SOURCE: Berryman, John. “Thomas Nashe and The Unfortunate Traveller.” In The Freedom of the Poet, pp. 9-28. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.

[In this essay, originally written in 1960 and reprinted in a posthumous collection of essays and stories, Berryman focuses on generic issues surrounding The Unfortunate Traveller and Nashe's strengths as a writer. The critic also discusses Nashe's public quarrel with Gabriel Harvey as providing instances of his best work.]

Considering how little we know of his short restless life, and how little we read his work, Thomas Nashe makes an oddly distinct impression. One sees a small man, passionate, racy, sharp (“young Juvenal, that biting Satirist, that lastly with me together writ a comedy”—so Robert Greene at the point of death¹), Cambridge-trained, poor, writing like mad fantastic pamphlets, negligible plays, and parts of plays with Marlowe and perhaps others, one stunning lyric and a gay one and some bad and obscene ones, in trouble with the authorities; dying no one knows where or when, and pretty forgotten then for centuries. He wrote also a novel, this one, we hear, and it stands as practically the only work of his anyone reads, even scholars, though every scholar uses the index McKerrow made for his magnificent five-volume edition of Nashe fifty years ago.

But it is not a novel, nor should it be held even to be his best book—if it is proper to think of Nashe as writing books at all. Historically The Unfortunate Traveller may claim real interest, as a symbolic effort to wrench prose narrative out of euphuism and romance, and as perhaps the first historical “novel” in English (putting an imaginary hero among actual dead men and past events, to let him operate and listen). But it can hardly be seen as successful in itself or as in itself pointing to anything. Literary historians like to point, forward, backward. The view, well put by Walter Allen in his intelligent survey The English Novel: a short critical history, is surely the right one, that these Elizabethan narratives have nothing to do with the novel (Robinson Crusoe, Emma, Ulysses). They are just stories, and Nashe's is not a good story.

The usual potted account of it is misleading. Jack Wilton, we are told, servant, prince of rascals and good fellows, careers about the Continent hobnobbing with Luther and More and Erasmus, after sitting in on historic battles political and religious, is trapped with his master, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, by a Venetian courtesan, gets off with Aretino's help, adopts the Earl's name, and proceeds to Florence with a rich widowed beauty, is discovered by Surrey, and witnesses a great tourney, races to Rome, etc., etc. Here is a young Englishman projected from 1593 back into Henry's reign, and meeting: the supreme Reformer, the two greatest Northern Humanists, one of the most formative of all English poets, whores, scoundrels, murderers, Aretino. It all sounds good.

These things do indeed happen in the book. But the book is not like this. As a story, almost everything in it creaks. Little of what is encountered convinces (not that Nashe had visited these lands, by the way). Its major faults, free of synopsis, might be three. There is a hanging failure to get on—a banal anecdote will be strung out to its end. On the other hand, Nashe can be the most perfunctory and disconcerting of writers. Jack listens to Luther and Carlstadt in solemn disputations: they heap up words against the Mass and the Pope—they are vehement, Luther talks louder, Carlstadt pounds his fists more, “they uttered nothing to make a man laugh, therefore I will leave them.” We do not hear them at all; that was that. Worse yet, the hero develops no personality or character. One never comes to care a straw what happens to him. Even Allen, who is very good-natured toward the book (“the most sheerly enjoyable of all Elizabethan prose fictions”), has nothing to say for Jack.

Well, how shall we set about accounting for the unmistakable attraction The Unfortunate Traveller still exerts? There have been half a dozen reprints in England and here during the last generation, a matter scarcely to be explained in terms of its academic interest. On what ought we to base the book's continuing claim?

Perhaps there is some deeper structure, non-picaresque? I wonder that no professor-critic desperate for a subject has waded in here, for clearly Nashe is a triadist, and the organization of his narrative, intended or not, is definite. There is the triple-war sequence: in France, at Marignano, at Münster. There is the triple-learning sequence: Erasmus and More (actual), the Wittenberg reception (farcical), Cornelius Agrippa's feats (magical, and superior)—after which we emerge into the real world. There are the ceremonies: at Wittenberg's reception, at Florence the tourney, at Bologna the execution. Leaving out all else, the fundamental triad plainly is that which justifies the epithet “Unfortunate” in the book's title: Jack's imprisonment for counterfeiting, for murder, and for cellar-door breaking. It is true that the last punishment is the worst (to become an anatomical specimen), so that a crescendo is observed; still, I see difficulties with this scheme. There are only two courtesans, only two epidemics; and there are four Italian cities. Venice-Florence-Rome will do; Bologna is extra. But Bologna is where the story's climax grinds. The professor triumphant has an answer: Thrice the story appears to start, and fails. When Jack goes back to England (there was no pretense of a story during all the pages before that point); when he meets Surrey and sets out—but nothing happens; when in Venice they are had. That it never gets going will never baffle an article. I like better the triple sense of a recent critic that Nashe's Traveller “begins as a jest book, continues as a mock chronicle, and concludes as an experiment in Italianate melodrama.”²

The jest-book origin is certain. How far and where Nashe first intended to go with it, though, is not clear. Did he, as some critics say Cervantes did (to compare small things with vast), begin with little and see that he had opened a sort of mine? (Those critics are practically right, but wrong.) Or had he it all in mind at first? Where—we are postponing now the question of value—did this work, which has lasted so much better than the jest books, come from?

Prose fiction had not got very far in England. There had been John Lyly's Euphues (1578), Greene's romances through the following decade, Sidney's Arcadia (1590); Nashe reacts against all these. “Euphues I read when I was a little ape in Cambridge, and then I thought it was Ipse ille: it may be excellent good still, for ought i know, for I lookt not on it this ten yeare: but to imitate it I abhorre” (Four Letters Confuted, 1592). From the Continent had come a literature of roguery, the Italian novelle, and the anonymous La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, picaresque, “realistic,” which had been translated and was no doubt read by Nashe but which is as different as possible from The Unfortunate Traveller and exerted no influence on it that anyone has been able to demonstrate. Classical narrative does not seem to be in question. Nashe was a great looter in details (McKerrow's notes are full of his borrowings or thefts and it has been shown since that he used a compendium, Textor's Officina, for the parade of learning in his apprentice work An Anatomy of Absurdity),³ like many Elizabethans, but unless something turns up, McKerrow's judgment will have to stand: that the book is “in the main an original attempt in a hitherto untried direction” (iv, 252)—a judgment the more impressive for his careful arguments against Nashe's familiarity with the works of either Aretino or Rabelais (v, 128-31). Some translated Aretino he may have read.

So he had no model, unless he intended a parody of the medieval knightly legends for which he had already explained his detestation, and not only is there no evidence for this but the jest-book outset is against it. He drew, of course, on this and that, the chronicles of Lanquet and Sleidan, conversation (certainly) with people who had visited Italy⁴ (as Shakespeare pumped them also, or remembered), and a report, in Puttenham's Art of English Poesy (1589, but written much earlier), that Surrey had gone there, together with Surrey's “Geraldine” sonnet—not one of that poet's best sonnets, though it imitates, like his best, Dante's history of La Pia (end of Canto V, Purgatorio).

But the work has no respectable ancestry, then, leads to nothing (except Defoe and so forward), is rather a tale than a story, and is not internally organized as artworks are supposed to be and, from the Iliad to The Bear, mostly are.

Nashe's strength here, and elsewhere, is continually said to lie in his style. That is why, historians and critics and editors say, we read him.

It is a reason. The notion “style” points in two contrary directions: toward individuality, the characteristic, and toward inconspicuous expression of its material. The latter is the more recent direction (George Orwell a superb practitioner); we may range it with T. S. Eliot's intolerable and perverse theory of the impersonality of the artist; it may have something wrong with it. Nashe is an extreme instance, perhaps the extreme instance, of the feasibility of the first theory. (We are not saying anything, as yet, about the correctness of the critical sense that his style generated his power.) He is unmistakable, even among the wild men, brilliant Dekker, and their imitators.

Suppose we begin with an example. To Surrey's long discourse of his love for Geraldine, Jack responds mentally in the narrative as follows:

Not a little was I delighted with this unexpected love storie, especially from a mouth out of which was nought wont to march but sterne precepts of gravetie & modestie. I sweare unto you I thought his companie the better by a thousand crownes, because he had discarded those nice tearmes of chastitie and continencie. Now I beseech God love me so well as I love a plaine dealing man; earth is earth, flesh is flesh, earth will to earth, and flesh unto flesh, fraile earth, fraile flesh, who can keepe you from the worke of your creation?

I have taken, on consideration, a passage which no one would be likely to overpraise or to hold commonplace, a suggestive but median passage, though exalted in the close.

A spectrum of points, not exhaustive:

The word order of the first sentence is unremarkable, yet reminds me that Nashe is (I hope I do not exaggerate) one of the masters of English prose. Inversion or rearrangement for rhythm, emphasis, and simulation of the (improved) colloquial; examples are so common in the novel that tauter illustration seems unnecessary. Rapid, offhand, natural, the order is still highly periodic.

Note then how physical it is (“from a mouth”) and how active (“march”): major notes of the style. It is a self-conscious style, but alert, not laboured. “Extemporal” was indeed the word Nashe most often used for his programmatic and instinctive sense of what he felt he ought to be up to (“give me the man whose extemporall veine in any humour will excell our greatest Art-maisters deliberate thought”—Preface to Greene's Menaphon, 1589). Anti-pedantic, spontaneous (apparently), but showmanlike; “Now I beseech God …” is between Madison Avenue and truth.

Nashe is a stylist queerly schizophrenic, even below the level of intention: More than half a thousand images, from this novel, lately collected by a student,⁵ show more than half divided between, say, the Marlowe side [Learning] and the Shakespeare side [Daily Life]—the first static (example: “prince of purses”), the second dynamic (“march”). These come, in Croston's reckoning, to half his whole number (147 and 133), most of the rest (200) being from Animals and Body, and “Imaginative” (personifications mostly), a dim remainder (83) being credited to Nature, Domestic, and the Arts. There is no suggestion, in Nashe, of the image clusters explored in Shakespeare by E. A. Armstrong.

Now there is a complicated simultaneous double movement, both democratic (this non-Elizabethan trait in Nashe has been often remarked), and servantlike. Amusing as it may be, Jack's “swearing” to the pages (to whom the book is addressed) that he likes his master's (an Earl's) “companie” better now that they are matey, man to man—the word “companie” is dramatic—passes to a flick of greedy hope, in the “thousand crownes,” that this new comradeliness may bring a tangible reward; a suggestion reinforced by the implication (notwithstanding his earlier praise of Surrey, for Nashe is regularly inconsistent) that he has only tolerated the Earl's “companie,” till now, for gain. At the same time, the Elizabethan hierarchy is at work in the passage: the pages (“you”), Jack (“I,” a super-page, mobile), the Earl, and God—but then we return to Jack, and pass outward (not upward) to a sturdy common denominator, the plain-dealing man.

Follows a peroration at once highly rhetorical and rather casual, pathetic and joyous; and “realistic,” you notice, after Surrey's tearful protestations. The vivid ambiguity of the whole passage comes to a head in the final phrase, where not only is frailty set against and with “worke” but “your creation” is perfectly double: both divine and sexual; that which we were created to do, and what which we do to create.

Next, two passages about Greene, from the Four Letters Confuted, addressed to his august antagonist, Dr. Gabriel Harvey of Cambridge. “A good fellowe he was, and would have drunke with thee from more angels than the Lord thou libeldst on gave thee in Christs Colledge; and in one year he pist as much against the walls, as thou and thy two brothers spent in three.” Here an insolent and a spiritual alliance is effected between the poverty-stricken, generous London tosspot and God's rescuers, as against the arrogant, miserly (an angel was a coin, worth rather more than a dollar) Cambridge Fellow, which is really Pauline, and deadly. The word order in the opening is more important than in the other passage we were looking at. “He was a good fellow” would be entirely different, as failing to convey the thrust that he was good, though he seemed not, as you are not, though you seem so in your respectability and eminence. It is hard to measure what has been lost in our prose by the uniform adoption of a straight-on, mechanical word order (reflecting our thoughtless speech). Perhaps Nashe's prime instruction to modern writers might be located here. But the clause, though inverted, is anti-pontifical, and this might be a second lesson. Impromptu and searching, Nashe's prose often seems, not a first anything, but a last high achievement of the impromptu and searching vigor exemplified in Tyndale's Bible (1525): “And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe” (A.V.: “prosperous man,” and the heart sinks; Gen. 29.2). For our generation, this inspired rendering associates itself with Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, where it is used as an epigraph for the chapter on the Puritans, whom Nashe of course hated, and one wonders whether our prose has not become puritanical: straightforward, pompous. Finally, I remark the savage contrast between Harvey's impious hypocrisy (“libeldst”) and Greene's unpretending physical ale-frankness (“pist”). Very few people write like this.

The second passage is deservedly celebrated and must be one of the most remarkable sentences that has come down to us from that time, Shakespeare always excepted. We might contrast it, for emotional and moral tone, with Essex's great cry at his trial, against Ralegh: “What boots it swear the Fox?” It comes just before the sentence we have been studying and is very simple: “Debt and deadly sinne, who is not subject to? with any notorious crime I never knew him tainted.” The weight of the terrible likelihood for man of evil comes first in both clauses (likelihood?: certainty), followed first by resignation, second by a kind of freeing. A whole moral drama lives in the little thing, hopeless, rebuking.

Undeniably, then, Nashe writes well, better than well, at his best. But he is slovenly, uneven, and I would not care to fix in his style alone whatever claim he may be held to make on our attention. Before saying more about this, some discussion is in order of his chief lifetime reputation and his chief present controversial interest.

He was known in his age as a satirist, primarily. He flattered popular taste in various ways (cozening, pageantry, Italian crime, the wicked Jew, travellers' lies and wonders), but in nothing so much as in his mockery and abuse: of ridiculous captains, of university pedantry and entertainment, of the Pope's mistress poisoned. I am holding to The Unfortunate Traveller; actually his fame was a product of his invective against Harvey—so scandalous the flyting became that in 1599 all the books of both were ordered seized and no new ones allowed printed (whatever that means). But can this matter to us? I would think not, unless historically. The targets of a generation become indifferent. We pretend that genius transcends, even here, and perhaps it does, for A Modest Proposal, but who reads what Swift calls his masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (of which an admirable modern edition exists)? As in all things human, scale obtains; trouble, attention, will be taken, paid, for and to a small work; not a large. The Unfortunate Traveller is in between; but I hardly see anyone reading it now for its satire. For Nashe's general powers, squandered on a war with a (rather attractive) pedant: there may certainly come a time when his pamphlets will be more attractive than they are now, but it is not yet. These are two obstacles, apart from our entire lack of interest in the matters at stake, if there were any, between Harvey and Nashe. We jib at cutting and humiliation, even of someone else; Housman's ferocity as a scholar toward his colleagues makes us more nervous than it entertains us—our exhausted and vague humanitarianism, sentimental, feels that this ought not to happen. But the second obstacle, emerging from the history of culture, puts Nashe further off still: a fight between two film stars is a topic—between two scholars, not. It is easy, even from here, to analogize the Nashe-Harvey controversy, imagining a war between Walter Winchell (gifted suddenly by God with a style) and Walter Lippmann (made a little dull, academized). But who, five years later, one season later, would care? Another problem here—the sincerity of the slashers—I postpone a little.

Currently there is some question as to whether The Unfortunate Traveller is picaresque or not. A picaro is a knave, and by showing Jack Wilton as heartless, financial, a servant, mischievous, Professor Bowers, whose style is rather mechanical,⁶ has made an important contribution to nothing by emphasizing the possibility that Nashe conformed more to the picaresque (Spanish) model than we thought. It does remain a possibility.

It has also been claimed that Nashe is a master of psychology, leaving loose the wonder that he troubles to make Diamante innocent, as an accused wife, and then calls her courtesan.

A prose work will not live for its style alone, other factors ordinary. This is my difficulty, trying to account for the book's survival over three and a half destructive centuries. A poor story, brilliant. But do we truly only read for stories? Let's jump and retrieve the term “Imagination”; one can write marvellously without it. For example, C. D. Broad, the British philosopher, in his obituary for McTaggart before the British Academy, has a cunning sentence: “Whatever else may be thought about McTaggart's work on Hegel, it cannot at any rate be denied that he has succeeded in producing from the Hegelian hat a large and fascinating rabbit, whilst others have produced only consumptive and gibbering chimeras, a feat the more remarkable in that the rabbit may never have been inside the hat at all, while the chimeras certainly were.” It is brilliant, fanciful, has nothing to do with fiction at all. But style? wow. Now we put against it: “A pretie rounde faced wench was it, with blacke eie browes, a high forehead, a little mouth, and a sharp nose, as fat and plum everie part of her as a plover, a skin as slike and soft as the backe of a swan, it doth me good when I remember her. Like a bird she tript on the grounde, and bare out her belly as majesticall as an Estrich.” Now this has little more to do with fiction than Broad's sentence (though something more), but clearly it has a vast deal more to do with the possession and employment of Imagination. The operation of Fancy in Broad's splendid sentence—I am returning to Coleridge—“has no counters to play with, but fixities and definites,” whereas the description of Diamante is surely a plain instance of the operation of Coleridge's “secondary Imagination”: “co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary [Imagination as purely creative] in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create …”

Nashe is nothing even resembling a great writer then, but he is a really good one. It must be admitted that he is very spotty—but perhaps we are much too keen in the present period of criticism to require works even of the second order to be even wholes, which few of them are. It must be admitted also that he puts forward no settled view of life. This objection has been expressed most strongly, of late, by C. S. Lewis:⁷ “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” and Lewis goes on to compare Nashe with Bosch, the later Picasso, and James Thurber. Ignoring, if we may, the last comparison, I think this attractive view is somewhat exaggerated. Of course we are dealing always with the work of a young man, imperfect and forming. The steadiness and depth of Swift are out of the question. But when Lewis wonders whether Nashe's rage is real (“Even his angers seem to be part of his technique rather than real passions”), perhaps the critic, expert though he is in the literature of the Renaissance, may be felt as proceeding in his judgment rather from a modern than from a Renaissance or a classical sense of Sincerity. A shaky passage earlier in Lewis's fascinating book (p. 44) seems to make this certain, when he refers to the truth that “denunciations of vice became part of the stock-in-trade of fashionable and even frivolous writers. Perhaps nothing in our period is so surprising to a modern as the readiness with which a Lyly, a Nashe, or even a Greene, will at any moment launch out into moral diatribe of the most uncompromising ferocity. All our lifetime the current has been setting toward license. In Elizabeth's reign it was the opposite. Nothing seems to have been more salable, more comme il faut, than the censorious. We are overwhelmed by floods of morality from very young, very ignorant, and not very moral men. The glib harshness is to us a little repulsive …”

I doubt if this will do, though part of what it says is true enough. The larger truth might be we are uneasy equally with the enthusiastic and the censorious—with the enthusiastic, for instance, in Cummings's Harvard lectures and Jack Kerouac's On the Road—while an Elizabethan was at home with both. I think, therefore, that it would be as foolish to question the sincerity of Nashe's wonderful praise of poets as of his detestation of Anabaptists and Puritans. But our fundamental difficulty lies probably further on, and is not touched by Lewis's account at all, except in his phrase “at any moment.” The real trouble is that, among the ghastly orthodoxies of the twentieth century, communist, fascist, democratic, we are suspicious of anything that is not wholly pro or con: in a rambling-free Elizabethan structure we are unready for either violent praise or blame. Perhaps in literature we stand in some need, decidedly, of more of the anti-categorical, and ad hoc, the flexible, the experimental, which Sir Isaiah Berlin, in an unusual article in Foreign Affairs several years ago, called desirable in Western statesmanship. Why does not, for example, some serious writer go to work against Time and Life as Nashe went to work against Harvey?

Our categorizing will be hard, so long as it continues, on Nashe. The split between journalist and imaginative writer, between “non-fiction” and fiction, does not apply to him any better than it applies to Swift. He is a minor case; not so small as a prose man; but the increasing irritability with storytelling observable in writers like Joyce and Saul Bellow might profit by a study of him. In Bellow, it is true, there is the parade of a view of life, as there is not in Joyce or Nashe. Nashe's concern—but his imaginative concern, I would say—is rather with the medium, with prose itself. He may suffer from the absence of Joyce's overall formal concern; but then Joyce's work suffers from its existence. It is pedantic, after Dubliners, magnificent and pedantic. Nashe hated, evenly, both the pedantic (inkhornism) and the monosyllabic (which he called “single money,” or small change), and opposes himself thus as an artist both against Joyce and against Hemingway—paths that do indeed seem to have run into the ground.

To revive another analysis of Coleridge's, this time as of the visual arts, we appear to find Nashe unqualifiedly in the second part: “the beautiful in the object,” Coleridge says, “may be referred to two elements—lines and colors; the first belonging to the shapely (forma, formalis, formosus), and in this, to the law, and the reason; and the second, to the lively, the free, the spontaneous, and the self-justifying.”⁸ I would not place him so simply. As our interest in narrative declines—I would assert that it is, and has been for some time, declining, without in any way approving of the decline—our interest in the dynamics and art of particular passages is bound to increase, and Nashe's sense of rhythm in English prose that I would call the passages we have cited “shapely,” like hundreds of his others. As a novelist, that is, he cannot much attract us; but his claim as a writer is permanent, and much of it will always attach to The Unfortunate Traveller, which therefore deserves to be read.

2

Of Nashe's hard-pressed, harum-scarum life (though he on one occasion defensively claimed that “it is as civill as a civill orenge”) the best account is naturally, though oddly, to be collected from the austere pages of McKerrow's edition, volume V, which begin, however, with several open assertions so nearly eloquent that I know of nothing else like them in all McKerrow's works.⁹ “Save Shakespeare alone,” he observes, “there is perhaps no writer of the Elizabethan time whose work has been better known to students of the period, or who has been more constantly drawn upon for illustration of language and manners. Not that he was, or has ever been considered, one of the greatest of the Elizabethans—though he surely deserves to be counted among the most brilliant—but because of a certain actuality in his writings, a vividness of presentation which makes them more surely and entirely of their own time and country, more representative of the England of Elizabeth, than almost any others. In invective he stands perhaps without a rival: as a satirist of manners he had talent rather than genius, wit rather than wisdom; in eloquence and in profundity of thought he was surpassed by many a man long ago forgotten; he was indeed often faulty in language and crude in ideas, often careless, often ignorant, but what he saw he could describe, and what he thought he said in most effective words.” As encomium this estimate hardly ranks with Housman's overwhelming survey of the mind and achievement of Arthur Palmer (most easily come by in Gow's A. E. Housman), but as the final view taken by one of the foremost modern scholars of English literature, of his major subject, it is very attractive.

Nashe was born in the autumn of 1567 (christened in November, no day given) of the second marriage of a Suffolk minister, at Lowestoft, and except for a two-year-older brother, Israel, he was the only survivor into adulthood of seven children, though a half-sister, Mary, from one of his father's earlier marriages also survived. When he was six his parents moved to West Harling (Norfolk) and in either 1581 or 1582 he went up to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was doing we don't know what until his father's death in January 1587, and even for a year after that, when he left without taking his master's degree—although he probably was not sent down. He matriculated as a sizar of St. John's in October 1592 and was later a scholar of the Lady Margaret Foundation. Presumably he ran out of money at some point after his father's maintenance ended (the master's degree, now very cheap, was then expensive), or he was offered some sort of preferment in London, or a love affair (leading to “pensiveness,” as he says) drew him away, or he went down to make a career in literature, taking a manuscript with him (An Anatomy of Absurdity, entered on the Stationers' Register, 19 September 1588, but not printed until much later)—or some combination of these and other motives. Of his six or seven years at the university we know only that he attended (or said he would attend) lectures on philosophy by a Mr. Rowly in 1588 (probably early on) and had some hand in a show called Terminus & non terminus (a title that Samuel Beckett might find useful if he ever runs out of his own anti-wonders). From an enemy we hear that his name had become proverbial for disorder in Cambridge—there would be nothing surprising in this, though nothing confirms it and various inferences are against it; from Nashe we hear that he could have had a fellowship at John's if he had desired it. He spoke always with affection of the university and his college afterward; but he never returned there, so far as we know, though in February 1592 he was some sixty miles out of London in the country, in a landscape like the fens out of which Cambridge and Ely protrude. None of these possibilities excludes the others, in life, as they do in scholars' notebooks. He went down. Maybe the active Puritan party in John's drove him crazy (McKerrow, v. 10²); who knows?

Now begin mysterious years.

He becomes one of the University Wits—Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Lodge, Lyly, to mingle the generations a little—whose education, usually at Cambridge, does not seem to have done so much for them as Shakespeare's self-education somewhere did for him; and was in London for some years apparently without break; and had published at once his preface to Greene's Menaphon (1589), a most enigmatic document even for the Elizabethan period, which testifies, however, in its existence to reputation beginning, Greene being very well known. Perhaps he got into the famous Marprelate controversy (see below); he certainly quarrelled with the old and boring poet Thomas Churchyard and evidently had to apologize; he was putting together (if the term is not too strong) the shapeless Pierce Penniless; he wrote a preface in 1591 to Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. But how did he live? An Anatomy of Absurdity had indeed appeared, in 1589—an attack, larded with Latin, on women, on Puritans, and on luxury, interspersed with chaotic recommendations of poetry, learning, and study, and some pages on diet are intermingled—and, just possibly, some anti-Martinist tracts; but none of these things could let a man live. Even after Pierce Penniless (1592) had got him famous, and the war with Harvey had got him notorious, his writings did not support him. We are here in the very beginning of the possibility of living by writing, as no doubt Greene did (Shakespeare was of course an actor, and a poet with Southampton as patron, as well as a dramatist). Nashe's work, moreover, during these years apparently went largely unprinted (“I have written in all sorts of humors privately, I am perswaded, more than any yoong man of my age in England,” 1592—my italics); nothing of his substantial work is thought lost by McKerrow, and the known stuff justifies no such statement. He was in debtors' prison at some point. Had he patrons?: Lord Strange, to whom perhaps he dedicated an obscene poem (The Choice of Valentines, printed by J. S. Farmer from several manuscripts in 1899) too badly written to quote; Sir Charles Blount, to whom The Anatomy was offered, but who was now mostly abroad and of whom we never hear again from Nashe; one of these, or another, to whom he acted as secretary? It is in 1592 and 1593 that Nashe emerges into sight.

A word, however, about the preface to Menaphon, in regard to which I am obliged to agree with Professor Lewis (“He clearly has something to tell us about English prose style but I have failed to understand him”)—that even McKerrow's notes have not here made much plain. The spectacular lucidity of Shakespeare and Marlowe and Jonson has perhaps had too little attention, among the libraries of print devoted to them; Spenser, and nearly all contemporary witness to Shakespeare, is more in line with Nashe's mysterious Epistle “To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities.” He seems to attack: Latin-taggers, tragic playwrights (not Marlowe, McKerrow argues), plagiarists, and—a passage that has tormented a century of scholars: “It is a common practise now a dayes amongst a sort of shifting companions, that runne through every Art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint [scrivener] whereto they were borne, and busie themselves with the indevors of Art that could scarcely Latinize their neck verse if they should have neede; yet English Seneca read by Candle-light yeelds many good sentences, as Blood is a begger, and so forth; and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, hee will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of Tragicall speeches.” Later—the pun is atrocious but the passage sufficiently energetic, just quoted—he declines into a blast at some who “imitate the Kid in Æsop, who, enamoured with the Foxes newfangles, forsooke all hopes of life to leape into a newe occupation … Sufficeth them to bodge up a blanke verse with ifs and ands …” Both Greg and McKerrow resist the tendency to make this an attack on Thomas Kyd (son of a scrivener, author of The Spanish Tragedy) as author of a pre-Shakespearean Hamlet. Whether they are right I do not think our scholarship is yet in a position to say. We know very little about the drama of these years; more will come, in particular about Shakespeare; it is more and more likely that he wrote a Hamlet in the mid-1590's and then finally in 1600-1; why not first much earlier? If he is here being attacked by Nashe, either as of a Hamlet or for changing professions (actor to playwright—the substance of Greene's venomous remarks three years later), it would not be—but I cannot now go into this—the only early assault on the gaining dramatist of the age. The general literary problem involved is whether Nashe was deliberately obscure in the preface; and I do not think a solution is possible. He was slashing about, partly for Greene no doubt, and to cause comment, but until we shall know at whom, I see no way of measuring the degree of his dissimulation. If Shakespeare was here the target, it must be said that that author's reply (see below) was characteristically—though not comprehensibly—mild, or even friendly.

In 1592, as I said, Nashe becomes visible. He goes into the country in the late winter, Pierce Penniless is entered on the Stationers' Register on 8 August, about which time Greene's fatal banquet (according to Harvey) of herring and Rhenish wine, with Nashe and Will Moxon, takes place. Then Nashe is staying at Croydon, probably, and writing a very bad play for Archbishop Whitgift, Summer's Last Will and Testament, performed there privately in October (perhaps), in which Henry VIII's jester, Will Summers, alone comes to life,¹⁰ and one great lyric by this poet who delivered so little, a plague song. What is he now, twenty-four?

Beauty is but a flowre,
Which wrinckles will devoure,
Brightnesse falls from the ayre,
Queenes have died yong and faire,
Dust hath closde Helens eye.
I am sick, I must dye:
          Lord, have mercy on us.

Even in Elizabethan lyric the hovering and plunging grief of this stanza exceptionally sings. It is strange that we have so little verse of Nashe's. He now has definite patrons: besides the Archbishop, an “Amyntas” in Pierce Penniless probably to be identified with the “Lord” he speaks of here of having been in the country with for fear of the plague raging this year through London, and Sir George Carey, captain-general of the Isle of Wight, with whom Nashe was at Carisbrooke Castle in the coming winter. But his patrons seem always to have come and gone.

With Pierce Penniless he both became really known and developed fully his particular gift for taking the English language by the throat, at the same time clubbing it on the head, with passionate love. “Argument” there is none, except that the writer is determined to present a supplication to the Devil, finds a messenger, and gives it to him to read; he himself desires the support he deserves, and that all the gold locked up in rich men's coffers should be liberated. Many sins are then attacked: avarice, pride, envy, murder, wrath, gluttony, drunkenness, sloth, and lechery; and some classes: antiquaries, and enemies of poetry, and one person, Richard Harvey; then the “state” of hell is discussed, and the devil's nature, and “Amyntas” is praised. The work may seem to belong rather to what we should now call “popular culture” than to literature, but the distinction, fruitful now, had not then in fact arisen.¹¹

The same thing is true of his famous quarrel with the Harveys, which here begins. I have said nothing, by the way, of the great Marprelate controversy, because it is far from certain now that Nashe had much or anything to do in this. Tradition long asserted for him a major share in it, on the bishops' side, of course, against “Martin Marprelate” and his Puritan associates. But McKerrow, as his edition progressed, grew increasingly doubtful, and in the end only thought it possible that Nashe may have written An Almond for a Parrot (1590)—for which the case has lately been somewhat strengthened¹² but remains too uncertain for confidence. Naturally there is no question as to Nashe's sympathy with the anti-Martinists. In any event, the Almond is a negligible production, to my sense as to Dover Wilson's, while some of Nashe's most spirited pages were called forth by Gabriel Harvey.

Nashe loved an enemy. “Redeo ad vos, mei Auditores, have I not an indifferent prittye veyne in Spur-galling an Asse? if you knew how extemporall it were at this instant, and with what haste it is writ, you would say so.”¹³ Here joined in one sentence bristle his major claims, to powers of invective and the offhand; to later critics he properly left the claims to mastery of rhythm, imagination, and the detailed administration of diction. You notice the three hid points in the sentence, administrative. “Indifferent” is a handsome quibble, meaning first “fairly hot” and then “unprejudiced”—and the second is double, i.e., both “you can trust me” and “I couldn't care less.” There is thus a three-step descent, or ascent, into insolence. “Spurgalling” is a two-step-up operation: a spur you strike in—to gall is to wound. These first two stages of insult, though, have their (original) destination in the word “Asse”—by no means, now, just a rudeness, but that which you ride, steering, hurting, yourself not only careless but “right” (the truth is with you), and able; so that the whole triple process has now, in the mind of the alert reader, reversed itself to conclusion, and we feel with exactness—hard to come by in prose—how Nashe regards Richard Harvey. Moreover, owing to the complex of rhetoric and logic in the sentence, the terms of the writer's intellectual and even practical superiority to his victim look fixed; who could make his way back, for vindication, much less a new battle, through such a mine field? Other points, in this staggering crescendo from “indifferent” [me] to “Asse” [you], will easily be distinguished by the interested reader, but the culmination of the whole (backward) suggests—which might be missed—that nothing forward (or more) is to be said; and the overall implication that the enemy is to be ridden to a goal not only amusingly contradicts that notion but tosses us into the center of Nashe's mind. With a first-class enemy, given our powers, we're in. Nashe loved an enemy.

The sentence just studied, I would diffidently suggest, is hard, if our study is true, on many accounts of the differences between poetry and prose, although we said nothing of its rhythm. The dynamics of the imagination I hope are clear. Pascal, on his own unit side, Lancelot Andrewes on the large-formal side, exemplify imaginative dimensions that seem never to have come up for Nashe; in prose. (In verse half a dozen of his lyrics in the play Summer's Last Will brought forward by Q in The Oxford Book of English Verse—a very good collection, after all, irresponsible textually and unreliable except in lyric—of 1900 give him a small but solid place.)

The intemperance, and length, of the Nashe-Harvey quarrel is not easy now to understand, nor is its origin exactly known. Probably religious motives were involved, as well as literary and personal. It began in 1590 with an attack by Richard Harvey (physician, pastor, and astrologer, who had made himself widely ridiculous in 1583 with a predictive work) on Nashe's preface to Greene's Menaphon. To this Greene replied, in the summer of 1592, with an attack on Richard and his brothers, Gabriel and John. The passage was at once cancelled, but now Nashe replied to Richard in Pierce Penniless. Gabriel published Four Letters, insulting over Greene, who had just died in poverty and ignominy, and attacking Pierce Penniless. Gabriel Harvey, best remembered now as Spenser's friend and Nashe's butt, was one of Cambridge's best-known scholars. This treatment of Greene is the worst thing we know of Harvey, apart from his style, but there seems to be little doubt that he was an arrogant man, withdrawn but quarrelsome. Nashe knew him very little, though he had praised Harvey's Latin verse; and even in Four Letters Harvey praises Nashe's poetry. Nashe hung back a bit, for which he was rebuked in Chettle's Kind Heart's Dream, before replying; then he threw the book at Harvey, with Strange News, of the Intercepting Certain Letters (entered on the Stationers' Register, 12 January 1593). “Hee that wraps himselfe in earth, like the Foxe, to catch birds, may haps have a heavy cart go over him before he be aware, and breake his backe.” Harvey had picked the wrong man. Harvey is “a filthy vaine foole,” a barefoot poet, impudent and calumnious, and moreover has no pride: he was in fact the son of a prosperous ropemaker and was very much ashamed of the fact, whereas “Had I a Ropemaker to my father, & somebody had cast it in my teeth, I would foorthwith have writ in praise of Ropemakers, & prov'd it by sound sillogistry to be one of the 7 liberal sciences.”

Harvey defended himself in Pierce's Supererogation (1593). The best sentence perhaps that he ever wrote occurs herein, begging the reader to give up Nashe and Greene and read serious works (of exploration, navigation, war): “Phy upon fooleries: there be honourable woorkes to doe; and notable workes to read.” Nashe's style and works are satirized, his way of living deplored, even his originality denied. But at some point here there were offers of peace, through intermediaries or letter, and Nashe indeed has a handsome passage of retraction and praise, prefatory to his uninteresting Christ's Tears over Jerusalem (also 1593), which was long thought to be contemptuously repudiated by Harvey in his New Letter. McKerrow is of the opinion that Harvey had not seen the work but only heard that Nashe was repenting; and doubted it, for his New Letter is a blast. McKerrow also thinks that Pierce's Supererogation, though written long before, had not yet been published when the motions of peace occurred and culminated in the epistle to Christ's Tears; so that Nashe had not any knowledge of the two new attacks when he apologized, and Harvey had not the apology before him when he wrote them. One gets an impression of churlishness, however, from Harvey, as well as almost invincible ignorance of the figure he was cutting.¹⁴

Nashe, furious, set on his enemy again in a new epistle for Christ's Tears (1594: a passage about misappropriation of charity funds and bribery had caused trouble in London, so part of the work was reprinted and bound up with old sheets). He seems to have delayed, again, over his real reply, but it was well under way when, late in 1595, he met Harvey by chance in Cambridge (or rather not met, refused to meet, but lodged in the room next to his at the Dolphin and rejected his overtures—as, Nashe tells us, insincere already once before). Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596) is Nashe's masterpiece, I think, but I am not going to try to describe it; even McKerrow confessed that it “defies analysis”; copies or reprints of it may be found in respectable libraries. With it the controversy closes, for McKerrow is clear that The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, a scurrilous production of 1597, is not by Harvey and only once mentions him. A word in Harvey's favor, here at the end. He is one of the most unreadable of authors, and did not like The Faerie Queene, but his judgment in diction was nothing like so bad as Thomas Nashe thought—if we may trust the practice of posterity. Nashe drew up a list, in Strange News, of Harvey's “inkhornism,” which begins with “Conscious mind” and continues—with some daisies admittedly—through “Ingenuitie” and “Rascallitie” and “artificiallitie,” “addicted to Theory,” to “Notorietie” and “negotiation”; all fair terms these days.

We have got ahead of our story, but indeed there is little left to tell. Nashe was very likely satirized on the stage at least twice—by Shakespeare, as Moth in Love's Labour's Lost, a friendly view of him as sharp-witted, about 1593,¹⁵ and as Ingenioso, a sharper view, in the Cambridge Parnassus plays of 1598-1601.¹⁶ He finished Marlowe's Dido (printed 1594) after the death of that evil genius in 1593; or possibly they collaborated, but at what date, if so, is unknown, and critics give Nashe only a few passages. One critic has tried to discover in the anonymous A Knack to Know a Knave (1592, printed 1594) the comedy Nashe wrote with Greene.

The Unfortunate Traveller (entered 8 September 1593) he dedicated to Southampton, between two trivial works (Terrors of the Night and Christ's Tears) dedicated to Sir George Carey's daughter and wife; but when the work was reissued, he removed the dedication (McKerrow thinks, because his current patron, whoever that was, was unfriendly to Southampton). Shakespeare made some use of the novel in 1 Henry IV, and of Pierce Penniless later in Hamlet,¹⁷ and it appears that Nashe was associated with the Chamberlain's men, Shakespeare's company, but what the relations of the men were, there is no saying; I myself hear Moth as rather affectionate than otherwise, as an amused sketch of an irreverent tongue.

A letter which survives in the British Museum, to a William Cotton, a long scatological complaint about the state of publishing and the public taste, concludes: “I am merry when I have nere a penny in my purse,” but the scanty evidence we have for his short years left mostly suggests misery. The Isle of Dogs, a Pembroke's play in which he had a hand with Ben Jonson and probably others, was found seditious in the summer of 1597. The players went to prison and Nashe to Yarmouth, the town which in gratitude then supplies one of the main themes (the chief theme is red herrings) of his final and excellent work Lenten Stuff (1599). This year his and Harvey's books were ordered seized and new ones forbidden to be published. We learn of his death only from an epigraph in Charles Fitzgeffrey's Affaniae, 1601.

Notes

1. It is not certain, though generally accepted and very probable, that Nashe is referred to. See The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 1904-10 (repr. 1958), V, 143-4; and Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) calls him “gallant young Juvenal.”

2. L. G. Salinger, in The Age of Shakespeare, ed. Boris Ford, 1956.

3. D. C. Allen in Studies in Philology (xxxii), 1935.

4. “I have not travaild farre, though conferred with farthest travailers” (Lenten Stuff, 1599).

5. A. K. Croston, The Review of English Studies (xxiv), 1948.

6. “Jack is not too exclusively a victim”; F. T. Bowers in Humanistic Studies in honor of John Calvin Metcalf, 1941.

7. In English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama, 1954.

8. Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross.

9. Few men more conservative can ever have lived. Sir Walter Greg, a lifelong friend, tells one extraordinary story in the memoir of McKerrow he did for the British Academy. McKerrow was interested in science and was heard, years after the Michelson-Morley experiment, when it was mentioned in his presence, to murmur regretfully to himself, “Yes, I suppose it is true.”

10. Cf. M. C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy, 1955.

11. A study of the subject might begin with a page (312) in L. C. Knight's Drama & Society in the Age of Jonson (1937), and some of the papers, especially Clement Greenberg's and Dwight Macdonald's, assembled in the uneven collection Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, eds. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, 1957.

12. Donald J. McGinn in PMLA (v. 59), 1944.

13. Pierce Penniless. Generally, I am quoting McKerrow's text, but with minor adjustments (three, here) for modern clarity.

14. McKerrow, quite unwarrantedly, I think, attaches no importance (v, 104) to Nashe's open assumption that Harvey was responsible for the publications.

15. A recent summary will be found in Richard David's New Arden edition, 1951, xxxix ff.

16. See The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman, 1949.

17. Cf. the 1957 reprint of McKerrow, v. Suppl., 38, and K. Muir, Shakespeare's Sources, 1957.