Between 1579 and 1600, Elizabethan "novelists" like Thomas Nashe produced what would appear to be little more than rudimentary experiments in their art, yet much of this prose narrative effectively assimilates the grotesque, as episode, character, theme, and image, into its patchwork structures. The combination of crude joke and terrible detail particularly accents the studies of rogue life, tales of adventure, and tracts for the times, even though such moments of horror and farce are often incongruous with either the romantic or the realistic character of these works. As Huntington Brown pointed out in his discussion of Rabelais, however, the grotesque can be, "as truly as tragedy, an imitation of life in the Aristotelian sense."¹ Its appearance in such an experimental piece as The Unfortunate Traveller deserves therefore a closer scrutiny as to whether it is the result of caprice—a monstrosity, according to Montaigne, which violates right form and is unrelated to the non-grotesque in art: "having neither order, dependencie, or proportion but casual and framed by chaunce"²—or, whether the grotesque is a unifying element which, in the words of Frances Barasch, "resides not only in the structure of the work, but in the writer's view of the world, in fact, in the theme of the work itself."³ Because of the wealth of literary material within this period and the complicated history of the grotesque in art, this study must necessarily limit itself to a cursory look at a few exemplary Elizabethans and their suggestive use of the grotesque as providing a context for Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. This remarkable piece will be considered as an effective and seminal work in English literature for its conscious use of the grotesque as a structural and thematic center within the picaresque novel. Of particular concern in this examination of The Unfortunate Traveller is the interrelationship between the picaresque and the grotesque, for it is the interaction of cultural impetus and personal vision which results in the deliberate artistic development of the grotesque mode as subject, form, and theme.

During the period in which Nashe was writing, the appearance of the grotesque in English prose fiction is generally sporadic and phenomenal. But time and again, the inclusion of these grotesque episodes force their authors, if only for greater exploitation of the sensational, into refining aspects of their narrative art in order to accommodate the different mode. Furthermore, as Robert Greene, Thomas Deloney, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Nashe devised their presentations of the macabre, the physically deviant and horrible, they were not only catering to popular taste but also revealing the dis-ease of their age, exposing the "reality" of a primitive undercurrent in a growing urban civilization, and reasserting the lines between the natural and the unnatural in human beings and their constructs. Such a juxtaposition of the fabulously contrived edenic villa (which Nashe's Jack Wilton visits in Rome) with the city's famine suggests an interest in the grotesque as it threatens confidence in the integrity and order of nature, and therefore, for most Renaissance writers, as it threatens the basis of art. Yet, as O. J. Campbell testifies, these "proletariat" writers were also amused by the deplorable absurdity and outrageous follies they observed in the mad, vicious world they knew.⁴ Hence, the elusive combination of satire, sadism, and low comedy which results in not just a description of what appears to be grotesque but the reader's combined experience and apprehension of the grotesque moment itself.

The grotesque exists, as Frances Barasch and Philip Thomson define it, when just such a tension between mirth and horror, seriousness and mockery exists.⁵ However, Wolfgang Kayser's final interpretation of the impetus for the grotesque pertains to the Elizabethan experiment as well, for much of this lurid material avowedly attempts "to invite and subdue the demonic aspects of the world."⁶ Having "Beaten open the Infernall Gates," Thomas Dekker opens his discoveries of "strange country" and terrible dreams through the engine of his pamphlets. In the age of Gloriana, demons were both real and fantastic enough. Much of the grotesque or unnatural in these narratives are extensions of that barbarity which produced records of rape, random murder, incest, filicide, and the horrors (plague, poverty, brutality) resulting from the squalor of slum life and the systems of criminal justice and penal administration.

In one sense, then, the spring for the grotesque mode came from the outer world which thrust its incongruities on Nashe and his cohorts. Otherwise, the literary treatment and structural use of the grotesque go beyond the service of satire and receive their impetus from the artist's own sense of the neurotic and erotic impulses common to all men. Even such a conventional prose romance as Sidney's Arcadia locates much of its pith in abnormal relationships like those involving the disguised Zelmane (Pyrocles) or in the inverted episodes of "chivalric" encounter like that between "Zelmane" and the "clownes": "But she … hitte him so surely on the side of his face, that she lefte nothing but the nether jawe, where the tongue still wagged…. But Dorus (leaving the miller to vomit his soul out in wine and bloud) strake of another quite by the waste…. "⁷ Of particular interest is the deliberate shift in stylistics, diction, and image from the general tenor of Sidney's prose. The technique is not far from the mock glorification of magnificent carnage in Dekker or its distillation into the exaggerated detail of an execution or murder in Nashe or the less flamboyant Deloney.

While celebrating bourgeois affluence and catering to its taste for both entertainment and edification, Thomas Deloney flirts with the grotesque by setting extravagant episodes, extravagantly treated, within a realistic framework. His tale, The Gentle Craft, glorifies the virtues and successes of shoemakers, yet Deloney salts his prosaic dough with a garish battle between an elephant and a dragon, a fantastic encounter with a cyclops, the grisly burial alive of a greedy priest, and the comic-gruesome deaths of Hugh and Winifred. How does one react to this terrific comedy? Deloney, like Nashe earlier, seems to be reacting to more than audience demand for thrills. His handling of such a romantic tale with a genre which itself was a defiant reaction to the effete romances of the aristocracy would indicate that his maudlin treatment is aggressive. The narrating voice finally does not really evoke pity, but revulsion.

More the literary chameleon than Deloney, Robert Greene divided himself between wooing a gentle audience with conventional romance and assaulting the squalid character of London with the cony-catching pamphlets. Although Greene does explore the distortion of personality by a prominent fault (vanity) in his pretty tales like Alcida, the reporter distinctly emerges from the blur of his euphuistic romance to link with Nashe in his unflinching pamphlets and their portraiture of freakish men. These chronicles of social monstrosities in the criminal underworld are part of the background against which we must read The Unfortunate Traveller. Most conspicuous, perhaps, among Greene's rogues is Ned Browne who, in The Blacke Bookes Messenger, "telleth verie pleasantly … such strange prancks and monstrous villanies by him and his consorte performed." Like that of most Elizabethan rogues (including those Jack Wilton describes), Ned's gnarled life relaxes itself to a desperate sense of death. Resulting in a perverse philosophy of carpe diem (not unrelated to the twisted logic of Flannery O'Connor's "Misfit" in our time), the rogue has apprehended "Death only as Natures due." In an age when plagues and starvation harvested thousands at random, the identification of nature with death results in a beast-world of antic criminality. Hence, Ned's gaudy narrative celebrates the rogue's ingenuity and fustian craft until the note abruptly sours with the sadistic description of his "miserable" death by hanging and the subsequent ravaging of his corpse by wolves.

Greene and Nashe are not alone in their temptation to spin wry heroes out of villainous fiber. Thomas Dekker, too, developed a knack for working the macabre into social criticism in order to exploit the social anxiety and unrest which resulted from the hoardes of disbanded soldiers and generally unemployed after the Drake and Norris expedition of 1589. These displaced persons rapidly inflating the criminal class were feared, detested, scourged, and destroyed—sometimes simply for loitering, but their misshapen lives made fascinating reading for those buying at the stalls in Saint Paul's.

A later work than The Unfortunate Traveller, The Belman of London (1608) brings "to Light the Most Notorious Villainies, drawne to the life, of purpose that life may be drawne from it." Largely, it serves as a catalogue of "valiant beggars" in which a perverse hierarchy raises its most unregenerate characters in first place and titles them "upright-men." The account deliberately begins with an apostrophe to the pastoral wholesomeness of country life, but abruptly inverts the pastoral in discovering the countryside to be a nest for the "beasts" among men. While spying on a conclave of rogues, the "belman" observes them at table "as if they had beene so many Anticks: A Painters prentice could draw worse faces then they themselves made." Insofar as their wrenched ethic has disturbed the order of things and threatened the conventions of that order, the rogues sound strings on the time-honored lyre of the Robin Hood—Robin Goodfellow—Puck Hairy tradition. To that extent they are still psychologically manageable within the cultural context.

Finally, Nashe's ghoulish narrative of the plague finds a counterpart in Dekker's ironic account of The Wonderful Yeare (1603), in which scenes of horror are juxtaposed with passages of beauty and fantasy. As with Nashe, Dekker's parenthetical expression proves a sharp-toothed weapon, while his blending of the fantastic with realistic detail engenders a graver "realism" of the horror of the plague than a more statistical version. Ironically acting as anaesthetic to the birth of calamity is the prefatory section celebrating the joyful omens of the Stuart succession. Once again capricious Death turns life garish as a bride collapses midway between the phrases "in sickness" and "in health." In the midst of "for better" and "for worse" she becomes worse (p. 128). Yet, the Antic spares a drunkard who stumbles into an open grave of pestilent corpses so that he rises to startle the bleary-eyed sexton. Ultimately, we discern that the narrative is nicely structured by the "lickerish expectation" of the caprice of this "ruffianly swaggerer" Death. The impossibility of comprehending the logic of nature arouses a dread which is simultaneously mitigated by a dry humor. The latter often results from deliberate stylistic appeals to the audience's intellectual pleasure in the perverse and its smugness in its own safety.

So far, this discussion has glanced at the scope, sophistication and intensity of the grotesque mode in Elizabethan fiction as Nashe's associates dabbled in it. One notes accordingly that the infusion of ironic comedy appears to be proportionate to their involvement with the mode. Finally, the effort to realize an equal tension between the terrible and the ridiculous is achieved in the grotesquerie of Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Nothing like it exists up to that time in English narrative, but the controversy still goes on as to exactly what it is. In charging Nashe with brilliance rather than artistry, C. S. Lewis nevertheless spotlights the essential character of this work and identifies it with the tradition of the grotesque in the visual arts: "In his exhilarating whirlwind of words we find not thought nor passion but simply images: images of ludicrous and sometimes frightful incoherence boiling up from a dark void. There is that in Nashe which connects him with artists like Bosch and the later Picasso."⁸ In light of the more intensified interest in the grotesque of later artists and critics in the twentieth century, we can perhaps more clearly appreciate Nashe's experimentation with this elusive mode. Rather than merely redeeming the formlessness of the work with its dark fascination, the grotesque structure within The Unfortunate Traveller actually supports the picaresque nature of the novel while rendering the work more peculiarly Nashe's own and less imitative within the continental tradition of the picaresque.

Beginning as a rogue par excellence, the hero, Jack Wilton, undermines the existing order from within. As a soldier he alternately fleeces the profiteers in his company and avoids active duty; and, as a page, he scourges the courtiers with his supercilious rites. The structural frame of the picaresque novel consists, therefore, of Jack's movement from anti-hero to non-hero, from victimizer to victim. Like the demon in Ben Jonson's The Devil Is An Ass, the alienated picaro discovers his own naiveté regarding the nature of evil and the level of absurdity in an alienated world.

Identifiable as a persona for Nashe in the Induction, Jack mockingly bequeaths, "for wast paper here amongst you," certain pages of his misfortunes. Wars, massacres, and plagues provide pulp for his press. Ludicrous and horrible is his description of the sweating sickness in England: commingled with the spectacle of whole families wiped away are glimpses of fat people larding, like Falstaff, the lean earth, of clothiers profiting from their savings on cloth. On familiar turf in these episodes, Jack remains secure from danger and his tone is aloof as he outlines the wretched panorama of the battlefield after a French-Swiss conflict: "I saw a wonderfull spectacle of blood-shed on both sides: here unweeldie Switzers wallowing in their gore, like an Oxe in his dung; there the sprightly French sprawling and turning on the stained grasse, like a Roach new taken out of the streame …" (II, 230-231).⁹

Jack meets the insanity of war (in which a city, paid for with 12,000 lives, is surrendered "in reconciliation") with irreverent imagery: "That Warre thus blowen over, and the severall Bands dissolved like a Crowe that still followes aloofe where there is carrion, I flew me over to Munster" (p. 232). But the tones become mixed (as does the logic of the digressive treatise on humility and violence) in Jack's account of the Anabaptists' crazy and inadequate dress for battle, their hysterical praying, and their misplaced trust in the rainbow which ironically portends not their victory but their slaughter. Has nature or God betrayed them? Jack offers no opinion, but sums up with an account of the opposing army's butchering, with teary eyes, the heretics: "Pittifull and lamentable was their unpittied and well perfourmed slaughter" (p. 240).

Joining up with the Earl of Surrey, Jack quits his "cavaliership," and becomes a willing pawn to a doting knight on a darkling chessboard. Touring Northern countries, Jack gleefully satirizes conventional details of chivalric romance (Surrey's dotage on the phlegmatic Geraldine, the German tyrant husband) and the folly of scholarly approaches to the correction of pirate commonwealths. Life is lived foolishly and absurdly here; public practice is divorced from political theory, and the latter disappears in plagiarized legal gibberish. However, Jack's narrative voice becomes significantly modified inasmuch as he does not control these situations. His perception of follies is indirectly obtained through Surrey, whom he "follows"; and, moreover, he seems unaware of the full tenor of the scenes he describes. The saucy rogue has become an unperceptive or "content" persona. By the time he reaches Wittenburg, he can no longer distinguish the reality from the appearance and is efficiently duped by a prostitute and her bawd—twice.

In Italy, as we could expect, the landscape becomes increasingly strange, the structures more deceptive. And, as Jack recedes into his non-heroic identity, the grotesque strain grows more virulent. The description of the summer banqueting house is a highly wrought piece of prose appropriate to the offensiveness of an art that attempts to outstrip nature. As such, the prose is as sophisticated and artificial as the "inchained" birds with throats of conduit pipes: "Such a golden age, such a good age, such an honest age was set forth in this banketting house" (p. 285). With the swiftness of a cinematic slide change, the scene shifts from the sleeping wolves and lambs of the garden to the vision of the plague in the city. After drawing the veil of death and hopelessness around the setting, Jack proceeds with the violent story of the rape of Heraclide. The episode is told in a mock-serious style, but this time combining vivid narration with high-flown moralizing. Jack Wilton is ensnared in the drama and humanized considerably in the process; for once he projects more than the cold mask of the persona. When his courtesan is dragged off by the bandits, the sequence of his emotions is realistic: indignation, anger, cowardice, frustration. Fearing an imaginary guard, he is threatened by the failure of supernatural forces to render justice, but he is cynically aware of his own impotence and the emptiness of his bravado: "Then threw I my selfe pensive againe my pallete, and darde all the devils in hell, nowe I was alone, to come and fight with mee one after another…. I beat my head against the wals & cald them bauds, because they would see such a wrong committed, and not fall uppon him" (pp. 287-288).

Nashe's technique for intensifying the rape itself pioneers the device of telescoping action. Jack, spying from above through an opening in the floor, frames the scene. The inhuman rapist-murderer, Esdras, looms ghoulishly against the backdrop of plague and death in the house, but Heraclide suggests a parody of Lucrece as she histrionically appeals to all the conventional standards of morality which turn her logic against her: "If thou be a man, thou wilt succour mee; but if thou be a dog and a brute beast, thou wilt spoile mee, defile mee, and teare me" (p. 290). Esdras proceeds to be a beast (as Jack proceeds to be a voyeur) and ravishes her, on the "pillow" of her dead husband's body. From a warped sense of "virtue" the lady commits suicide to atone for her defilement and save her honor. The grotesqueness of the whole sequence is nicely rounded by her husband's awakening from his "sleep" (jarred by the discomforting weight of bodies, no doubt). Jack falls target for the husband's wrath, his imprisonment and escape leading to his further victimization by the sinister Jew, Dr. Zachary, and Juliana.

The erstwhile rogue founders hopelessly in the tortuous machinery of ecclesiastical and scientific roguery. Incarcerated, bartered, alternately threatened with being anatomized, bled to death, sexually depleted, and starved, Jack succumbs to hysteria and splenetic imaginings like those portrayed in Nashe's Terrors of the Night ("In the night I dreamt of nothing but phlebotomy, blood fluxes, incarnatives, running ulcers"): "I cald to minde the assertion of some philosophers, who said the soule was nothing but blood: then thought I, what … if I should let my soule fall and breake his necke into a bason" (p. 308). Significantly, Jack's ubiquitous perspective of the early episodes and instructed vision of the middle section have been narrowed, in captivity, to his own meager and partial perception.

Jack resigns himself to powerlessness, even before he is rescued by his mistress, and decides to return to England. First, he soaks his wounded morale in exorbitant descriptions of the executions of the Jew, Zadok, and of Esdras' murderer. In a passage which has brought accusations of callousness and sadism against Nashe,¹⁰ the Jew is langorously tortured to death. The key is not so much in the subject matter as in the intense, almost inhuman, precision with which Jack narrates, as though the details were singularly important, not the life. In trying to understand his experience, Jack must anatomize the torture as the mob must anatomize the criminal "all the people (outragiously incensed) with one conioyned outcrie yelled mainely, Awaie with him…. torture him, teare him or we will teare thee in peeces if thou spare him" (p. 327).

But the charm has clearly worn off Jack's role as picaro. No longer defiant of convention, the non-hero recoils from this realm of the grotesque from which he can no longer remain aloof. If the reality of wars and plague has discredited the ideals of chivalry and divine governance, the reality of his own inability to contend with the underside of human experience or to traverse safely the frontiers of the estranged world discredits his claim to even the anti-heroic stance of picaro or social rebel. Retreating into the formulated behavior he once spurned, Jack "converts" himself to the cult of conformity and survival: "Mortifiedly abiected and danted was I with this truculent tragedie…. To such straight life did it thence forward incite me that ere I went out of Bolognia I married my curtizan, performed many almes deedes; and hasted so fast … that within fortie daies I arrived at the king of Englands campe…" (pp. 327-328). Thus, as Jack himself becomes grotesque in his failure to orient himself in the physical universe, he opts for the controlled or regulated hazard (the military career) as preferential to the chaotic one. His wry fate echoes the wry lament in Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague":

Wit with his wantonnesse
Tasteth deaths bitternesse:
Hels … executioner
Hath no eares for to heare
What vaine art can reply.
I am sick, I must dye:
Lord have mercy on us
(III, 1602-08).

So, too, does Jack resign sovereignty of himself and "dye" into his new "straight" life."¹¹

Nashe has employed the grotesque mode to shape his narrative into the cohesive work it is. He paces the narrative with grotesque encounters and structures his central figure's development according to his perception of and reaction to the intensified experience. Nashe's narrative technique defines an intimate relationship to the mode, as Jack's apprehension of the grotesque originates in his own mind (his interpretive early descriptions) and shifts to become identified with the character of the outer world. In Italy, Jack finds the grotesque within and without and increasingly incomprehensible. But we are given an additional, outer perspective on the point of view of the narrative. In the customary prefatorial address, Nashe aptly divides himself (and his tone) between "voices"—as the author obsequiously seeking patronage and as the supercilious gallant laughing at his own work as that of the picaro-page Wilton.

In the dedicatory epistle to the Lord of Southampton, Nashe not only seeks to "sell" himself to the nobleman but also "fictionalizes" a sophisticated audience for his work:¹² "Long have I desired to approove my wit unto you." He promises and delivers "some reasonable conveyance of historie and varietie of mirth" to readers whose power over his works he respectfully concedes: "Unrepreviably perisheth that booke whatsoever to wast paper, which on the diamond rocke of your judgment disasterly chanceth to be shipwrackt." But in his "Induction to the dapper Mounsier Pages of the Court," the sharp-witted Nashe, with tongue-in-cheek, baits another audience—dice-playing, hard-drinking, and smoking city-squires who are sarcastically "bequeathed" the narrative for "wast paper." Or, as the rest of the address proposes, the sheets can kindle tobacco, stop mustard pots, or serve as napkins for "madde whoorson" printers.

Which "role" represents the reality of Nashe's world, which tone his true attitude towards that world, which fictionalized audience the one to whom he directs the narrative? Perhaps some impetus for the grotesque mode arises from this dualism in Nashe's perspective: high ambition and low comedy, gentility and buffoonery, pungent satire exposing real horrors in the political world to those nobles who supposedly control it and fantastic drollery for those who must mock the mad world in order to endure it—these are the components reflected in the artist's eye "that sees round about it selfe." In his bold experiment with the novel, Nashe has recognized, deliberately or intuitively, the grotesque mode as at once structural and thematic within the narrative form. Ulrich Wicks, in attempting to define the picaresque, notes the element of the grotesque as "horrible incident" and states that its primary function in such fiction is "to arouse some kind of shocked response" from its audience. Yet, in so designating the grotesque as producing an awareness of only the "nightmare world," Wicks divorces the grotesque from the total effect of the picaresque as he describes it: "In picaresque we 'participate' in the tricks essential to survival in chaos and become victims of the world's tricks."¹³ Actually, as Nashe utilizes the grotesque mode in his adventure, it arouses our awareness of the "trick" or joke as well. The laughter emerging from the grotesque and existing in equal tension with the horrible is even more essential to our acceptance of the "trick" than that rather superior snicker arising from the satire in the novel.

Insofar as The Unfortunate Traveller deviates from the norm of either Elizabethan romance or prose tract, Nashe has used a method of tonal structure appropriate to his experiment in the picaresque. Its combination of sinister tones with light overtones anticipates the later works of the Schaur-Romantiks and consequently much modern fiction. Through such experimentation as Nashe's we are reminded that the "driving purpose of form is to transform that which might inspire terror (or revulsion) into something which can be contemplated and experienced without fear"—in fact, with pleasure.¹⁴

Notes

¹Rabelais in English Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. 6.

² Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, transi. John Florio (1603), (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), Ch. XXVII, "Of Friendship."

³The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 10.

⁴Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1938), p. 22. Campbell goes on to note that Nashe "in the very title of his Anatomie of Absurdities (1589) marks the difference between his attitude and that of his predecessors. What they found abhorrent, he thought entertaining, and even funny" (p. 23).

⁵The Grotesque (London: Methuen and Co., 1972), passim. Thomson's definition reflects several critics' thoughts on the subject, especially: Frances K. Barasch, "The Meaning of the Grotesque," an introductory essay to Thomas Wright's A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (New York: Ungar, 1968); and Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon. Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).

⁶The Grotesque in Art and Literature, transl. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), p. 188.

⁷The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols. (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1912-26), I, 312-313.

⁸English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 416. Agnes M. C. Lathem also argues for a strong burlesque element in the narrative's horrors, in "Satire on Literary Themes and Modes in Nashe's 'Unfortunate Traveller'" (English Studies, New Series, 1 [1948], 85-100). The critical debate over the generic identity of this narrative is aptly summarized by Richard A. Lanham in a footnote to his own essay on the subject, "Tom Nashe and Jack Wilton: Personality As Structure In The Unfortunate Traveller," (Studies in Short Fiction, 4 [1967], 201-216). Lanham's identification of both the neurotic impulse in Jack Wilton and its resemblance to our modern condition only confirms this novel's participation in the grotesque tradition as well.

⁹ All references are taken from The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958; rpt. and ed. by F. P. Wilson).

¹⁰ David Kaula, "The Low Style in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller," Studies in English Literature, 6 (1966), 45-48.

¹¹ The equation suggests the modern existentialist perspective in which one knows who he is only insofar as he knows who he is not. In this the picaro is one with Kafka's Joseph K., Mann's Joseph, Camus' Meursault, Sartre's Roquentin, or Melville's Ahab.

¹² The relationship between the audience which a writer "fictionalizes" for himself and his stylistics is presented by Walter J. Ong, S. J. as an evolving characteristic of literature in "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," PMLA, 90 (January 1975), 9-21.

¹³ "The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach," Publications of the Modern Language Associ ation of America, 89 (March 1974), 247, 242.

¹⁴ Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 128.