SOURCE: "The Unfortunate Traveller: Nashe's Narrative in a 'Cleane Different Vaine'," in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 10, No.l, Winter, 1980, pp. 1-15.

In the letter of dedication for The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Nashe described his text as being in a "cleane different vaine" from anything else he had ever written.¹ He gave no explanation of how he envisioned this new vein, but readers of The Traveller have long since acknowledged that it is an unconventional narrative. For want of a better explanation of its peculiarities, decades of critics dismissed the work as a primitive forerunner of the novel, influenced by Lazarillo de Tormes and the rise of the Spanish pícaro. Most critics today, however, agree with Fredson T. Bowers that such a dismissal oversimplifies.² R. B. McKerrow, in the complete Works, and G. R. Hibbard, in the only existing full-length biography of Nashe, have led in the trend away from the picaresque interpretations and toward more sophisticated analyses of the textual peculiarities.³

Nevertheless, critics continue to find the text perplexing, and many have resorted to dealing with only isolated aspects of the work rather than attempting to classify the whole of Nashe's rather eclectic narrative. Hibbard's attempt to summarize and describe the text is a vivid illustration of why so many critics have avoided trying to take an overview. Unable to synthesize the various aspects, he finally concludes that the "'story' is sheer improvisation."⁴ Hibbard is disturbed by the same eclectic quality that led Agnes M. C. Latham to decide that The Traveller is "a spirited parody of popular literary themes and styles" and that it is "a book designed to leave its readers giddy, gasping, and weak with laughter, as though they had just come off a switchback."⁵

While others have acknowledged the vertiginous sensation induced by Nashe's text, few find it quite as mirthful in its effect as Latham does. Responding to Latham, Richard A. Lanham commented:

No one, I submit, has ever been left gasping and weak with laughter by The Unfortunate Traveller since the first day it was hawked about London at the start of its not notably successful career. We are giddy all right, but not from laughter.⁶

The salient aspect of the more recent criticism is the growing awareness of the peculiar effect The Unfortunate Traveller has upon its reader. What begins as an apparently light, humorous book proceeds to take its reader through a maze of narrative maneuvers which leaves readers baffled and uneasy. Nevertheless, in noting this effect, no one has quite explained why it is there. It may be that it was this very narrative effect that Nashe considered his "cleane different vaine," however. Perhaps we make a mistake in looking for the essence of the text simply in its story line.

The story told in The Traveller, after all, is a convoluted but not particularly enigmatic one. Jack Wilton relates his adventures as he moves from Henry VIII's camp in France, to England where he encounters the sweating sickness, and on to the continent and the battle of Marignano. After stops in Münster and England again, he joins Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, for an eventful trip through Rotterdam, Wittenberg and Italy. In Venice they are joined by Diamante (who becomes Jack's mistress), and after Surrey holds a ludicrous tournament in Florence, Jack and his "lady" move on alone. In Rome and Bologna, the two survive a series of misfortunes (caused variously by the plague, plunderers, ruthless Jews, and unfortunate misunderstandings). And finally, in a fit of unexpected moral insight, Jack repents, marries Diamante, leaves Italy, and promises more tales if his audience applauds his efforts.

It is a simple, if rambling, story, and at first glance would not seem a text to particularly unsettle readers. What is omitted in a summary, however, and what gives the work its unique flavor is the narrative technique and its deliberate entanglement of the reader. For The Unfortunate Traveller gradually involves the reader in an unexpected turn. At first the tone and content of the text seem very much like that of the familiar Renaissance jestbook or rogue tale; the reader is being told a series of amusing anecdotes. But as he reads on, he finds his role with respect to the text being subtle but deliberately changed. His experience of the text becomes increasingly unsettling, particularly with respect to the narrative voice.

The first person narrator in The Traveller is one of the structural characteristics which early critics identified as picaresque. While it is true that Lazarillo is written in the first person, there is considerably more to the use of the first person in the English text than there is in the Spanish one. The Traveller makes conscious use of a double first-person narrative and purposely focuses upon its complex narrator-reader relationship.

The first of the two narrative voices to address the reader in The Unfortunate Traveller is the fictive one of Thomas Nashe himself in "The Induction to the dapper Mounsier Pages of the Court." He describes the text to come and, in doing so, begins to characterize himself and the second narrator, Jack Wilton:

A proper fellow Page of yours called lack Wilton by me commends him vnto you, and hath bequeathed for wast paper here amongst you certaine pages of his misfortunes. In anie case keepe them preciously as a priuie token of his good will towardes you. (207)

The entire letter is set in this playful tone, with Nashe joking about Jack and the text, and it closes with a pitch to the reader to join the proposed fun and read on through the rest of the text:

… onely let this suffice for a tast to the text, and a bitte to pull on a good wit with, as a rasher on the coles is to pull on a cup of Wine. Heigh passe, come alofte: euerie man of you take your places, and heare Iacke Wilton tell his owne Tale. (208)

On a purely practical level, of course, the letter was Nashe's attempt to get the browser at the bookseller's to buy. But with respect to the goals of the text, it is his purpose to designate an audience which will identify readily with Jack Wilton. He establishes a mood of familiarity and plays up this mood, suggesting that the audience has a certain responsibility for Jack's narrative:

Iust a little nearer to the matter & the purpose. Memorandum, euerie one of you after the perusing of this pamphlet is to prouide him a case of ponyardes, that if you come in companie with anie man which shall dispraise it or speak against it, you may straight crie Sic respondeo, and giue him the stockado. It standes not with your honours (I assure ye) to haue a gentleman and a page abusde in his absence. (207)

As he goes on elaborating upon the "articles" of his "memorandum," detailing how his audience should feel and act toward Jack's text, the prevailing emphasis is upon a sense of fraternity between narrator and reader. He acts as if he is inviting his reader to join him in a nearby pub, to meet their "proper fellow Page," and to take their seats around him. The role of the fictive Nashe here is not unlike that of the "setter" who roamed the streets of London in Tudor times seeking out the "cony," putting him in a mood of relaxed congeniality and delivering him to the master who would make use of the preliminary conditioning to turn an unwary stranger into a baffled victim.

By designating Jack's fellow pages as the expected audience, Nashe's Induction sets the stage for the characterization of the second narrative voice. The point is not so much that the text is designed for the court pages per se as that it is a narrative set up for a persona who assumes an immediate intimacy with his readers. The reader may be anyone (later, in fact, other specific readers are addressed at specific moments),⁷ but whoever he is, the reader is a person with whom Jack assumes the right to take certain liberties.

When Jack begins his own introduction, he reinforces the effect:

I, Iacke Wilton, (a Gentleman at least,) was a certain kind of an appendix or page, belonging or appertaining in or vnto the confines of the English court; where what my credit was, a number of my creditors that I cosned can testifie: … There did I (soft, let me drinke before I go anie further) raigne sole king of the cans and blacke iakes, … (209)

He addresses his reader as he would an old friend. He speaks as if in a dialogue and makes "inside" jokes about his own mischievousness (209). He gets great fun out of bragging to his compeers about his rascality:

This was one of my famous atchieuements, insomuch as I neuer light vpon the like famous Foole: but I haue done a thousand better iests, if they had been bookt in order as they were begotten. (217)

He imagines his reader and himself as laughing uproariously over his past exploits: "Oh my Auditors, had you seene him. … if (I say) you had seene but halfe the actions that he vsed, … you wold haue laught your face and your knees together" (219). He directs affectionate teasing at the reader: "Gentle Readers (looke you be gentle now since I haue cald you so), as freely as my knauerie was mine owne, it shall be yours to vse in the way of honestie" (217).

This banter is interlaced with other comments which suggest that Jack is sitting across the table from his reader, telling him the story face to face. He anticipates his reader's responses and answers him. From time to time he expects the reader to participate actively in the text. At one point he even demands that the reader fill in the elaborate details of a transition:

I must not place a volume in the precincts of a pamphlet: sleepe an houre or two, and dreame that Turney and Turwin is wonne, that the King is shipt againe into England, and that I am close at harde meate at Windsore or at Hampton Court. (227)

He implies that this is more a conversation—more a cooperative effort—than a monologue.

All of these narrative techniques point to the fact that The Unfortunate Traveller is an eminently "oral" text and that it is oral in a very particular way—in a distinctly modern sense of the word. It is important to note here what is meant when we describe Nashe's text as oral. Walter J. Ong's well-known studies of "oral residue" in Renaissance texts have left the impression that when one speaks of oral effects in sixteenth-century works, he speaks, like Ong, of the postprint orality of an age highly influenced by classical rhetoric. In this kind of oral text, as Ong explains,

… expression is chiefly by means of formulas, with the bulk of the remainder formula-like or "formulaic" and very little non-formulaic expression. In a literary text, on the contrary, we find few formulas and only a bit of the formulaic, leaving us with mostly nonformulaic compositions. Oral composition or grammatical structure is typically non-periodic, proceeding in the "adding" style; literary composition tends more to the periodic.⁸

Although there is at times the appearance of an "adding style" in Nashe's writing, clearly this is not what we mean generally when we speak of his narrative as oral. Rather, The Traveller employs patterns we think of today as colloquial. As E. D. Mackerness put it some years ago,

… Nashe's style has close affinities with a language meant to be spoken rather than perused in silence. Not only are his rhythms similar to speech (as opposed to consciously created literary) rhythms, but his whole procedure maintains a contact with elements of ordinary usage such as were later considered to be outside the purview of the respectable writer.⁹

These oral characteristics are part of an effort in the text to bring the reader into a close interaction with Jack Wilton, to blur the distinctions between the reader's world and the narrator's. They nudge the reader into a casual, unguarded relationship with the narrator. They lead him to accept gradually the terms of the narrator's world as a feasible reality. They prepare him for the effects of Jack's subtle blending of the reader's reality markers with those of the narrative. Jack speaks of historic events and personalities the reader will recognize as "real."¹⁰ He sets the events of his story within remembered historical time. He locates the events of his narrative geographically within the reader's known world. And, finally, in his coup de maitre, he manipulates the reader's unconscious tendency to blend the concepts of verb tense and of time.

Jack begins by speaking as if his delivery is taking place at the very moment in which the reader is reading it. Whatever would halt the flow of an oral delivery halts Jack's tale as well. He stops to drink (209) or to tell the reader to fill in portions of the story (227), and the discourse is interrupted. He pauses to gloat over his own cleverness, and that interrupts the tale as well. Or he changes his mind and his story flows on again:

Here let me triumph a while, and ruminate a line or two on the excellence of my wit: but I will not breath neither till I haue disfraughted all my knauerie. (225)

All of these are temporal interruptions to a temporal flow of narrative. They suggest that this text, unlike most written texts, is subject not to the laws of the written word but to the laws of oral discourse. Ordinarily it is in the reader's power to control the flow of the written word, to pick up the book or put it down, but here the power of interruption seems to lie elsewhere as it would if the reader were involved in a conversation. The text suggests that here there is no difference between "textual time" and "reader time."

The effect of this is a blending of the reader's exterior, temporal world with the text's interior, spatial one. Reading through the pages becomes the equivalent of moving through time, which, of course, in one sense it is. But rather than limiting the time/space relationship to a 'so-many-pages in so-many minutes' ratio, the narrative voice attempts to confuse the reader's time with the time of the text—or, more precisely, with that of the narrator,—and both with the physical limitations of a "text" which exists in a spatial world. The reader is meant to lose his sense of separateness from Jack's textual world, or more precisely the two worlds are meant to seem the same. The deliberately imposed setting, the oral nature of the text, and the blurring of his sense of time and space outside the text contribute to making the reader vulnerable to Jack and the dictates of his text.

Initially, however, the effect upon the reader of this blending of the two worlds is not in itself unsettling. The reader is drawn gently within the boundaries of the fictive world. He is subtly urged into a relationship with a persona who seems much like the innocuous figure around whom many late sixteenth-century jestbooks were set. Jack, however, soon begins to show some peculiar changes in his character and in his behavior toward his reader. He does not remain the jolly, friendly jester. In the passage in which Jack tells of his return from battle in France (227), after politely telling the reader to fill in the transition, Jack suddenly turns on the reader. Although his relationship with his reader has been apparently congenial to this point, for no apparent reason he begins to talk as if the reader were opposing him:

What, will you in your indifferent opinions allow me for my trauell no more signiorie ouer the Pages than I had before? yes, whether you will part with so much probable friendly suppose or no, Ile haue it in spite of your hearts. (227)

The reader finds himself trying to cope with a persona who not only constantly changes character, attitude, and manner but also punctuates these unexpected maneuvers with implied accusations that the reader is somehow at fault.

Perhaps more disturbing to the reader than even these abrupt changes in mood is the change that takes place in Jack's sense of humor. At the beginning of the text, fun is poked at some characters who seem to merit ridicule, and most of the humor grows out of Jack's simply assisting these people at making fools of themselves. A greedy ale merchant in Henry's camp attracts Jack's mischievous attention, and Jack manages to convince him that the only way he can counter King Henry's suspicion that he is a traitor is to give away his wares to all the English soldiers (210-216). Likewise Jack dupes an over-ambitious captain (217-225), another licentious one (225), and three clerks who are taking advantage of the soldiers in camp (225-226). The reader can be amused with Jack, for in each case the punishment of the victim seems deserved. But as his narrative goes on, Jack begins to see humor in some rather peculiar things. He describes the horror of the sweating sickness which strikes London, yet finds amusement in the plight of the victims:

I haue seene an old woman at that season, hauing three chins, wipe them all away one after another, as they melted to water, and left hir selfe nothing of a mouth but an vpper chap. (229)

He comes to the battlefield at Marignano, the "wonderful spectacle of bloodshed," and finds humor in that as well:

Anie man might giue Armes that was an actor in that Battell, for there were more armes and legs scattered in the Field that day than wil be gathered vp till Doomesday: … (231)

A persona who finds comic relief in an old woman's slow wasting from a deadly fever and delight in punning about the gruesome spectacle after a battle is a grotesque companion. Jack, whom initially the reader finds likable, now shows signs that there is another side to his nature. At first the reader can laugh easily at Jack's jests and can even accept a certain intimacy with the persona himself. But as the narrative progresses, though Jack keeps insisting upon his tone of familiarity with the reader, he and his attitudes become more and more difficult for the reader to identify with.

As the text proceeds, the character of the narrative voice and the tone of the narration vacillate so erratically and unpredictably that the reader finds himself in a position very different from the one he experienced and anticipated as he read the early pages of the text. As he has become more implicated in the text, his relationship to the narrator and the narrative has become considerably less comfortable. If he pauses to glance back and to compare an early passage with a later one, he can see that the narrator and tale have somehow changed before his very eyes. For instance, in the first section of the text most of the narrative reads like this passage in which Jack describes his initial relationship with one of his victims:

Well, suppose he was a Captaine, and had neuer a good cap of his owne, but I was faine to lend him one of my Lords cast veluet caps, and a weatherbeaten feather, wherewith he threatned his soldiers a far off, as Iupiter is said with the shaking of his haire to make heauen & earth to quake. Suppose out of the parings of a paire of false dice I apparelled both him and my Selfe manie a time and oft: and surely, not to slander the diuell, if anie man euer deserued the golden dice the King of the Parthians sent to Demetrius, it was I: … (217)

In those early pages Jack had chattered about his rascality and narrated his jests like a mischievous but harmless clown. Jack and his early victims were all rogues whose comic antics and comic fall were expected fare. There were victims in Jack's story, but there was no discomfort in hearing about them. Two hundred pages later, however, one almost feels that he has picked up the wrong book, that some other narrator is telling some other tale. Here is a passage from one of the last anecdotes narrated in the text:

To the execution place was he brought, where first and foremost he was stript, then on a sharp yron stake fastened in y ground he had his fundament pitcht, which stake ran vp along into the bodie like a spit; vnder his armeholes two of lyke sort; a great bonfire they made round about him, wherewith his flesh roasted, not burnd:…. Then dyd they scourge his backe partes so blistred and basted, with burning whips of red hot wier: his head they nointed ouer with pitch and tar, and so inflamed it. To his priuie members they tied streaming fire-workes: the skinne from the crest of the shoulder, as also from his elbowes, his huckle bones, his knees, his anckles, they pluckt and gnawed off with sparkling pincers: … (315-316)

Jack blithely reports the execution as if it were welcomed word on a justified retribution. The victim is Zadoch the Jew, clearly cast from the beginning as a villain. He is hardly a character for whom the reader would, under normal circumstances, have sympathy. But the matter of fact reporting of the details of his being placed on a spit, roasted, whipped and skinned alive overloads the reader's emotional circuits. A report that Zadoch had been suitably and moderately punished would have satisfied a need in the reader; the elaborate description of his mutilation and torture only further unsettles the reader. The disturbing effect is particularly intense because at this point the text lacks what Norman Holland has called an "adaptive strategy"—"something that looks quite like … unconscious defenses, but which occurs explicitly in literary works."¹¹ Normally we depend upon the structure of a text both to provide outlets for, and to defend us against, our more primitive impulses. A text which does the former while failing to do the latter can become a very uncomfortable experience for the reader.¹²

Not only has the text metamorphosed from a blithe jestbook into a horror story, but the narrative voice is behaving as if it had not. He still makes flippant remarks about the content and about the subjects of his anecdotes. He introduces the passage above, for instance, with this comment: "Ile make short worke, for I am sure I haue wearyed all my readers" (315). Ten pages later he introduces a similarly gruesome account with, "The executioner needed no exhortation herevnto, for of his own nature was he hackster good inough: olde excellent he was at a bone-ach" (327). Jack moves in and out of these horror tales as if they were the innocent pranks of the early part of the text.

It is not surprising, then, that readers have found The Unfortunate Traveller unsettling, have thought that it must simply be an aimless text with an inconsistent persona, and, have backed away from it concluding, with Hibbard, that "There is no Jack in the proper sense of the word, …"¹³ The content and tone of the text change from pleasant to unpleasant, and the reader's experience of the text changes with them. Disturbed by this, readers have concluded that the text—and particularly the character of the narrative voice—were inadequately planned. The Jack Wilton of the last part of the text does not have the same relationship with his reader that the Jack Wilton of the first part had with him, but if the narrative voice seems drastically different—both in his nature and in his treatment of his reader—the question we need to ask is whether there is any pattern in the unexpected change. We need to look back at what the text tells us about Jack.

The reader's concept of Jack Wilton in The Traveller is drawn primarily from direct experience of him. Jack tells his own story, and he is constantly attempting to manipulate the reader closer to him. This forced intimacy is, in fact, part of the reason for the reader's difficulty in dealing with him. Jack implies that he and his reader are well acquainted; while constantly promoting the unexpected, he acts as if everything is progressing normally. But the reader is not dependent entirely upon his own encounter with Jack (or even upon Nashe's Induction) for his information. Upon the occasion of his first return to England, Jack gives a physical description of himself (227). Overall, the image is of a pompous, gluttonous and rather testy young fop. And since it is a self-portrait, it gives the reader a hint that the narrative voice may not be as pleasant a fellow as he has seemed. But the most revealing insight of all is the characterization we get of Jack as he boasts about the pranks he has played. In his tales about his exploits, we get a detailed description of a side of Jack Wilton that nothing else in the text has given us up to that point. We see Jack as he is with his victims—a character very different from the one who is telling the tale.

For example, the very first jest Jack relates is the one he plays on the ale merchant in the English camp. He begins by describing the Falstaff-like merchant as a man who "thought no scorne (Lord, haue mercie vpon vs) to haue his great veluet breeches larded with the droppinges of this daintie liquor" (210). As we follow him through the steps of his onslaught upon the unsuspecting merchant, if we mark his actions and attitudes, we begin to see the very characteristics that appear in Jack again toward the end of the text—under different circumstances. First, he shows how he chooses the appropriate setting for his approach, always, as here, a setting that suggests companionship and intimacy:

… comming to him on a day, as he was counting his barels and setting the price in chalke on the head of them, I did my dutie very deuoutly, and tolde his alie honor I had matters of some secrecy to impart vnto him, … (211)

Jack always likes to establish the impression that he and his victim are compatriots, preferably drinking companions. In this instance the mood is easy to set:

With me, yong Wilton, qd. he, mary, and shalt: bring vs a pint of syder of a fresh tap into the three cups here, wash the pot: so into a backe roome hee leade me, where after he had spitte on his finger, and pickt of two or three moats of his olde moth eaten veluet cap, and spunged and wrong all the rumatike driuell from his ill fauored goats beard, he bad me declare my minde, and thereupon hee dranke to mee on the same. (211)

Jack has little respect for his victims, but this he never lets on to them. He carefully creates the appearance of closeness and affection:

I vp with a long circumstaunce, alias, a cunning shift of the seuenteenes, and discourst vnto him what entire affection I had borne him time out of minde, …(211)

He assures his victim that his sole interest is the other's welfare:

These considerations, I saie, which the world suffers to slip by in the channell of forgetfulness, haue moued me, in ardent zeale of your welfare, to forewarne you of some dangers that haue beset you and your barrels. (212)

In this particular anecdote, the longest description Jack gives of one of his jests, he lets us see the great fun he himself has tormenting and traumatizing his victim while the poor victim struggles with what to him is unexpected and horrifying news:

At the name of dangers hee start vp, and bounst with his fist on the boord so hard that his tapster ouer-hearing him, cried anone, sir, by and by, and came and made a low legge and askt him what he lackt. Hee was readie to haue striken his tapster for interrupting him in attention of this his so much desired relation, … (212)

Jack always depends on his story telling skills to work his game, and he delights in his ability to draw out the details unmercifully:

Well, at his earnest importunitie, after I had moistned my lippes to make my lie run glibbe to his iourneies end, forward I went as followeth. It chanced me the other night, amongest other pages, to attend where the King, with his Lordes and many chiefe leaders, sate in counsell: there, amongst sundrie serious matters that were debated, and intelligences from the enemy giuen vp, it was priuily informed (no villains to these priuie informers) that you, euen you that I nowe speake to, had—(O would I had no tong to tell the rest; by this drinke it grieues me so I am not able to repeate it.) (212-213)

He revels in the game of enticement and delay, making his victim frantic by skillfully counterbalancing the unexpected revelation against the withheld detail:

Nowe was my dronken Lord readie to hang himselfe for the ende of the full point, and ouer my necke he throwes himself verie lubberly, and intreated me, as I was a proper young Gentleman and euer lookt for pleasure at his handes, soone to rid him out of this hell of suspence, and resolue him of the rest: … I, beeing by nature inclined to Mercie (for in deede I knewe two or three good wenches of that name), bad him harden his eares, and not make his eies abortiue before theyr time, and he should haue the inside of my brest turnd outward, heare such a tale as would tempt the vtmost strength of lyfe to attend it and not die in the midst of it. (213)

With his compatriots Jack is the mischievous joker, but with his victims he is fond of playing the moralist and preacher:

What shal I say? that which malice hath saide is the meere ouerthrow and murther of your daies. Change not your colour, none can slander a cleere conscience to it self; receiue al your fraught of misfortune in at once. (213)

After teasing and delaying as long as he can, Jack finally tells the ale merchant the awful "truth":

It is buzzed in the Kings head that you are a secret frend to the Enemie, and vnder pretence of getting a License to furnish the Campe with syder and such like prouant, you haue furnisht the Enemie, & in emptie barrels sent letters of discouerie and corne innumerable. (214)

He provides a little information, just enough to stir his victim's curiosity, and then withdraws to act the innocent who regrets having to tell the tale at all:

Answere me (quoth he), my wise yong Wilton, is it true that I am thus vnderhand dead and curied by these bad tongues?

Nay (quoth I), you shall pardon me, for I haue spoken too much alreadie; no definitiue sentence of death shall march out of my well meaning lips; they haue but lately suckt milke, and shall they so sodainly change their food and seeke after bloud? (214-215)

Jack plays a carefully planned role with his victim, feigning regret at his disclosures and offering uncharacteristic utterances of philosophy and advice:

I cannot stay at this time to report each circumstaunce that passed, but the onely counsell that my long cherished kinde inclination can possibly contriue, is not in your old daies to be liberall: such victualls or prouision as you haue, presently distribute it frankely amongst poore Souldiers; I would let them burst their bellies with Syder and bathe in it, before I would run into my Princes ill opinion for a whole sea of it. (215)

Another of his practices in dealing with his victims is to exchange his usually careless, colloquial speech pattern for a stilted, melodramatic kind of stage diction. The contrast is evident in his tale about the ale merchant in which he places narrative lines next to his dialogue with his victim. It is even more noticeable if one compares one of the opening passages with a passage like the following in which he flatters one of the captains he victimizes:

I see in your face, that you were born, with the swallow, to feed flying, to get much tresure and honor by trauell. None so fit as you for so important an enterprise: our vulgar polititians are but flies swimming on the streame of subtiltie superficially in comparison of your singularitie, their blinde narrow eyes cannot pierce into the profundity of hypocrisie; you alone, with Palamed, can pry into Vlysses mad counterfeting, you can discerne Achilles from a chamber maide, though he be deckt with his spindle and distaffe: … (221-222)

The excessive melodrama, the alliteration, the parallel structure and other rhetorical decorations with which Jack adorns his addresses to his victims contrast sharply with the vernacular he uses on his reader at the beginning of the text while the reader is still being treated as a friend.

This, then, is the modus operandi of Jack Wilton, the incurable rouge. And if the reader looks back at these jests, he begins to see something that has become very familiar in his own experience of Jack. The narrator of The Unfortunate Traveller is, par excellence, the cony catcher about whom Nashe's friend Robert Greene was so fond of writing. The fictive Nashe in the Induction has served as Jack's "setter," leading the reader into Wilton's tavern and into his power. Then Jack—with his reader as with the victims of his jests—has proceeded with the step by step execution of his confidence game. He has begun by establishing the impression of intimate friendship. With his reader as with the merchant, he has carefully created the illusion of the comradeship of drinking partners and has expressed great concern for his welfare. With the reader, too, Jack has indulged his story-telling skills designed to prolong the narration and has relished the chance to tease his audience with what is left unsaid. There is in these passages the very same pose of innocence he has taken with the ale merchant. For example, he relates the course of a rape in startling detail, tantalizing his reader with the prurient description, until he comes to the end and says, "Coniecture the rest, my words sticke fast in the myre and are cleane tyred; would I had neuer vndertooke this tragicall tale" (292). The comment echoes the words he used to tease and put off the merchant: "I have spoken too much already." …"O would I had no tong to tell the rest; … it grieves me so I am not able to repeat it." With his reader as well, Jack has become uncharacteristically sacerdotal, offering unexpected sermons and moral pronouncements: "Strange and wonderfull are Gods iudgements, here shine they in their glory" (320). And in the closing pages of the text, Jack more and more takes on the melodramatic stage diction that earlier he had used only on his victims. He speaks to his reader with all the excess, the alliteration, the parallel structure and rhetorical adornment that he favored in the passage quoted above in which he gulled the captain:

This woman, this matron, this forsaken Heraclide, hauing buried fourteene children in fiue diaes, whose eyes she howlingly closed, & caught manie wrinckles with funerall kisses; besides hauing her husband within a day after laid forth as a comfortles corse, a carrionly blocke, that could neither eate with her, speak with her, nor weepe with her; is she not to bee borne withall though her body swell with a Timpany of teares, thogh her speech be as impatient as vnhappie Hecubas, thogh her head raues and her braine doate? (292)

It is because these parallels exist that the peculiar, changing behavior of the narrative voice in The Unfortunate Traveller becomes doubly disturbing to the reader. Much of the content of the latter half of the text is disturbing enough in itself, and so are the abrupt shifts in tone and content, but this parallel between the relationship Jack has with his early victims and the one he has with his reader at the close of the text is the most unsettling effect of all. The reader finds himself in a situation very much like that of the ale merchant. He is not in a position to deny the truth of what Jack has to say (any more than the ale merchant is), but the world the narrative voice gradually draws him into is an erratic and insecure one. Worse, it seems to become a more and more brutal one, and his companion through all this turns out to be a caricatured Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Short of putting the book down and the experience out of his mind, the reader has no way to free himself from what has become a relationship of increasing discomfort. He began the text as Jack's comrade and somehow has been transformed into Jack's victim.

As numerous critics have pointed out, The Unfortunate Traveller does start out very much like the jestbooks, the rogue stories, and the picaresque tales of the same period. But if Nashe had any of these traditions in mind when he began, ultimately he transformed his work into a "cleane different vaine." If he began by laughing with his reader at the confusion and dismay of others, he concluded by putting the reader himself in confusion and dismay. The history of the text's limited popular appeal and the comments of many of its critics indicate that the effect has been an understandably displeasing one to readers. But the idea of writing a text in order to amuse himself with an assault upon his primary reader is characteristic of Nashe. He triumphed in his replies to Martin Marprelate and in his pamphlet war with Gabriel Harvey because he was able to employ a street humor and a colloquial jargon (possibly learned from Martin himself)¹⁴ to degrade and ridicule his victim. As C. S. Lewis points out, in dealing with Harvey, Nashe was blatantly "unfair, illogical, violent, extravagant, coarse, but then"—as with the reader in The Unfortunate Traveller—"that is the joke."¹⁵

The resulting vertiginous effect of the text, which Latham described as leaving its readers feeling "as though they had just come off a switchback," is ironically what makes the text both unique and seriously flawed. Nashe seems not to have looked beyond the immediate effects of his work. He belonged to the first wave of professional writers, the same men whose names later became associated with terms like "hack" and "Grub Street," men whose purposes were immediate and pecuniary. The only potential Nashe sought in his "cleane different vaine" was its potential to sell. He made no attempt to endow his work with a reader experience which transcended the text. The experience—the sensation—itself was the text. This is what C. S. Lewis called Nashe's "'pure' literature: literature which is, as nearly as possible, without a subject. In a certain sense of the verb 'say', if asked what Nashe 'says', we should have to reply, Nothing."¹⁶ And it is because the text is "pure" in this sense that it failed to make anything of its unusual narrative beyond becoming a unique and rather elaborate jest. Even in the one respect which mattered most to him, Nashe misjudged the effect of his text. People ride "switch-backs" for pure sensation, deliberately making themselves "victims" of a sort for the sake of the experience itself, but they seldom read books for this reason. The text (like a practical joke) is by its very nature more entertaining for its writer than for its reader. And, as a result, in its own day there were no additional printings after the initial ones (despite Jack's closing hint that he hoped for clamorous applause), and the work has never had much of a following since. The Unfortunate Traveller, with its peculiar indulgence of the author's own amusement, failed to become a successful literary innovation because Nashe, in concentrating upon audience effect, ironically overlooked the inevitable results of the audience response it elicited. It is a text which, in victimizing the reading audience upon whom its own success depended, paradoxically became itself the ultimate victim of its author's peculiar humor.

Notes

¹ Thomas Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), II, 207. References to The Traveller refer to this edition and hereafter are cited parenthetically in the text.

² Fredson T. Bowers, "Thomas Nashe and the Picaresque Novel," in Humanistic Studies in Honor of John Calvin Metcalf (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia, 1941), p. 20.

³ Ronald B. McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), IV, 252-253; G. R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 145-146.

⁴ Hibbard, p. 178.

⁵ Agnes M. C. Latham, "Satire on Literary Themes and Modes in Nashe's 'Unfortunate Traveller'" English Studies (Essays and Studies n.c), 1 (1948), 88 & 99.

⁶ Richard A. Lanham, "Tom Nashe and Jack Wilton: Personality As Structure in The Unfortunate Traveller," Studies in Short Fiction, 4 (Spring, 1967), 209.

⁷ "Ministers and Pastors," p. 237; "Puritans," p. 266; "Women," p. 316; "Guiltless Souls," p. 320.

⁸ Walter J. Ong, "Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 80 (June, 1965), 148-149.

⁹ E. D. Mackerness, "A Note on Thomas Nashe and 'Style,'" English, 6 (Spring, 1947), 199.

¹⁰ Earl of Surrey, p. 241 ; Erasmus and Thomas More, p. 245; Cornelius Agrippa, p. 246; Pietro Aretino, p. 264; and the siege of Tournay and Terouanne; the battle of Marignano [1515]; the Anabaptist uprising in Münster [1534].

¹¹ Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 106.

¹² Ibid., "Form as Defense," pp. 104-133.

¹³ Hibbard, p. 177.

¹⁴ With regard to Nashe's part in the Marprelate writings and the influence the controversy had upon his style, see D. J. McGinn, "Nashe's Share in the Marprelate Controversy," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 59 (1944), 952-984, and Travis L. Summersgill, "The Influence of the Marprelate Controversy Upon the Style of Thomas Nashe," Studies in Philology, 48 (April, 1951), 145-160.

¹⁵ C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 413.

¹⁶ Hibbard, pp. 178-179.