SOURCE: "Tom Nashe and Jack Wilton: Personality as Structure in The Unfortunate Traveller," in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring, 1966, pp. 207-16.

If The Unfortunate Traveller has, alone of the shorter Elizabethan fictions, stayed alive for a modern learned audience, it has done so at least partly because it presents so many problems of interpretation. It is commonly called a picaresque novel, but few critics have agreed on just what such an attribution means. It is usually thought to be a satire, but the target remains uncertain. To call it a random collection of jests and stylistic parodies does not seem to do justice to a commonly felt unity of mood and attitude that it shares with the rest of Nashe's prose. The structure of the novel (novel for lack of a better word), if indeed it has one, is still debated; so, too, are the various kinds of topical references embedded in it.¹ Although the essay that follows touches on this whole body of problems, its immediate concern is much narrower: first, to point out that The Unfortunate Traveller creates the confusions that it does because it is a certain kind of fiction, one that poses a minor dilemma for critical theory; second, to show that the best path out of this dilemma is a structural one, one that considers Jack Wilton's personality as the central form of the novel.

I

It is fair, if simplistic, to say that the principal question usually asked of The Unfortunate Traveller is "What is it really about?" Inquiries into its form, its structure, the nature and direction of its satire and topical allusion, all return to uncertainty about its final concern. An inexplicable themelessness has been the real problem in almost all Nashe's prose: faced with it in The Unfortunate Traveller, critics have followed two main paths. Either they have sought in Nashe's life and personality a central, recurring preoccupation, or they have sought out a series of individual sources and analogues that Nashe glued together into a novel. Thus the early stories come from the jest-books, the long rants are rhetorical parodies, some of the satire is connected with the Harvey controversy. The joint result of these two lines of investigation has been, not surprisingly, to leave The Unfortunate Traveller more in pieces than ever and an easy prey to charges of formlessness. The only commentator to describe, rather than reproach, Nashe's inability to focus on a subject was the late C. S. Lewis.

Paradoxically, though Nashe's pamphlets are commercial literature, they come very close to being, in another way, "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. He tells no story, expresses no thought, maintains no attitude. Even his angers seem to be part of his technique rather than real passions. 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. (p. 416)

This shrewd observation, if it holds true for The Unfortunate Traveller, would seem to imply that the confusion about the novel is partly at least in the critics' methods, rather than in Nashe's prose. For if The Unfortunate Traveller is so much closer to the preconscious springs of creativity than fiction, certainly highly stylized Elizabethan fiction, usually is, then it is useless to seek a well-made plot. We will look equally in vain for a carefully-wrought series of literary parodies or a pattern of satire, topical or otherwise. The structure of such a work as Lewis describes will be found in none of these. It is hard indeed to think where it might be found by a critic, for there exists no commonly accepted critical procedure to deal with such an artifact. And, until we know more about the relationship between literary form and authorial psychology, none will exist. Such a lacuna is clearly too complex an issue to be opened here. It is germane to remark, however, that precisely this gap in literary theory may have created the fundamental disagreements about the novel. The Traveller may be offering diverse replies because it is being asked such diverse questions. The lesson taught us would seem to be a greater clarity of method than students of Nashe have generally felt the need for.

Two consistent approaches are possible to a novel like The Unfortunate Traveller, and neither is satisfactory. We can treat it as a collection of images, boiling up from the "dark void" of Nashe's preconscious mind, upon which he has not wholly succeeded in imposing a significant form. The novel would thus be sub- or perhaps pre-literary. Or, we can consider it as a complete fictional form in which continuity is imagistic (or, in some parts, stylistic) rather than narrative. The first approach would seem to deliver at least some of the novel into the hands of the biographer or the psychoanalyst, and objections will certainly arise to this. The second approach is equally open to question, for we would be using techniques of analysis developed to cope with fiction far more sophisticated than Nashe's. To do so would be to re-enact the kind of critical anachronism in which formalist terms are applied where there is little form. The two approaches are poles apart and each excludes the other. How is one to proceed? Either approach can rightfully be called forced, artificial, and incomplete.

Fortunately, for the case of The Unfortunate Traveller a compromise works out more easily in practice than theory promises. If the novel is not "really about" anything, has no central theme, it does have a central character, Jack Wilton. He is obviously the main concern of both biographical-psychoanalytical and formalist critic. He may be Nashe, he may be a persona, he may be first one, then the other, but he will be at the center of either approach. For it is evident that, in so far as whatever Jack says (or Nashe says through him) fails to provide a theme, the character of Jack himself will tend to take over the attention that theme usually draws to itself. Narrator will become subject. The most promising approach to the novel, then, would seem to lie through Jack Wilton.

To decide whether to strike a biographical or a formalist pose, we must first decide when Jack is talking and when Nashe. A doctrinaire formalist answer is easy; we may say that there is no character named Nashe in the novel. It is even easier, however, to see Nashe everywhere. The pamphlets are full of personal allusions and asides that seem to indicate Nashe drew no fine line between himself and his fictional spokesman. The very lack of a subject, in the conventional sense, would seem to encourage a biographical reading in which Nashe is talking throughout: we scarcely need Freud to remind us, after all, that when we talk with nothing to say, we end up talking about ourselves. We should expect, in such a case, a revelation of the inner life as well as the outer. Hibbard seems to imply something like this when he says that the only unity in The Unfortunate Traveller comes from Nashe's personality (p. 178). But the conditions that seem to encourage a biographical reading of The Unfortunate Traveller actually preclude it. There is, in the first place, little reliable biographical information outside the pamphlets themselves to bring to their interpretation. We can excerpt passages that "read like a personal allusion" as McKerrow put it, and use these to make up a biography that we then feed back into the pamphlets. But even when the allusions seem clearly autobiographical, the reasoning stays circular. And when we take biographical bits from one pamphlet and use them to identify Nashe's personality (style, opinions, attitudes) in another, the guesswork is compounded. This is not to say that a dominant personality may not inform either The Unfortunate Traveller or Nashe's work as a whole, but merely that this personality will have dubious biographical value. In the absence of a reliable external biography of Nashe, his "personality" will have the truth of fiction and not that of biography.

A more strictly psychoanalytical reading seems to face the same problem. There is so little external evidence of Nashe's personality that the novel, not Nashe, is psychoanalyzed. It is no condemnation of such a procedure, of course, to observe that it analyzes not an historical personage, Thomas Nashe, but a fictional character, Jack Wilton. But we do fetch up just where a biographical approach leads us. We must take Jack Wilton as our subject, and take him as we find him, for he is all we have. Regardless of our critical bias, sufficient information simply does not exist to make either a biographical or a psychoanalytical reading possible in its own terms. There is no reason not to speculate about Nashe's state of mind, of course, provided we call it speculation.

We are left, then, so far as I can see, with a formalist analysis of Jack Wilton as the only viable approach to the novel as an artistic whole. It is far from a perfect one, but the correctives of other approaches must, in this case, remain tentative. We must allow Jack Wilton all the prerogatives a sophisticated fiction demands.

This is so far from being the case at present that one of Nashe's most judicious critics, Hibbard, denies that Jack exists at all. The commonly accepted position is that he is a picaresque hero of some sort. Arnold Kettle, in presenting this view most recently, defined a picaro as a "social outcast … rejected by, and rejecting feudal society and its morality." "The picaro's story was typically disorganized," he goes on, "a series of incidents held together by no informing plan, by nothing save the presence of the hero, who is himself a vagabond whose life has no centre and no pattern" (I, 21 ff.). McKerrow, on the other hand, held the opposite view: "practically nothing in the work … can have been suggested by the picaresque type of romance." Jack Wilton "was not intended to be a rogue at all" (Works v, 23). Hibbard cuts the knot by arguing Jack's personality out of existence altogether.

Dr. Kettle's picture of Jack as the outcast rogue, who has a certain place in society but does not "belong" to that society or feel himself in any way morally bound to its standards, is a happy fiction, concocted to serve a general theory of the picaresque. There is no Jack in the proper sense of the word, and, so far as I can see, there is no society either. (p. 178)

What I am committed to argue here is that there is a Jack Wilton and that there is a society, and that their relationship supplies both a structure and a subject for The Unfortunate Traveller.

II

Hibbard, in dissolving Jack, seems to be saying two things. First, that The Unfortunate Traveller is not a novel, because neither the hero nor his society remain identifiably the same throughout. The pamphlet is rather a series of tales about a series of heroes, all called Jack Wilton, but sharing little else. Second, that none of the Jack Wiltons responds to his society in the way Kettle suggests. Both verdicts are really answers to a single, not always explicit, question that seems to me the central one for the novel's structure: What attitude, or attitudes, toward society does Jack Wilton assume?

Jack Wilton is a scoundrel. He is hard up. He lives by his wits. But it is not clear that he combines these three ingredients in a picaresque formula. He does not commit a major crime that would forfeit our sympathy entirely, but it is only by accident that he does not. He does not spend all his chronicle telling us about cadging a living; only the first few episodes. He uses his wits more for pleasure and less for food than the kind of hero Dr. Kettle has in mind. It has been assumed that he is a satiric persona of some sort, but he really does not fit this type either. His behavior implies no criticism of social values. His outbursts against the order of things lament not that order as good or bad in itself, but simply his place in it. He never illustrates a framework of values larger than his own. He does, it is true, occasionally assume the pose of a vir bonus, as when he is considering the discarded niceness of the Earl of Surrey: "I sweare unto you I thought his companie the better by a thousand crownes, because hee had discarded those nice tearms of chastitie and continencie. Now I beseech God loue me so well as I loue a plaine dealing man; earth is earth, flesh is flesh … (Works, II, 245). But his actions before and after this asseveration make of it merely a pose. He is the very opposite of plain-dealing, unless it is to his advantage to be so. Thus we have properly speaking not satire at all in The Unfortunate Traveller but burlesque.² The novel is often read for social history, but Jack's grotesque exaggerations and burlesque mockeries teach us little about Elizabethan England. When Jack is at his best, in Surrey's tournament, Vanderhulke's oration, in the death of Cutwolf, the social criticism is tangential. The abuse is the thing. This fondness prompts Sutherland to comment: "Nashe's satire exists in a vacuum. His attitude to controversy is like that of the Irishman who asked, 'Is this a private fight, or can anyone join in?'" (p. 35). Yet the abuse is seldom good-natured or, in spite of all the adulation of Nashe's exuberant high spirits, really exhilarating. Even the burlesque writer must cherish some modicum of liking for his target. Compare, in this respect, Panurge's silent debate with Thaumast in Gargantua and Pantagruel with Wilton's description of Vanderhulke. Jack is too eager to strike, too senseless and indiscriminate in his targets to be a humorist. And in his need to find a target for his aggressiveness, and to overwhelm it with abuse, he loses that prime requirement for the satirist, self-control. His anger betrays in him a motive which is neither moral indignation nor good-natured amusement at folly, but simply a free-floating aggression looking for a target. And the classic kind of generalized angst seems to go with it; Jack always sounds like a hounded intruder, ready to run away from the wrath he engenders or to confess that he really did not mean it. He never seems strong. Nothing could well be further from the traditional tone of satire than this fearful insecurity.

Jack may be, as Hibbard suggests in his chapter on The Unfortunate Traveller, simply a joker out of the jest books in the first few adventures, but the reader soon encounters a more complicated motivation. The railer seems to rail out of sheer frustration and rage. Like his own description of Aretine, "utterly given over to artlesse envie" (Works, II, 265), he is a kind of allegorical indignatio. We wonder how he will succeed in matching wits with "them," with the society from which he seems cut off, but we wonder still more why he must continually attack them. Why attacks becomes more important than what he attacks. The satirist becomes subject.

Satirist here means the Jack Wilton who emerges from the admittedly unrelated episodes he passes through, the identity that accretes around the name, as in any narrative fiction. These identities do seem to have a lowest common denominator: the factor "outsider." Wherever he finds himself, he occupies an ambivalent, indeterminate place. He is a page, but certainly not one of the pert small boys who delighted the Elizabethan theatre audiences; neither is he commoner, nor yet is he treated like a gentleman. He is a traveller in a foreign land. He is a Falstaff who gets mixed up in the wars. He is a Protestant in Catholic Italy, an orthodox Anglican among the Anabaptists. He is friend to a lord, would like to change identities with him and is happy when he does, but he is unable to make the change permanent. He worships Surrey for his liberality but mocks his chivalric ideals in the tournament. He extolls the sacred duty of poetry and poet, but continually dwells on his own authorial haste and carelessness. He is a fool with no tolerance; a funny man who cannot stop short of the grotesque. Scornful of all who do not act from self-interest, he yet praises the unworldly, unselfish poet. He is in some ways like the ideal poet he describes, and would like to resemble him in others: "None come so neere to God in wit, none more contemne the world…. Despised they are of the worlde, because they are not of the world: their thoughts are exalted aboue the worlde of ignorance and all earthly conceits" (Works, II, 242). If all these instances of isolation, of ambivalent status, occurred in an elaborately structured satire on something else, on travelling, for example, or rhetoric, or chivalric derring-do, with a carefully devised, consistent persona, one might say the coincidence was forced or fortuitous, or both. But when context offers no reason at all to choose one situation over another, when the forces that Nashe's subconscious mind exerts on him are given such free play, then if Wilton is in essentially the same position in all his episodes, perhaps one can speculate that Nashe was, whatever his intention, repeatedly dramatizing a single social predicament much on his mind.

The kind of jesting Jack likes fits this predicament well enough. The joke is, for him, an instrument of attack, of deflation. As he says admiringly of Aretine: "His pen was sharp pointed lyke a poinyard; no leafe he wrote on but was lyke a burning glasse to set on fire all his readers. With more than musket shot did he charge his quill" (Works, II, 264). Wilton's characteristic rhetorical figures are the "reducing" ones: "his alie honor" for the camp victualler whose gulling opens Jack Wilton's adventures; "their hooded hypocrisie" to describe the Wittenberg scholars who welcome the Duke of Saxony; Petro de Campo Frego, "our special approved good pandar" as Wilton styles him, was "seene in all the seven liberall deadly sciences." Jack allows no figure of respect or authority or prosperity to remain unattacked; the prosperous camp victualler is ruined and disgraced; Erasmus and More are left to their "discontented studies"; Surrey, who is praised with a fulsomeness intended, as Hibbard thinks, to catch Sidney's eye, is ridiculed for his love of Geraldine and of chivalric tourneys; Tabitha is executed; Diamante's cuckolded husband is made to run off; Dr. Zachary is banished by the Pope; Zadoch "executed with al the firy torments that could be found out"; Cutwolf shoots Esdras of Granado in the mouth in a memorable scene; Cutwolf himself is graphically butchered a page later. It is a mistake to think that evil is being punished in all cases. These figures share not evil, or goodness, but a dominant position over Jack. Jack does not triumph, unless his last-page marriage to his "curtizan" be so considered, but he does manage to protect himself against what today we might call the "system," power legitimate or not. The typical situation of the pamphlet appears to be Jack's revenge on his persecutors. More than the run-of-the-mill picaro-rogue who lives by his wits, he is pursued and tormented. His predicaments tend to be horribly bizarre; he is threatened not with a beating but with being donated to a medical school for experiment. The kinds of things that plague Jack, as The Unfortunate Traveller changes from a jest-book exercise into something more serious, are infinitely varied. But the threatening itself persists.

Hibbard is right, I think, in refusing to look upon this aspect of Jack's behavior as a studied "picaro" pose, as antifeudal manifestation of prebourgeois philosophy. Jack vacillates too much. But his repudiation of authority seems unmistakable. We can speculate, if we like, that Nashe's own attitude toward authority sought and found expression in The Unfortunate Traveller. He, too, occupied a marginal class position. But this speculation does not force us to agree with Kettle that The Unfortunate Traveller was written to illustrate an emergent bourgeois attitude toward the dying feudal social structure. If we must speculate, we might say that the novel illustrates Nashe's subconscious attitude toward authority as well as Jack Wilton's precisely because it was not written to illustrate that attitude or any other. No theme interfered with a settled preoccupation of mind.

Jack's persistent attack of authority suggests the kind of humor we are to expect from him. It only pretends to be lighthearted, Rabelaisian. Agnes M. C. Lathem writes: "So deft are Nashe's lightning transitions that we almost forgive him for writing a book which requires them, a book designed to leave its readers giddy, gasping and weak with laughter, as though they had just come off a switch-back." 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. Wilton's technique is that of the improvisor who can go on jesting ex tempore as long as he can profit from it. He walks a tightrope. We are giddy because he is giddy too, and always on the point of falling off. Does Nashe consciously create this vertigo? Does he pretend to a haste deliberately calculated to throw the reader off balance and keep him there? Or was he writing so fast that he really did approximate an improvising jester? Again, we might look at The Unfortunate Traveller rather than at Nashe's psyche. Had he restored the reader's balance by slowing down, he certainly would have destroyed the power of the fiction. For by accident or choice, its profuse speed is one of its great virtues. Without it, Wilton's jesting would fall flat. He lacks tolerance. To compensate, he sustains outrageous abuse and revolting gore endlessly. Not the just accuracy of his attack, but the imaginative variety, the rhetorical richness of his animosity, provoke the laughter. The more incoherent the associative rambling, the more it tells us, not about the subject, but about Jack. In the passage quoted earlier, C. S. Lewis comments on the unreality of Nashe's anger. If we read "Jack Wilton" for "Nashe," we may perhaps see this unreality in The Unfortunate Traveller. The angrier Jack gets, the more elaborate his language becomes. The more elaborate the language, the more one attends to it and not to the target of the abuse. The object of The Unfortunate Traveller, what Nashe says, what The Unfortunate Traveller is about, becomes Jack Wilton. If pressed, Jack himself might confess that his great subject was his own wrath.

If we look more closely at Jack's adventures, we can see his increasingly violent anger patterning out a specific social class relationship. In his first adventure, with the victualler, he emerges as a practical joker on the edge of harmlessness and about to step over. The victualler, or tapster, is a fool but harmless. He in no way hurts Jack nor, so far as the reader knows, anyone else. He is a neutral target and the jest unprovoked: "He and no other was the man I chose out to damne with a lewd moniless device" (Works, II, 211). But Jack thinks of him in an odd way:

there was a Lord in the campe, let him be a Lord of misrule if you will, for he kept a plaine alehouse without welt or gard or anie ivybush…. This great Lord, this worthie Lord, this noble Lord, thought no scorne (Lord, have mercie vpon us) to haue his great veluet breeches larded with the droppings of this daintie liquor, & yet he was an old seruitor, a cauelier of an ancient house, as might appeare by the armes of his ancestors, drawen verie amiably in chalke on the in side of his tent dore. (Works, II, 210-211)

Why cast the tapster as a lord? And which side is Jack on? Does he attribute to the victualler aristocratic pretensions so that he can ridicule him for them? Or mock the panoply of aristocratic life by attributing it to a tradesman? Or simply try to get a laugh from the incongruity? He seems on neither side and antagonistic to both. He could fetch a laugh here in many ways, yet chooses to do it by ironically juxtaposing two social classes. And the juxtaposition is finally irrelevant, for the main jest (the kind we expect of a picaro rogue) comes later, when he invents his story of high-level betrayal in order to obtain free meat and drink. His mindless detail seems more to his real purpose than the traditional jest by which the sharp-witted rogue obtains free cider from the dull victualler. On the one hand Jack Wilton is fascinated by the genteel, who in these times was frequently down-at-heels, and on the other hand, by the middle-class, who were prospering as never before. He envies both and yokes them together for no other reason than to group his enemies.

His joke on the Captain, a little more serious than that played on the victualler, has at least some provocation. The Captain, though poor, flaunts his rank: "You must think in an Armie, where trunchions are in their state-house, it is a flat stab once to name a Captaine without cap in hand. Well, suppose he was a Captaine, and had neuer a good cap of his owne, but I was faire to lend him one of my Lords cast veluet caps, and a weather-beaten feather, wherewith he threatened his soldiers a far off …" (Works, II, 217). Jack resents the show of power, and also the poverty, since he has to gamble for the Captain to remedy it. So he schemes to have him sent on a dangerous mission from which he will not return. What sidesplitting fun!

Gone he is; God send him good shipping to Wapping, and by this time, if you will, let him be a pitiful poore fellow and vndone for euer: for mine own part, if he had been mine own brother, I could haue done no more for him than I did, for straight after his back was tumd, I went in all loue and kindness to the Marshall generall of the field, & certifide him that such a man was lately fled to the Enemie, & got his place begd for another immediately. (Works, II, 222)

The humor of the jest comes from the skill with which Jack uses his wits and observation to play on the Captain. Jack, the clever, perceptive subordinate who sees beneath pretense to real motive, is made to play the fool for a clod whom the rough hand of social inequity has placed above him. (The Captain gives himself away to the French King by the lack of that ready wit which Jack so plentifully possesses.) Jack temporarily redresses the balance. Here again we should note some apparently unimportant details. The Captain's weakness on which Jack plays is the desire to be noticed and hence advanced in rank: "Resteth no way for you to clime sodenly but by doing some rare strategeme, the like not before heard of: and fitlie at this time occasion is offered" (Works, II, 218). The Captain is tempted to folly much as, at another level, Jack himself is set in action. For the ruse aims, as the long quotation above shows, to rid Jack not so much of the Captain's drain on his purse as of the Captain himself, so as to get his place for another.

The more closely one reads these harmless, happy incidents, the more one begins to think Jack Wilton a rogue. Look, for example, at this apologia that Jack tosses out in the midst of telling how he robbed the "companie of Coystrell Clearkes."

My masters, you may conceaue of me what you list, but I thinke confidently I was ordained Gods scourge from aboue for their daintie finicalitie. The houre of their punishment could no longer be proroged, but vengeance must haue at them at all a ventures. So it was, that the most of these aboue-named goose-quill Braggadoches were mere cowards and crauens, and durst not so much as throwe a pen-full of inke into the Enemies face, if proofe were made: wherefore on the experience of their pusillanimitie I thought to raise the foundation of my roguerie. (Works, II, 226)

A preposterous justification, it in some sort jumps with Jack's humor—he likes to punish. This pleasure in punishment, merited or not, recurs in all Jack's adventures.

Jack betrays his preoccupation with the outward signs of rank in the first narrative link, which bridges the time between the first trip abroad and the second, and which includes his activities as a page and the description of the sweating sickness in England. He remarks of his page service:

I was the first that brought in the order of passing into the Court which deriued from the common word Qui passa and the Heralds phrase of armes Passant, thinking in sinceritie, he was not a Gentleman, nor his armes currant, who was not first past by the Pages. If anie Prentise or other came into the Court that was not a Gentleman, I thought it was an indignitie to the preheminence of the Court to include such a one, and could not bee salude except wee gaue him Armes Passant, to make him a Gentleman. (Works, II, 227-228)

What an unusual deed to chronicle! Surely this didn't come from the jest books. It has no relevance whatever. Jack seems no particular friend to the nobility elsewhere in the story, or indeed even here. He is simply preoccupied with social distinctions.

The description of the sweating sickness delights in repulsive detail simply for its own sake. The description of the battle of "Turwin" that follows seems just such another:

It was my good lucke or my ill (I know not which) to come just to the fighting of the Battell; where I saw a wonderfull spectacle of blood-shed on both sides: here vnweeldie 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: all the ground was strewed as thicke with Battle-axes as the Carpenters yard with chips; the Plaine appeared like a quagmyre, ouerspred as it was with trampled dead bodies. In one place might you behold a heape of dead murthered men ouerwhelmed with a falling Steede in stead of a toombe stone, in another place a bundell of bodies fettered together in their owne bowells; and as the tyrant Romane Emperours used to tye condemned liuing captiues face to face to dead corses, so were the halfe liuing here mixt with squeazed carcases long putrifide … the French King himselfe in this Conflict was much distressed, the braines of his owne men sprinkled in his face…. (Works, II, 231)

This description serves no narrative purpose. Jack seems so to have enjoyed describing the sweating sickness horrors that when he comes to the end of them, he must needs keep going. He enjoys watching the scourge of God at work.

The tirade against John of Leiden and his Anabaptists Hibbard takes to be serious religious satire (or at least abuse). It may be. It certainly offers Jack another role as scourge. This reader at least finds that Jack enjoys playing the role quite as much as he has a theological grievance—that, in other words, Jack has capitalized on still another occasion to vent his own generalized spleen.

How much weight to attach to the recurrent jibing at Surrey's Geraldine is hard to judge. If for Surrey we are to read Sidney, this persistent mockery makes no sense at all. The nonsensical tournament renders this identification more difficult still. The soul of the jest lies in the insignia of rank, and, more generally, in the upperclass ceremony, but the incongruities are so carefully elaborated that one is tempted to call it the only really harmless jest in the work. Characteristically, Wilton overdoes it. There are too many ludicrous chivalric devices. But he shows here what he seldom does elsewhere, a real interest and delight in what he mocks. He approaches something like bemused tolerance. If Jack Wilton's trading of identities with Surrey has any relevance at all, it may be to offer the other side of Jack's very ambivalent attitude to persons of rank. He envies them, yet his wit and common sense alone would set him off from their elaborate politesse even if his worldly situation suddenly altered for the better.

The most arresting episodes in The Unfortunate Traveller, as well as the most seemingly irrelevant, tell of the bandit Esdras of Granado. The first of these episodes is the rape of Heraclide, which Jack describes. At this point Jack ceases to be a protagonist and becomes only a narrator of the violence to follow. He begins the process of dissociation which is climaxed by Cutwolf's suicidal surrender, when the principle of violence, one might say, is sacrificed to the principle of order. This change from actor to narrator of violence has never been satisfactorily explained. Focussing on the progression of violence rather than on the humor might help explain it. By becoming the narrator of violent antisocial behavior rather than its perpetrator, Wilton can both continue the progression of increasing violence and at the same time keep the credibility of one who has not done anything irrevocably wrong. While retaining some of the elements of the picaro pose, he can yet revel in a serious violence the picaresque mode forbids.

In the rape of Heraclide episode, no pretense either to jest or to picaro revenge prank is made. Jack describes, at interminable and intolerable length, the sadistic torment and final rape of a wife on the supposedly dead body of her husband. The rhetoric is ludicrously overdrawn:

This woman, this matrone, this forsaken Heraclide, hauing buried fourteene children in fiue daies, whose eyes she howlingly closed, & caught manie wrinckles with fiinerall 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, though her speech be as impatient as vnhappie Hecubas, thogh her head raues and her braine doate? Deuise with your selues that you see a corse rising from his hierce after he is carried to church, & such another suppose Heraclide to be, rising from the couch of enforced adulterie. (Works, II, 292-293)

Yet it never collapses into parody and so it remains extravagant and cruel. The episode is offensive, yet may have been meant as a jest. Literary analysis is helpless. The novel itself provides no standards by which to judge such savoured, but irrelevant violence. Nashe supplies no stylistic control by which to judge the rhetoric. As one stage in a series of progressively more violent scenes the episode at least has a context. Rebellion against the constituted order could hardly be taken any further than Esdras of Granado takes it. The punishment of Esdras by Cutwolf poses the same puzzles as the rape of Heraclide. Hibbard sees it as a deadly serious exemplum "depicting the inevitable way in which divine justice works to punish human weakness" (p. 167). But the emphasis is all on the punishment, not on the justice. It is incidentally a just action; in the context of The Unfortunate Traveller, it provides a climactic act of violence. Cutwolf's oration draws the torment out with sadistic relish. As with the rape of Heraclide, the rhetoric is too declamatory to be seriously convincing, draws attention from action to speaker. Yet if self-consciously declamatory, it is still too vivid to be burlesque. Both gore and rhetoric draw our attention to Cutwolf, not to justice. The scene is the most frankly violent in the novel. We can, I think, relate it to the pattern of violence preceding it by construing Cutwolf's punishment of Esdras as Jack Wilton's attempt to kill the scourge of God figure that he had been acting and dramatizing. He casts Cutwolf in the part and then has him surrender himself to the mob that tears him apart. Thus the enjoyment of violence, so evident throughout, is brought under at least some social control.

If we were permitted a guess at Wilton's subconscious, we might say he is here vicariously killing off a part of himself that blocks his establishing a harmonious relationship with society.

Brauely did he drum on this Cutwolfes bones, not breaking them outright, but, like a sadler knocking in of tackes, iarring on them quaueringly with his hammer a great while together. No ioint about him but with a hatchet he had for the nones he disioynted halfe, and then with boyling lead souldered vp the wounds from bleeding: his tongue he puld out, least he should blaspheme in his torment: venimous stinging wormes hee thrust into his eares, to keep his head rauingly occupied: with cankers scruzed to peeces hee rubd his mouth and his gums: no lim of his but was lingeringly splintered in shiuers. (Works, II, 327)

Odd treatment at all events to give a vicar of God's justice, in an otherwise happy—or at least neutral—ending.

III

At this point the reader may well ask to what end this violence tends, what artistic purpose it fulfills. None. The Unfortunate Traveller is indeed "pure" literature, a succession of grotesque episodes with structure, a "theme" if you like, so far as Jack is conceived, but building to no paraphrasable meaning. We may emphasize the language to back-light the "rhetorical" parody; we may excerpt detail to get social history. We may point out sources, and call the novel one of a series of "merrie tales" collections. We may, as has been done here, examine Jack's role to gain from it a fundamental pattern, a narrative repetition of social disenfranchisement and violence. But, having seen this pattern, we can do nothing with it. Jack's story is a confession, a fictional autobiography in which, as Northrop Frye says,³ the speaker makes available what he feels has been an integration of his own experience. But here no integration has occurred. The confession is bankrupt. Jack is a consistent character, I believe, but we seldom either profit or delight from his chronicle. He establishes a characteristic accent, one that reveals his personality as well as the episodes that it so clearly complements. Jack is not the problem of The Unfortunate Traveller and neither is narrative unity. Seeing him clearly solves, I think, both problems. The real dilemma The Unfortunate Traveller poses is how one criticizes the imitation of a truly neurotic personality. Can literature take as subject not a personality integrated by literary form, but a personality integrated by no form save the search for one, consistent only in the love of violence? The Unfortunate Traveller is being read today as it has not been since Nashe's lifetime. I wonder if this is because we respond to it as literary form or only because Wilton's neurosis is very like our own. Perhaps it is because his neurosis is like ours that our novel is becoming so much like his.

It is not difficult to find Jack Wilton's personality in other of Nashe's prose fictions. It is not difficult to see that this personality is enhanced by Nashe's characteristic looseness of form, for this looseness offers his sometimes subconscious frustrations precisely the opportunity they need to gain expression. Nor is it hard to relate such an incoherent, disenfranchised personality to the little we know of Nashe's own life and the good deal that we know of others like him. Jack Wilton's frustrations may, in fact, be those of a whole group of Elizabethan writers. Nashe, with nothing to write about, may have written about more than himself.

Looking at The Unfortunate Traveller in this pseudobiographical light may also suggest the extent of Nashe's indebtedness to the picaresque tradition. That his original intention was, in general terms, picaresque seems likely. The beginning of the novel, drawing as it does on the jest books for some clever stunts, seems to indicate it. But Nashe soon shifted direction away from this traditional beginning. What followed was, everyone seems to agree, original. In precisely what way it became original I hope I have begun to show. One can speculate why Nashe started out as he did; he could write a successful jokebook and relieve some of the spleen his own failures had built up. Once started in this way, it seems very plausible that he would modify the picaresque jest to his own purposes. In doing so he did not create a finished work of art—it is more like the wellings-up of subconscious situations and responses in the creative imagination that provide the raw material of art. It strikes one, as I think do many of Nashe's pamphlets, as the product of a prodigious creative imagination of almost Dickensian richness, running beyond control.

Hibbard remarks in the course of his discussion of The Unfortunate Traveller that it "has no representative quality at all" (p. 146). I maintain that it does. This quality, this consistent pattern of antisocial violence, may well have come from the unique expressive demands that Nashe's personality and social situation made on his writing. But we cannot prove it.

Notes

¹ The only full-length study of Nashe, G. R. Hibbard's Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1962) includes a chapter on The Unfortunate Traveller. C. S. Lewis has written brilliantly but briefly of Nashe's prose in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: excluding drama (New York, 1954). The notes to McKerrow's edition (The Works of Thomas Nashe, Ronald B. McKerrow, ed., rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols., Oxford, 1958), the starting point for any student of Nashe, are not especially illuminating for problems of structure. Professor F. T. Bowers long ago made out a case for the novel as picaresque in "Thomas Nashe and the Picaresque Novel" (Studies in Honor of John Calvin Metcalf Charlottesville, 1941). Arnold Kettle puts this interpretation into the framework of a Marxist theory of the picaresque novel in An Introduction to the English Novel (2 vols., London, 1951). James R. Sutherland comments briefly on the satire of The Unfortunate Traveller in English Satire (New York, 1958). Agnes M. C. Lathem sees The Unfortunate Traveller as essentially a series of parodies of rhetorical exercises: "Satire on Literary Themes and Modes in Nashe's 'Unfortunate Traveller'" (English Studies 1948, New Series, 1, 85-100). More recently, Sister Maria Gibbons has directed attention to the elements in the novel that recall Nashe the controversialist: "Polemic, the Rhetorical Tradition, and The Unfortunate Traveller" (Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXIII, 408 ff.). David Kaula has analyzed "The Low Style in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller" (Studies in English Literature, VI, i, 43-57). There is also a detailed stylistic study by George M. Anderson, still unpublished, "The Use of Language and Rhetoric in Thomas Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller" (Doct. Diss., Yale University, 1961). All subsequent citations of these works are in parentheses within the text.

² Kenneth Burke makes this distinction in Attitudes Toward History: "The method of burlesque (polemic, caricature) is partial not only in the sense of partisan, but also in the sense of incompleteness. As such, it does not contain a well-rounded frame within itself; we can use it for the ends of wisdom only insofar as we ourselves provide the ways of making allowances for it; we must not be merely equal to it, we must be enough greater than it to be able to 'discount' what it says." (Boston, 1961), p. 55.

³Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), pp. 307-308.