, and Hibbard rightly notes Nashe's "fascinated interest in the grotesque, not to mention the deep attraction towards violence" (250) that pervades so much of his work. This violent aggressiveness also bonds Nashe and Mercutio.

As Kenneth Muir and G. K. Hunter maintain, Shakespeare's reading is more extensive than has been formerly held, and he generally devotes more careful attention than his contemporaries to the collection of his source material.⁵⁷Romeo and Juliet has long been considered one of the few plays that seem to have a single source, but given the pivotal "Prince of Cattes" passage, along with the host of other verbal echoes, the evidence cumulatively and unmistakably points to an important influence of Nashe's Have with You to Sqffron-Walden on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, helping us to date the composition of that play in the last half of 1596. It appears that Nashe also provides for Shakespeare a viable milieu for the combative and sexual male ethos that Shakespeare found especially promising for the mercurial Mercutio he was to create from the barest of hints in his literary source material. Above all, the analysis of borrowings presented here also reveals how fertile is the transformative power of Shakespeare's imagination in shaping "the airy word" (1.1.80) as he unifies disparate elements from Nashe's Have with You to Saffron-Walden to create the artistically coherent world of his first romantic tragedy.

Notes

¹ All references are to Romeo and Juliet, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, New Cambridge Shakespeare edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and are cited parenthetically in my text. Evans examines the question of chronology (4-6), and he favors the case for Nashe's influence on Shakespeare, based chiefly on J. J. M. Tobin's arguments (see Tobin, "Nashe and the Texture of Romeo and Juliet," Notes and Queries 27 [1980]: 161-62). To Tobin's list of verbal parallels, Evans adds the word "coying"; see 3 n. 7. See also I am deeply grateful to Franklin B. Williams, Jr., and Bruce R. Smith for their invaluable advice in their reading of this essay.

² See Thomas Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (1904-10; rpt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 3:51; hereafter cited in the text.

³ G. R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 221; see also

⁴ See McKerrow, Nashe, 4:327 nn. 29-30. He implicitly entertains the possibility of "savour," but he asserts "favour" is the correct reading.

⁵ See McKerrow, Nashe, 4:327; Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in 'The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ' ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 1:300, 204. If Shakespeare editors cite Nashe's passage as illustrative evidence, they imply or explicitly state that Nashe, like Shakespeare, identifies "Tibault" as "the Prince of Cattes." See, for example, editions of Romeo and Juliet by George Lyman Kittredge, John Dover Wilson and George Ian Duthie, T. B. J. Spencer, John E. Hankins, Frank Kermode (Riverside), Brian Gibbons, and G. Blakemore Evans. Cf. also, Tobin, "Nashe and the Texture of Romeo and Juliet," 165, 167, 172; Evans, 2.4.18n.

⁶ I am very grateful to three experts in Reynardian literature—Kenneth Varty, Hubertus Menke, and Thomas W. Best—for confirming my findings that neither "Tibault" as a name for the cat ("Tibert") nor the title "Prince of Cats" appears in any recorded versions of the medieval beast epic. For the misleading conflation of the names "Tibert" and "Tibault" for the Reynardian cat, see Staunton, cited in Romeo and Juliet, ed. H. H. Furness, Variorum Shakespeare edition (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1899), 119 n. 18.

⁷ Nashe quotes extensively, but not always accurately. There is an interesting example from Have with You that illustrates this. Despite Nashe's close work with Harvey's text against him, Pierces Supererogation, Nashe refers to Harvey's fencing master as "Tom Burwell" (3:134) while Harvey calls him "Tom Burley." See Gabriel Harvey, The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 3 vols. (1884; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), 2:327; hereafter cited in the text.

⁸ See William Baldwin, Beware the Cat, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr., and Michael Flachmann (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1988); the editors note Isegrim is the wolf in Reynard the Fox, but a cat in Baldwin's text (30, 37, 46, 47, 51, 68). All references to Baldwin's pamphlet are to this edition; see "Textual Note," xxix-xxx. I am indebted to Franklin B. Williams, Jr., for bringing this text to my attention. Cf. also, William Baldwin, "Beware the Cat" and "The Funerals of King Edward the Sixth, " ed. William P. Holden, Connecticut College Monograph 8 (New London: Connecticut College, 1963), that reprints the 1584 copy at the Folger Shakespeare Library. See OED, "Isegrim."

⁹ The female cat Isegrim is never ranked a prince; Isegrim is an assistant to the gray cat Grisard, the counselor to Cammoloch, who is identified as "chief prince among cats." Later Glascalon is called "chief prince of the cats" (see Baldwin, 36-37, 47). Grisard, Polnoir, and Isegrim are called "the commissioners" (51); for the orderly and courtly world of these cats, see 46, 47, 51. The conversational format of Baldwin's satire also probably influences Nashe's similar framing of his Have with You as a dialogue of male friends who use the "oration" of another to mock him with his own words. Nashe admired (3:20) Baldwin's earlier and popular Treatise of Morali Phylosophye (1547); Nashe would especially appreciate the blend of fictional prose narrative and religious satire in Baldwin's Beware the Cat.

¹⁰ For example, in the lines immediately following Nashe's "Tibault" passage, Nashe cites Harvey's "Muske is a sweete curtezan, and sugar and honey daintie hipocrytes" and spoofs this by addressing Harvey's metaphors as "Madame Muske, … your worships, Master Sugar & Master Honie" (3:51).

¹¹ For the meaning of "Tybalt" and other related issues, see my article, "'Myself Condemned and Myself Excus'd': Tragic Effects in Romeo and Juliet," Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 352-54.

¹² For Nashe's playful use of "prince" and his disdain of princely language, see 3:24, 3:103; The Unfortunate Traveller, 2:209-10. Of the many times Shakespeare uses "prince," only once is it meant to be witty, in Berowne'sy'ew d'esprit on the paradoxical giantdwarf Dan Cupid, "Dread Prince of Plackets, King of Codpieces" (LLL, 3.1.184). As Evans (5) notes, this play's revised version of 1597 may be influenced by Romeo and Juliet. Moreover, Shakespeare's precise description of Cupid here may be influenced by Nashe's similar description of Harvey in Have with You as "Codpisse Kinko, and Sir Murdred of placards" (3:129), a passage to be examined later. See Richard David, ed., Love's Labor's Lost, 4th ed. New Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1951), xxix-xxx, xxxix-xliv, for how Love's Labor's Lost also might recall the Harvey-Nashe quarrel.

¹³ The mere appearance of the names of "Grimalkin" and "Robin Goodfellow" in Baldwin's text cannot serve as persuasive proof that Shakespeare knew this text; these names are too common by the time of Shakespeare's Macbeth (1.1.8, "grey Malkin") and A Midsummer Night's Dream (2.1.34). See Ringler and Flachmann, 11, 16, 60; Holden, 31, 35.

¹⁴ I have not been able to locate this reference in Nashe's works.

¹⁵ See Tobin, "Nashe and the Texture of Romeo and Juliet," 169. Nashe also refers to their quarrel as such "bandyings as had past bewixt vs" and his "strappadoing" and "torturing" Gabriel Harvey (3:91).

¹⁶ Nashe uses "scratching" in a general sense to signify fighting, as well as the construction "scratche with" used later in his text (3:92), but no weapons are specified in either of these passages. Shakespeare never uses the construction "scratche with." He does use, however, Nashe's general sense of scratching as fighting but embellishes it.

¹⁷ Cf. The Rape of Lucrece: "And was afeared to scratch her wicked foe" (line 1035) with her "poor hand" (line 1030), but "And with my knife scratch out the angry eyes / Of all the Greeks that are thine enemies" (lines 1469-70). See The Rape of Lucrece, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1733-34, 1738; all quotations from Shakespeare's works, except Romeo and Juliet, are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

¹⁸ See OED, "Fiddlestick," sb. 2.

¹⁹ See Evans, 3.1.40n., 4.5.110-11nn.

²⁰ For the accusation Nashe is a "piperly makeplay, or makebate," see Richard Harvey's Lamb of God (1590), in McKerrow, Nashe, 5:180.

²¹ Baldwin might serve again as an inspiration to Nashe because in his Beware the Cat "Catch-rat" is the name of the cat who falsely accuses "Mousesleyer" (51). For a later ballad (1615?) on the foreign travels of the rat-catcher, see STC 207411. We should also note that the word "rat" comes as a surprise in Shakespeare's context because his three other rodent references in the play, both before and after this scene, are to the "mouse" (1.4.40, 3.1.100, 3.3.31). Only through Mercutio, whose satiric vocabulary has been influenced most by Nashe's, is "rat" introduced, in "rat-catcher" and in a list of the animals who fight by scratching (3.1.91). Shakespeare figuratively uses "mouse-hunt" (4.4.11) later, and he might have coined "mouse-catcher" here to serve his needs.

²² For Nashe's other uses of "princox," see 1:44, 205; 2:309.

²³ Shakespeare's figurative usage of "demesnes," likening Rosaline's sexual anatomy of high and adjacent regions to geographical domains, may recall the spirit of his Venus and Adonis (lines 229-40).

²⁴ I surmise that Nashe's figurative use of "demeanes or adiacents" in parallel construction with his quotation from Lily's grammar means that Harvey abortively imitates verses from that place or from its adjoining places or "domains." But Nashe may also intend a bawdy play on "asse" as "arse."

²⁵ See Evans's notes on 2.4.77-82. As Evans notes, editors present different glosses for Romeo's line as well as place the stage direction for the Nurse's and Peter's entries either after Romeo's line, as Evans does, or before his line. If the latter choice is adopted, "gear" is usually taken as referring depreciatively to the Nurse's clothes or "stuff which would accord well with Mercutio's first response to the Nurse and Peter: "Two, two: a shirt and a smock" (2.4.84). Cf. LLL 5.2.303: "disguised like Muscovites, in shapeless gear."

²⁶ See OED, "Gear," sb. 8, sb.5b.

²⁷ See The Rape of Lucrece, "Distress likes dumps when time is kept with" (1127); Two Gentlemen of Verona, "To their instruments tune a deploring dump" (3.2.84). Even William Painter's English version of the Romeo and Juliet story from Boaistuau uses "sorrowful dumpes"; see Evans, 174 n. 104.

²⁸ See Tobin, "Texture of Romeo and Juliet" 166-67, 174 n. 15; "Nashe," 161-62. "Roperipe" appears in Ql; McKerrow notes the possible parallel between Shakespeare's "ropery/roperipe" and Nashe's "Rupenrope" (4.334-35). Evans compares "ropery" (knavery) to "roperipe" ("ready for the hangman"), 112 n. 122. Cf. The Taming of the Shrew, 1.2.112; The Comedy of Errors, 4.4.90.

²⁹ Cf. Nashe's use of "ropes" (3:127). Cf. Nashe's Strange News (1592) for this motif in his quarrel with Harvey: "Maister Birdes Letter shall not repriue you from the ladder.… Ergo, he is no Rope-maker" (1:274); cf. "the Ladder" (2:304).

³⁰ I am indebted to Alan C. Dessen for the information that all the references to ladders of cords or ropes in extant English dramatic literature postdate Shakespeare's use.

³¹ See Olin H. Moore, The Legend of Romeo and Juliet (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1950), 77-78, 90, 135. Cf. Brooke's "corden ladder … with two strong and crooked yron hookes," in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), vol. 1, lines 775-76, 813-14, 832. Cf. the other possible English source, William Painter, trans., The Palace of Pleasure, ed. Joseph Jacobs (1890; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1966), "Rhomeo and Iulietta," 3:92-93, 99.

³² Shakespeare's use of the rope ladder also cultivates directional imagery (ascent/descent) native to the Elizabethan public theater. "Ascent" for the lovers understandably has life-associated connotations, even in Friar Lawrence's knowing "lamentation" for Juliet (4.5.71-74), and "descent" usually conveys death-associated nuances, as in separation and death itself (cf. 3.5.54-56, 5.1.20). Thomas Middleton reveals his understanding of Shakespeare's use of this prop in his own dramatic parody of Romeo and Juliet, his play The Familie of Love (London, 1608), sig. D3^V : "a ladder of Ropes; if she would let it downe; for my life he would hang himselfe in't."

³³ See William Rossky, "Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic," Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958): 49-73.

³⁴ Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. H. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 24, 32, 36. See Rossky, 49-53, 73. Cf. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1962), 5.100-21.

³⁵ For the complicated problem of dating the composition of Nashe's Have with You, see McKerrow, Nashe, 4:302; cf. Evans, 3. Nashe indicates that he has been gestating this text since "the hanging of Lopus [1594]," although not working on it continually (3:18). As Evans rightly notes, we cannot be certain which Candlemas Term (23 January to 12 February) of what year Nashe has in mind for the projected publication (3:133; Evans, 3 n. 5). However, two other references have gone unnoticed. Nashe declares he is half done with a comedy on Harvey, to be acted "in Candlemas Tearme" (3:114), and he concludes by promising "more battring engins" against Harvey that he will "keepe backe till the next Tearme" (3:139). Perhaps this comedy is what Nashe intends when he refers to writing for stage (and press) in his letter to Cotton, dated about September 1596 (5:28). Nashe's references, occurring at the end of his text, to anticipated publication in Candlemas Term of different works on the same satiric topic suggest that he has one specific Candlemas Term in mind, probably that of 1596/97. Perhaps Nashe's state of poverty, always a misfortune in his life but particularly acute at the time he writes Cotton, prompted an earlier than anticipated publication of Have with You, perhaps shortly after September 1596.

³⁶ See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 2:195.

³⁷ Tobin, "Texture of Romeo and Juliet," 167-68, 172.

³⁸ See David, ed., Love's Labor's Lost, xxxix-xliii.

³⁹ Nashe links himself to nimble Mercury in his critique of Gabriel Harvey's style that Nashe feels is opposite to his own: "his inuention is ouerweaponed; he hath some good words, but he cannot writhe them and tosse them to and fro nimbly, or so bring them about, that hee maye make one streight thrust at his enemies face" (1:282). Nashe's imagery of the fight is again revealed when he declares Harvey is resentful of this Aretine-like "new kind of a quicke fight" because Harvey's "decrepite slow-mouing capacitie cannot fadge with" it (1:283).

⁴⁰ See Joseph A. Porter, Shakespeare's Mercutio, His History and Drama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 143-63. For Porter's analysis of Mercury's importance for Mercutio, see pp. 11-94. We should also note that Nashe associates the planet Mercury with nimbleness, such as characterizes his own style. See Nashe, 1:268; n. 39 above.

⁴¹ See Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1969), "et cetera," 101-02; Evans, 91 nn. 36, 38. Cf. OED, "Medlar," 2. Porter says Partridge avoids "mention of even heterosexual sodomy" (161), but in the revised edition of Partridge's book he explicitly analyzes and argues against that.

⁴² Rembert Dodoens, trans. Henry Lyte, A Niewe Herball; or Historie of Plantes (Antwerp: Henry Loë, 1578), sigs. Ppp-Ppp^v . Cf. John Gerard, The Herball; or Generali Historie of Plantes (London: John Norton, 1597), 1265-66.

⁴³ Cf. Nashe's jest about Harvey's bawdy "striking" pun and truculent posture with Queen Elizabeth's "Maids of Honour" (3:75).

⁴⁴ Robert E. Knoll, for example, suggests the "only love [Marlowe] knew was self-fulfillment," despite being a cynosure among his contemporaries (see Knoll, Christopher Marlowe [New York: Twayne, 1969], 23).

⁴⁵ For Nashe's influence on Shakespeare's use of dreams and Queen Mab, see my essay, "No 'Vain Fantasy': Shakespeare's Refashioning of Nashe for Dreams and Queen Mab," in "Romeo and Juliet": Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Jay L. Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995).

⁴⁶ Regarding the complex issue of tragic responsibility given contemporary duello ethic, see my essay, '"Draw, If You Be Men': Saviolo's Significance for Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 163-89.

⁴⁷ For this combat, see Mark Eccles, Christopher Marlowe in London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 9-14, 59-60, 171. Eccles suggests Marlowe was probably fighting Bradley on behalf of his friend Watson (59, 171). Despite the friendship between Marlowe and Watson, Eccles's supposition of this motive seems unlikely because Marlowe desists and does not risk coming to Watson's aid even though his friend is severely wounded because he has intervened, thereby relieving Marlowe. According to the legal proceedings, Watson fights only in self-defense, which is the reason the coroner's jury acquits Watson of murder or manslaughter.

⁴⁸ See Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. chap. 2, "Combatants and Comrades," 31-77.

⁴⁹ Cf. McKerrow, Nashe, 5:83, 86.

⁵⁰ McKerrow argues that Harvey probably knew of Christ's Tears but had not actually read it before he penned his most vicious attacks (5:98-102).

⁵¹ I think Hibbard is right to suggest that Nashe's literary model for his only verse narrative is not the Ovidian epyllion, despite his borrowing from Ovid's Ars Amatoria, but is rather the racy fabliaux in Chaucer's manner.

⁵² Cf. Nashe's two other references to "sodomitrie," 3:177, 278. Measuring Nashe's boast about his prolific writing against the size of his printed corpus, McKerrow suggests perhaps much of Nashe's work remained in manuscript and is now lost; see 5:136.

⁵³ Jonathan Goldberg argues that Gabriel Harvey's homosexuality was an "open secret." See "Colin to Hobbinol: Spenser's Familiar Letters," South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 192-220. When Nashe tenders his apology to Harvey in Christ's Tears, however, he acknowledges Harvey's "courteous well gouerned behauior" (2:12). Harvey's Puritanism may have tempered his private life because in Have with You Nashe seems delighted to have occasion to twit Harvey about licentiousness by using Harvey's "gentlewoman" against him. Nashe also attempts to ridicule Harvey by claiming his motive for his English hexameters "was his falling in loue with Kate Cotton, and Widdowes his wife, the Butler of Saint Johns" so that "Gabriell was alwayes in loue.… " (3:81).

⁵⁴ Grosart tries to gloss "Lusher " as if it were a word (perhaps "lasher") instead of a proper name as the context suggests (3:104). McKerrow suggests the author is not Gabriel Harvey but Richard Lichfield (5:107).

⁵⁵King Lear, 4.6.111. However, the mad Lear's perspective on the penalty for adultery is counterbalanced in the play by the punishment inflicted upon his patriarchal counterpart in suffering, Gloucester: "The dark and vicious place where thee [Edmund] he got / Cost him his eyes" (5.3.173-74).

⁵⁶ Cf. Nashe's ridiculously funny descriptions of Harvey's book and person (3:36-38). Nashe also accuses Harvey of stealing his railing terms and of rehearsing, but never answering, accusations (3:122-25).

⁵⁷ See Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), 1; G. K. Hunter, "Shakespeare's Reading," A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 60.

Source: "Nashe as 'Monarch of Witt' and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 37, No. 3, Fall, 1995, pp. 314-43.