Thomas Nashe's dedication of The Unfortunate Traveller to the Earl of Southampton closes with a bit of conventional play on the word “leaves”: “Your Lordship is the large spreading branch of renown, from whence these my idle leaues seeke to deriue their whole nourishing: it resteth you either scornfully shake them off, as worm-eaten & worthles, or in pity preserue them and cherish them off, for some litle summer frute you hope to find amongst them”¹ (II, 202). Even in his most serious moments Nashe was not above a pun, and it is no surprise to find him recycling this one in the original preface “To the Reader” of Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, wherein he utterly renounces the wanton works of his youth: “The Autumne I imitate, in sheading my leaues with the Trees” (II, 13).

These two instances of the pun present us with the shape of a man's career, the carefree days of summer falling away into the grim religious crisis of life's autumn. The summer shows us Nashe in his prime, writing what has become his best-loved work. With the next season he fades and grows bitter, producing a difficult text which has been almost universally disliked. Nashe would be hardly the only writer to follow such a path. But the perplexing fact is that The Unfortunate Traveller and Christs Teares Over Jerusalem are leaves of the same season, the plague-ridden summer of 1593. The “past” which Nashe repudiated so absolutely in Christs Teares was still being produced immediately prior to, perhaps concurrently with, that work. Do these two texts which seem so vehement in their opposition conceal a deeper affinity? I am persuaded that they do, and that our understanding of both will be benefited by exploration of their relationship.² If at first glance they seem to form a bi-textual beast, capable only of clawing out its own eyes in the correct belief that if it can't see us, we can't see it, a closer look reveals them cooperating to such an extent that one could hardly exist without the other.

To begin with, we require some notion of how Nashe conducted his brief career. He might best be described as a “professional writer” working in a time when it was not at all clear what the junction of those words might entail. As is well known, his period was one in which the idea of what it is to be a writer was undergoing drastic revision. Patronage had become less effective as a sole means of support while a significant commercial market for literature was beginning to arise, and with it the possibility of a viable, or semiviable, career writing for the presses. The generation of “Elizabethan Prodigals,” who had worked “in an atmosphere of doubt as to whether literature can or should be made in their time or in their language,”³ opened the way for a growing sub-culture of professional writers based in London. Neither they nor the system that produced them almost by accident knew precisely what role they could be expected to fill in society. Like many others, Nashe had to invent his own idea of professional authorship, working almost from scratch.

When I refer to Nashe as a professional writer, I mean that he presented himself as one, not that he supported himself solely through publication. A glance at the short list of his published writings confirms that he could not possibly have done so.⁴ Supplementary income came to him from works published anonymously, such as the anti-Marprelate tracts commissioned by Bishop Bancroft, and from private commissions such as his pornographic poem “The Choise of Valentines.” (Nashe boasted, “I haue written in all sorts of humors priuately, I am perswaded, more than any yoong man of my age in England” [I, 320].) In his early years in London he received sporadic patronage, primarily from Archbishop Whitgift and the Carey family, and for a time later on he lived at the expense of the citizens of Great Yarmouth.

In spite of the fact that his published works were few and can only have made up a portion of his income, Nashe preferred to present himself as the slave of the press: “such poore fellowes as I … either must haue our work dispatcht by the weeks end, or els we may go beg” (I, 3-44). The point of this not necessarily accurate self-description is to distinguish Nashe, the hard-working professional, from the lazy amateur: “I know their dul wits well inough, you shall haue them lie in child bed one and thirtie weeks and eight daies of three bad lines and a halfe, & afterward spend a whole twelue month spunging & sprucing them.” Nashe's idea of professionalism stands opposed to the amateur code of Sir Philip Sidney, who presented his work as the fruits of idleness, circulated his poetry in manuscript, and scorned those who wrote for print.

A central feature of Nashe's code, one which distinguishes him from almost all of his contemporaries, is the necessity he perceived for constant innovation: “Newe Herrings, new, wee must crye, every time we make ourselves publique, or else we shall bee christened with a hundred newe tytles of Idiotisme” (I, 192). This was hardly an accurate assessment of the tastes of an audience which consumed nothing more eagerly than collections of aphorisms lifted from older works. There was a real demand for the new insofar as books were things of fashion, and one hot off the presses was more desirable than one published last season,⁵ but the cry for literary innovation to which Nashe claims to have hearkened seems to have been almost completely a self-imposed demand.

Nashe never really wrote the same sort of work twice; even his two works written against Gabriel Harvey are worlds apart in style and structure. Innovation seems to have been more important to him than financial success. His tendency to describe himself as a slave to the press has led to the perception that he wrote whatever he thought would sell well, but the facts simply do not bear this out. While many of his works promise a sequel in the same vein if the first is well-liked, such sequels were never forthcoming, even when the first was a smash-hit. Pierce Penilesse, His Supplication to the Divell was popular enough to spawn numerous imitations and supposed sequels from its publication in 1592 until years after Nashe's death, but the author never got around to writing the promised second part. His need to experiment overrode the demands of the market.

If we view Nashe's works as considered experiments, we must begin to think in terms of plan and even structure, words rarely associated with Thomas Nashe. The idea of Nashe as a spontaneous scribbler, never knowing where his next sentence will lead him, has been accepted almost universally.⁶ The source of this common perception is of course Nashe himself, who frequently avers that he is writing off the top of his head: “giue me the man whose extemporall veine in any humour will excell our greatest Art-maisters deliberate thoughts” (III, 312); “haue I not an indifferent prittye vayne 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” (I, 199). Nashe presents himself in a mode of constant, unpremeditated production, but if we take him at his word we risk ignoring important facts. On average, he produced about one title per year. In his decade-long career he published as many works (under his own name) as did Robert Greene in the last year of his life. When we look at the evidence of his career, rather than the claims he makes for himself, Nashe impresses us as, if anything, less productive than his contemporaries. His insistence on his extemporaneity contributes to his pose as a slave of the press, forced to produce a work a week or starve.⁷ But unless we are to assume that his practice consisted of a few days of feverish writing followed by months of total literary inactivity, I think we must conclude that Nashe spent some time over his work.

When we open ourselves to the possibility that Thomas Nashe knew what he was doing and took a bit of time to do it, we see the extent of the problem posed by The Unfortunate Traveller and Christs Teares Over Jerusalem. These radically different works were both completed in the summer of 1593. Christs Teares was entered in the Stationers' Register on September 8, The Unfortunate Traveller nine days later. The latter work is believed to have been written slightly earlier, since on the final page of the first edition we find the date June 27, 1593, presumably the date of completion. This sort of dating appears in no other work by this author, and perhaps we should look upon it with some suspicion. While Christs Teares was published at the time of its registration,⁸The Unfortunate Traveller did not appear until early in 1594. (It is unknown whether it was held back or simply held up, but I will offer reasons to suspect the former.) Its publication was sandwiched between two editions of Christs Teares; the preface to the first of these seems to refer to it as a forthcoming work while the second preface comments on its reception. Obviously these two texts are bound together in their publishing history and it is quite possible that they also overlapped in their period of production. While it was published later and cannot have been written much earlier than Christs Teares, The Unfortunate Traveller was meant to be perceived as the earlier work, a product of the youthful wantonness which Nashe casts away in his turn to religion. Therefore it is probably best to deal with it first.

II

The Unfortunate Traveller is notorious for its frequent and troubling representations of death and violence. This is a book with a high body-count. In the course of the work human lives are disposed of wholesale by disease and warfare, and Jack Wilton's tale concludes with a sensational murder sandwiched between two graphic executions. The absence of anything even approaching this level of brutality elsewhere in Nashe's writings suggests that these recurring assaults on the body are central to what he set out to do with this particular work. As others have pointed out, the question of whether there is any unity, structure or meaning to The Unfortunate Traveller hangs on whether this apparently senseless violence has a point.⁹

The deadly assaults on the human body in The Unfortunate Traveller tend to come two by two. There are two deadly epidemics, two battles, two executions. The pairings are not accidental—as with Noah's animals, one passage seems to be the necessary complement to the other. Later I will argue that there are two distinct “genders” of description at work. In order to remain as close to the text as possible, I will present the passages in question pair by pair before examining them as members of two opposing groups. This approach still involves some disordering of the narrative—I will discuss plagues before battles, whereas in the tale we get epidemic, battle, battle, epidemic—but this slight scrambling will be justified if I can demonstrate that my order of presentation reflects an existing structure in The Unfortunate Traveller.

PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE

The first incidents in the book, Jack Wilton's exploits in the English camp at Turwin, are not marked by excessive mortality. An “appendix” to Henry VIII's court, Jack seems remarkably unconcerned with the deadly business that has brought his monarch to France. Following his return to a peaceful England, he apparently becomes fascinated by the deaths of others at the instant that he realizes that he himself is mortal: “let mee quietly descend to the waining of my youthfull daies, and tell a little of the sweating sicknes” (II, 228).¹⁰ Wilton tells us very little indeed about the outbreak of 1517, the incident he claims to describe.¹¹ Instead he tells a great many jokes about sweat, which in his view is the malady's cause as well as its chief symptom.

From the beginning Jack's description is marked by a lighthearted tone (“It was inough if a fat man did but trusse his points to turne him ouer the pearch” [II, 228]), and soon it veers into the realm of grotesque fantasy: “I haue seene an old woman at that season, hauing three chins, wipe them all away one after another, as they melted to water, and left hir selfe nothing of a mouth but an vpper chap” (II, 229). The idea that the description might reflect a real occurrence recedes rapidly as Nashe goes on to invent absurd historical incidents: all the cooks melted to “kitchen stuffe” from the heat of their fires, and so their hall fell into the hands of the king; “it was hye treason for a fat grosse man to come within fiue miles of the Court” (II, 229). And if the burlesque of chronicle history and the grotesque imagery were not enough, the passage signals its unreliability by refusing to come to a seemly conclusion. Nashe has a seemingly infinite store of one-liners too good to leave out: tailors who made the thinnest garments made fortunes, a whole family died from having an Irish rug in the house, the pestilence started in old men's beards, the very sight of a sergeant's red nose could kill a man at a distance, and so on. Nashe refuses to let the theme die before he has milked the sweating sickness for every last drop of ink.

In letting the sweating sickness highlight, rather than efface, what is distinctive about sergeants and vain old men, Nashe diverges radically from conventional plague narrative. At most (if not all) points in Western history, plague has been seen as the great equalizer. Here we find Nashe taking the opposite course, making the sweating sickness a celebration of difference. Far from dissolving distinctions, this pestilence suits itself to types and discriminates among trades, impoverishing furriers while the tailors grow rich.¹²

Each sentence, as if it began “it was so bad that,” seems ready to sum up the sweating sickness in a single image, but instead it simply gives way to the next one-liner. What Nashe is actually engaging in is a “variation exercise.” He is demonstrating how many ways it is possible for him to say “it was a terrible sickness,” much as Erasmus in De Copia transformed thanks for a letter “into a Protean variety of shapes.”¹³ Terence Cave's evaluation of Erasmus' exercise may here be applied to Nashe: “copia is envisaged not as a quantitative, linear process but as a manifestation of the desire to write.” This sort of writing constitutes a scrambling of classical rhetoric, releasing “res from the constraints of a predetermined sententia so that they may flow with the devious, Protean current of verba. … ‘Word-things’ … monopolize the land of discourse, endlessly deferring the realization of sense.”¹⁴

The sense or meaning that is so notably absent in the description of the sweating-sickness is of course the judgment of God. To most observers, plague and pestilence were “the will of God, rightfully punishing wicked men,”¹⁵ and those who wrote about them usually called attention to this fact. (The connection is drawn with particular vehemence in Christs Teares Over Jerusalem.) Nashe brings on the Almighty for the conclusion of the variation exercise, but hardly in his expected role: “To knit vp this description in a pursnet, so feruent & scorching was the burning aire which enclosed them, that the most blessed man then aliue would haue thought that God had done fairly by him if hee had turned him to a Goate, for Goates take breath, not at the mouth or nose onely, but at the eares also” (II, 230-31). God, the would-be meaning behind the sweating-sickness, becomes merely the last of the “word-things” participating in the deferral of sense.

The other outbreak of disease in The Unfortunate Traveller is handled very differently. Nashe took his information about the Roman plague of 1522 from Lanquet's Chronicle, which records that 100,000 died in that year. The tone Jack Wilton takes in this passage is decidedly different from his breezy account of the sweating sickness:

there entered such a hotspurd plague as hath not bin heard of: why, it was but a word and a blowe, Lord haue mercie vpon vs, and he was gone. … Phisitions greedines of golde made them greedie of their destinie. They would come to visit those with whose infirmitie their art had no affinitie; and euen as a man with a fee should be hired to hang himselfe, so would they quietly go home and die presently after they had bin with their patients. All daye and all night long carre-men did nothing but go vp and downe the streets with their carts and cry, Haue you anie dead bodies to bury? and had many times out of one house their whole loding: one graue was the sepulchre of seuen score, one bed was the alter wheron whole families were offered. … I sawe at the house where I was hosted a maide bring her master warme broth for to comfort him, and shee sinke downe dead her selfe ere he had halfe eate it vp.

(II, 286-87)

Many of the elements that characterized the account of the sweating sickness recur here: the suddenness of death, the uselessness of physic, the sense that someone is making a profit, the death of whole families, the personally witnessed event. But this is anything but funny. Nashe makes no use here of absurd history or comically grotesque imagery. Whereas the sweating sickness served to highlight the idiosyncrasies of its victims, this is the true Girardian plague, effacing difference and degree. Patient and physician, master and maid, all are reduced to bodies loaded on carts and buried in mass-graves. Here each new image does not supplant the last. Instead, the images pile up, giving the reader a real sense of the huge and increasing body-count.

Jack Wilton draws a moral from the case of the greedy physicians, but the disclosure of the plague's ultimate meaning is left to Heraclide, the chaste matron who is raped in the midst of the epidemic: “He is here present in punishment. … Gods hand like a huge stone hangs ineuitably ouer thy head: what is the plague but death playing the Prouost Marshall, to execute all those that will not be called home by anie other meanes?” (II, 289) Where meaning was deferred in the account of the sweating sickness, here it arrives with a literal vengeance.

BATTLE

Fleeing the sweat, Jack travels two years back in time to arrive just too late to join in the Battle of Marignano, where he had intended to enlist with whichever side was stronger. All he can do is watch and describe: “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 … 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. … Anie man might giue Armes that was an actor in that Battell, for there were more armes and legs scattered in the Field that day than will be gathered vp till Doomes-day” (II, 231).

In his book on Nashe and the grotesque, Neil Rhodes suggests that “the comic grotesque begins where the literal credibility of … analogies falters, and the deliberately bizarre takes over.”¹⁶ This technique serves to distance the reader from the horror and pain of the battlefield. When I first read this passage I imagined Jack watching from atop a high ridge or mountainside, and I was surprised on closer inspection to find no mention of such a location. The cause of my confusion was the image of the carpenter's yard. Not only does this analogy give the battle a grotesquely homey quality; it instantly inverts the proportions of battle and observer. Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, Wilton towers over this scene of carnage, calmly pointing out areas of interest.

Like the sweating sickness, the slaughter of Marignano highlights the nature of its victims. In the moment of death the Swiss and French become perfect expressions of their national characters. The pun on arms brings in the absurd parody of chronicle matter that we have seen before. And there is a strange sense of productivity amid the destruction: a heap of men and a horse come together to form a monument; interlocking intestines unite men in death into some sort of larger organism.

The “non-signifying excess of violence” which Jonathan Crewe finds in The Unfortunate Traveller is very apparent in this passage (Crewe, p. 75). But it is not simply the excess that declines to signify, it is the battle itself. This is “a frankly secular conflict” (p. 74) in which one side is composed of mercenaries; the dispute from which it arises is of no more interest to the average English reader than it is to Jack Wilton. The French King wins, but that means nothing to Jack or to us; no one suggests that God was on his side. Marignano offers another array of word-things cut off from sense. The images are ultimately evidence of nothing except that it was “a wonderfull spectacle of blood-shed.”

Immediately following this battle Nashe transports us to Munster in the year 1534 where Jack's description of the marshalling of the Anabaptists sets up expectations of the battle to come: “That day come, flourishing entred Iohn Leiden the Botcher into the field, with … a tough prentises club for his spear, a great Bruers cow on his backe for a corslet, and on his head for a helmet a huge high shooe with the bottome turnd vpwards, embossed as full of hob-nayles as euer it might sticke: his men were all base handicrafts, as coblers and curriers and tinkers. … Perchance here and there you might see a felow that had a canker-eaten scull on his head, which serued him and his ancestors for a chamber pot two hundred yeeres” (II, 232-33). We can expect the chuckling in this passage to grow into the “taut, cruel laughter” which characterizes such contemporary representations of lower-class rebellion as the uprising in Sidney's Arcadia.¹⁷ In the battle to come the rebels will no doubt make fools of themselves and their slaughter will be described mockingly and gloatingly. If the previous battle scene is anything to go by, the essential qualities of cobbler and tinker will be epitomized in the manner of their deaths.

Nashe seems almost reluctant to get to the violence. After describing the ridiculous entrance of the Anabaptists onto the field, Wilton is allowed to launch into a lengthy sermon against them and all Puritans. Even when the battle has begun, its description is put off so that Wilton can compare the Anabaptists to a bear “too-too bloudily ouermatcht” (II, 240) by dogs, and to sheep brought to the shambles. The long lead-up to the action may be intended to sharpen our appetites for comedy and variety, instead of which we ultimately get this:

their swordes, theyr pikes, their bills, their bowes, their caleeuers slew, empierced, knockt downe, shot through, and ouerthrew as many men euerie minute of the battell as there falls eares of corne before the sythe at one blow: yet all their weapons so slaying, empiercing, knocking downe, shooting through, ouer-throwing, dissoule-ioyned not halfe so manie as the hailing thunder of the great Ordinance: so ordinarie at euerie foot-step was the imbrument of yron in bloud, that one could hardly discern heads from bullets, or clottred haire from mangled flesh hung with goare.

(II, 240-41)

Nashe lists the weapons and the verbs appropriate to their action; we have a fleeting glimpse of rebels falling; Nashe offers his catalogue again; and then nothing is left but a sea of gore and metal. The rebels' dream of dissolving social differences comes home to them in the dissolution of their bodies. They seem never even to raise their weapons.¹⁸

The battle of Marignano served primarily as an occasion for comic grotesque description, but here there is nothing to describe. They were there, in all their foolery, and then they were not. The event is finalized at the moment it begins, so completely that not even individual corpses remain. Jack admits that there is nothing more to say: “This tale must at one time or other giue vp the ghost, and as good now as stay longer” (II, 241).

EXECUTION

In an analysis of horror and cruelty in the Elizabethan novel, Éliane Cuvelier writes that “for cruelty, it appears that the executions of Zadoch and Cutwolfe stand matchless in the literature of their time.” Unlike scenes of cruelty in the works of Lodge and Greene, she argues, “they play no structural part in the narrative, nor do they supply any help to ethical or religious teaching.”¹⁹ I suspect that this judgment is misguided. It is noteworthy that executions earlier in the book—of John Leyden, Tabitha and her pander—have been passed over without graphic description. Nashe actually departs from his source to avoid depicting Leyden's historical death by torture. “He dyde like a dogge, he was hangd & the halter paid for” (II, 241) is Wilton's snappish response to an imagined question from the audience, adding to the impression of his eagerness to escape from the spectacle of Munster. Nashe, then, does not depict graphic executions simply because he can, but when he deems it appropriate. From my discussions of plague and battle it should be apparent that execution must be presented twice in order to fulfill the pattern which structures and perhaps motivates the depiction of violence. The presence of the two scenes close together at the end of the book suggests that they in some way sum up the impressions and questions created by the violence that has gone before.

The execution of Zadoch is the more notorious of the two. There is nothing in the history or literature of the Renaissance that resembles it.²⁰ That nothing like this execution ever actually took place testifies less to a limit on human cruelty than to the limits of human anatomy.

To the execution place was he brought, where first and formost he was stript, then on a sharp yron stake fastened in ye ground he had his fundament pitcht, which stake ran vp along into the bodie like a spit; vnder his armeholes two of lyke sort; a great bon-fire they made round about him, wherewith his flesh roasted, not burnd: and euer as with the heate his skinne blistred, the fire was drawen aside, and they basted him with a mixture of Aqua fortis, allum water, and Mercury sublimatum, which smarted to the very soul of him, and searcht him to the marrowe. Then dyd they scourge his backe partes so blistred and basted, with burning whips of red hot wier: his head they nointed ouer with pitch and tar, and so inflamed it.

(II, 315-16)

All this takes us less than halfway through the execution. If Zadoch is not dead at this point, he is certainly insensible to further tortures such as the prying up of his fingernails and the breaking of his toes. But Nashe insists on his survival even up to the point that “they let him lingringly burne vp lim by lim, till his heart was consumed, and then he died” (II, 316). Cuvelier writes that “the tortured man's survival—which is the very justification of the hangman's activity—even becomes utterly unlikely in Zadoch's case (p. 47).” Surely there is no “even” about it—that is precisely the point. If the reader has not caught on to the growing absurdity of the description, the final line should be enough to pound the point in.²¹

The executions Nashe might have witnessed were “carefully organized, self-interpreting spectacles.”²² Whatever mutilations might subsequently be enacted on the corpse, death itself was rapid. Zadoch's execution could not be more different. From a realistic point of view, the tortures applied to his living body preclude one another, go on longer than they could, and are hopelessly out of order. They go on as long as Nashe wants them to, and so could conceivably go on forever. And as with the sweat and the battle of Marignano, there is nothing like a redeeming moral to the story. Instead of pointing to divine vengeance on the man who plotted to slaughter children and sell them as beef, Wilton comments sarcastically, “Triumph, women, this was the end of the whipping Iew, contriued by a woman” (II, 316). If we are tempted to see this as an early feminist statement, we should remember that the woman involved, Juliana, is a murderess and a whore, and her death is the next which Wilton gloats over.

Although it bears a clear relation to the first members of the other pair-groups, Zadoch's execution is not simply a repetition of these scenes in a new format. In the previous cases we may assume that an epidemic or battle did in fact take place, regardless of the imagery's failure to deliver sense. But when we are dealing with an assault on a single body we cannot say that a real event takes place behind the impossible description. Zadoch's execution simply effaces itself. Michel Foucault wrote that the state responded to the criminal's atrocity by seeking “to go further than this atrocity, to master it, to overcome it by an excess that annulled it.”²³ Taking this to another level, the reality of execution seems to be annulled by the excess of its own representation.

As we by now should expect, the execution of Cutwolfe reverses the themes found in Zadoch's death. It is much briefer: “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 splinterd in shiuers. In this horror left they him on the wheele as in hell; where, yet liuing, he might beholde his flesh legacied amongst the foules of the aire” (II, 327). The emphasis here is on method and efficiency. Zadoch's tormentors seem like the Marx Brothers in comparison with this hangman. Like the Anabaptist army, Cutwolfe is reduced to a mass of broken flesh and metal. This reduction, more than inflicting pain or destroying life, seems to be the hangman's primary purpose. Even if the torments in the previous execution were more various, one feels that everything that could be done to Cutwolfe has been done.

In the executioner Jonathan Crewe sees “the appalling ‘innocence’ of a moral art in the service of a postulated ultimate justice” (p. 87). Wilton certainly sees the hand of God, and this act of violence finally leads him to draw the correct conclusion: “Mortifiedly abiected and danted was I with this truculent tragedie of Cutwolfe and Esdras. To such straight life did it thence forward incite me that ere I went out of Bolognia I married my curtizan, performed many almes deedes” (II, 327). It would seem that after innumerable test-cases in the presentation and reception of violent death, Nashe and Jack have finally gotten it right. Whether or not we take them at their word depends on how we interpret the structure of violence in The Unfortunate Traveller.

OPEN AND CLOSED

I have attempted to demonstrate that certain qualities are shared by the sweating sickness, the battle between the French and Swiss, and Zadoch's execution, and that these qualities stand in opposition to those common to the Roman plague, the massacre of the Anabaptists and Cutwolfe's death. Henceforth I will refer to the first set as “open” and the second as “closed,” subsuming under this general polarity a range of more specific oppositions (productive/reductive, unfinalized/finalized, e.g.). “Open” depictions of death and violence are characterized by a succession of “word-things” which at once point to and defer the arrival of meaning. They are open not because they lack a beginning and an end but because within these boundaries there is room for the unlimited proliferation of images. Death here seems to reveal particularity. “Closed” violence is about the destruction of particularity. People may be reduced to undifferentiated bodies and bodies to undifferentiated matter. Succeeding images do not supplant each other but build toward an end. The event is credited by observers with moral and religious significance.

I believe that these two methods of representing violence signify the poles of the modes of writing available to an Elizabethan pamphleteer, and that in The Unfortunate Traveller Nashe is evaluating what each has to offer. Open writing exalts variety and particularity at the expense of the universal. It allows for the potentially endless production of images because it refrains from didacticism. Closure and sense are together forestalled as “the primary impulse to write, and the act of writing itself, assert their domination” (Cave, pp. 25-26). At its most extreme, open writing utterly effaces its subject, apparently justifying C. S. Lewis' observation that Nashe “says” nothing.²⁴ Nashe here chooses to spend his store of rhetoric without gain, or in Lorna Hutson's words, to “squander rather than make accessible the resource potential of figurative language” (p. 8). This sort of writing is commonplace today, but in the English Renaissance such blatantly unprofitable discourse struck at the root of humanist ideology.

In his closed writing Nashe seems to offer an extreme form of what his society demanded of literature. Hutson sees him “disclosing the spurious providence which compels every Tudor page to moralize and to invent any narrative as moral proof of divine judgment.”²⁵ In doing so, he demonstrates that such writing inevitably leads to the silencing of the author (the tale must “giue up the ghost”). The position of the professional writer, who seeks to write and go on writing, is shown to be extremely problematic. Just as Wilton's narrative is cut off by the “moral art” of Cutwolfe's death, the demands placed on Nashe's career threatened it with closure.

WILTON'S WORLD

If the paired passages of violence offer a contrast between two modes of writing, the startling implication is that knowledge of divine judgment in this text is revealed as primarily a question of style. This is indeed the case, and it is possible because in The Unfortunate Traveller the ways of God are utterly unknowable. Human interpreters of the divine are wrong without exception. A wrong explanation may still be better than none, but the question becomes one of narrative style rather than of truth.

Jack Wilton is several times faced with violent death himself, and is usually content to shrug at these close calls, saying that “he that hath gone through many perils and returned safe from them, makes but a merriment to dilate them” (II, 295). But when Jack is locked up to await vivisection at the hands of Doctor Zacharie, he takes a different tone: “Wel, well, I may scoffe at a shrowd turne, but theres no such readie way to make a man a true Christian, as to perswade himselfe he is taken vp for an anatomie” (II, 305). Alone in his cell, Jack has paranoid visions that are both comic and disturbing: “Not a drop of sweate trickled down my breast and my sides, but I dreamt it was a smooth edgd razer tenderly slicing downe my breast and sides. … I durst not let out a wheale, for feare through it I should bleede to death” (II, 305). The threat of death has not sunk in on previous occasions, nor has it really touched Jack now. What terrifies him is the idea of physical dissolution. When he swears “I praid then more than I did in seuen yeare before,” it is clear that his prayers are not for the salvation of his soul but for his body.

Jack really has no idea what it means for the soul to be free of the body. His attempt to imagine his own incorporeal part is a hilarious example of being unclear on the concept. “I cald to minde the assertion of some philosophers, who said the soule was nothing but blood: then thought I, what a thing were this, if I should let my soule fall and breake his necke into a bason” (II, 308). This moment is touching as well as funny, revealing Jack in a more vulnerable light than he usually allows while highlighting the confusion that runs all through The Unfortunate Traveller.

The fate of the soul after death, and the very distinction between soul and body, are deep uncertainties in this book. As we have seen, the deaths witnessed by Jack Wilton, in both the open and closed sets of events, are described primarily as assaults enacted on the body. Violence is often wildly in excess of what is necessary to release the soul. The God Jack knows is not a judge of souls but a punisher of flesh. Over and over again Jack is confronted not with death but with dead and dying bodies. Death is an abstract concept—what he sees is mutilation.

Within the world of The Unfortunate Traveller Jack's interpretation cannot be contested. Those characters who do insist on a distinction between the carnal and spiritual, between this life and the one to come, succeed at best in making fools of themselves. The most purely humorous example of this sort of confusion is found in the parodic sonnet put in the mouth of the Earl of Surrey:

If I must die, O, let me choose my death:
Sucke out my soule with kisses, cruell maide,
In thy breasts christall bals enbalme my breath,
Dole it all out in sighs when I am laide.
Thy lips on mine like cupping glasses claspe,
Let our tongs meete and striue as they would sting,
Crush out my winde with one strait girting graspe,
Stabs on my heart keepe time whilest thou doest sing.
Thy eyes lyke searing yrons burne out mine,
In thy faire tresses stifle me outright,
Like Circes change me to a loathsome swine,
So I may liue for euer in thy sight.
          Into heauens ioyes none can profoundly see,
          Except that first they meditate on thee.

(II, 263)

“Sadly and verily,” comments Jack, “if my master sayde true, I shoulde if I were a wench make many men quickly immortall.” Petrarchanism's eroticized “death” descends inevitably, by the logic of this work, into grotesque images of physical mutilation. To add to the joke, Surrey has gone a bit wrong in the head at this point, hallucinating that a fellow convict is his beloved Geraldine. He finds heaven's joys in meditating on the same woman whom Jack frankly dubs “my curtizan” (II, 267). And with an irreverent glance at Marlowe's “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss: / Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies,” Nashe makes pointed fun of a contemporary work which hinges on the fate of a man's soul.

Not every example of The Unfortunate Traveller's spiritual blindspot is so amusing. We find the bandit Esdras pleading for a lingering death so that he may have time to repent: “For my soules health I beg my bodies torment: bee not thou a divell to torment my soule, and send me to eternall damnation” (II, 322). Like Hamlet, Cutwolfe is concerned that his victim's death be something other than a free ticket to paradise, so he forces the terrified Esdras to sign away his soul to the devil and then shoots him in the mouth so that he may not repent. Yet in his moment of triumph Cutwolfe is strangely unable to look beyond the flesh: “His bodie being dead lookt as blacke as a toad: the deuill presently branded it for his owne” (II, 326). The immortal part of Esdras has assuredly been branded as well, but the revenger's failure to carry his gloating to the level of eternity is telling. Having aimed at the soul, he can ultimately only understand his own act in terms of the body.

The blackest joke of all is on Heraclide, who kills herself in penance for being raped. In her view, violation of the body is sin and only vengeance on that body offers salvation: “The onely repeale we haue from Gods vndefinite chastisement is to chastise our selues in this world: and I will; nought but death be my pennance, gracious and acceptable maie it be. … Point, pierce, edge, enwiden, I patiently affoorde thee a sheath: spurre forth my soule to mount poste to heauen” (II, 294-95). Sadly, as Hutson points out, in “taking vengeance on her own life, Heraclide [has] forfeited any hope of credit with the deity” (p. 243). Following in the valorized footsteps of Lucrece, Heraclide is caught in the damning dilemma which Lucrece's act presented to St. Augustine: “If she be an adulteress, why is she commended? If she be chaste, why did she kill herself?”²⁶ Heraclide is devastatingly wrong in conflating the standards of this world with those of the next, and damns herself in penance for a sin she did not commit.

I would argue that everyone in The Unfortunate Traveller who makes judgments about the soul, the afterlife, or God is in the wrong. As Mihoko Suzuki has pointed out, “the repeated invocation of divine providence bespeaks the characters' willful insistence on ordering and controlling their violent and chaotic experience” (p. 368). Such invocations frequently come in the form of self-justifications. Playing his self-serving tricks in the English camp, Jack says, “I thinke confidently I was ordained Gods scourge from aboue” (II, 226). Cutwolf rants, “The farther we wade in reuenge, the neerer come we to ye throne of the almightie … his scepter he lends vnto man, when he lets one man scourge an other” (II, 326). Suzuki characterizes these human “scourges” as “paltry usurpers” (p. 359). That is just what they are, but to fault them for being so would be unfair. God is so shrouded from human view in this work that even to have the idea of divine authority is to usurp it.

The hopelessness of appealing to the divine will is made inescapably evident in the fate of the Anabaptists: “falling prostrate on their faces and feruently giuen ouer to praier, [they] determined neuer to cease, or leaue soliciting of God, till he had shewed them from heauen some manifest miracle of successe. … Lo, according to the summe of their impudent supplications, a sign in the heauens appeard, the glorious signe of the rainebowe, which agreed iust with the signe of their ensigne that was a rainbow likewise” (II, 239-40). “[T]hey were all kild, & none escapt, no, not so much as one to tell the tale of the rainebow” (II, 241). In case we should think this object lesson applies only to cobblers and tinkers, Wilton's mockery of the Anabaptists includes one devastating line: “Verie deuout Asses they were, for all they were so dunstically set forth, and such as thought they knew as much of Gods minde as richer men” (II, 233). The alliance of religious values with class hatred in the condemnation of the Anabaptists cannot bear to be made so explicit, and Nashe knows it. His point, of course, is that cobblers and tinkers really do know the mind of God as well as richer men, for all of us are equally in the dark. Above all others, this episode should teach us to be extremely skeptical when Heraclide ascribes the Roman plague to divine punishment or when Jack sees God's hand in Cutwolfe's Promethean fate.

We would be missing the point if we concluded that The Unfortunate Traveller's vision is atheistic. To assume the absence of God's hand from this world would be as arrogant as to point to its presence, for God is unknowable. Any attempt to speculate on matters beyond the physical will result in a wrong answer. While Jack shares the general fault, and is known to cry “Heauens bare witnes,” he demonstrates his greater understanding of the world in which he lives and suffers when he admits parenthetically, “heauens will not always come to witnes when they are cald” (II, 259).

When Jack learns that his master Surrey is in love, he rhapsodizes, “earth is earth, flesh is flesh, earth wil to earth, and flesh vnto flesh: fraile earth, fraile flesh, who can keepe you from the worke of your creation?” (II, 245). No one can, nor can they be kept from the work of destruction, in which earth and flesh are made one (as literalized in the reduction of the Anabaptists and Cutwolfe into an amalgam of flesh and metal). In this text the fate of souls is left an open question while the fate of bodies is made all too plain. Sex and death are both relentlessly physical in The Unfortunate Traveller, and just as Surrey's Petrarchanism is mocked, those who gloss brutality with divinity are exposed.

Striking as it is, the absence of an interpretable God from Wilton's world is not the “point” of The Unfortunate Traveller. It is simply the prerequisite for Nashe's experiment with openness and closure, leveling the field for play. If the closed passages were allowed the advantage of truth, we would have to judge them superior. The fact that they are not does not mean that openness is preferable, for as we have seen it is equally incapable of reflecting reality. The example of Zadoch's death shows how the dream of endless recording of particulars and endlessly deferred meaning leads to the unsettling effacement of the subject. We cannot be sure that non-didactic description actually describes anything. The unvarying movement of the pair-groups from openness to closure suggests that unfettered openness is unsatisfactory, demanding correction or even punishment. When Wilton blithely defers the sense of a catastrophe he seems to call forth another plague, battle, or execution more horrible than the first.

In some ways the open passages are not far removed from the world of the antimasque, “a world of particularity and mutability.” Such a world is false by definition, existing only so that it may be swept away by the “eternal verities” proper to the masque.²⁷ The closed passages seek to function as masques but fail, revealing not eternal verities but ignorance and hypocrisy. The result is a nervous oscillation between two untenable options, and this oscillation propels the book onward. The text (Jack, Nashe) is always attempting to “get it right,” and until it has done so it cannot truly end. It justifies its existence, and the possibility of a sequel, through its repeated failure to achieve the proper resolution.

In fact, of course, the book does end, and Jack claims finally to have grasped the necessary moral. But the conclusion of The Unfortunate Traveller attempts to be open in closure. Nashe makes the supposedly penitent Jack promise “if herein I haue pleased anie, it shall animat mee to more paines in this kind” (II, 328), thus setting up the possibility of continued oscillation.²⁸ Jack appears to mirror the heroes of prodigal literature in reforming and going back where he belongs. But whereas the generic prodigal ends by conforming to the precepts delivered to him at the beginning by his father or tutor, Jack has received no such advice. Rather, he has encountered a succession of father figures all of whom lack the authority to answer his questions.²⁹ What then is he returning to? Among other things he is returning from a purely fictional series of adventures to history in Henry VIII's camp at the spectacular Field of the Cloth of Gold. The return to history is in itself a denial of closure.

In his Apology for Poetry Sidney contrasts the virtues of poetry and history, “whether it be better to have it set down as it should be or as it was.”³⁰ Naturally, he concludes that the former course is superior. But we can easily imagine Nashe reading the Apology in manuscript and forming a different conclusion: “the historian, bound to tell things as they were, cannot be liberal (without he be poetical) of a perfect pattern, but … show doings, some to be liked, some to be misliked. And then how will you discern what to follow but by your own discretion, which you had before reading Quintus Curtius? … the historian in his bare was hath many times that which we call fortune to overrule the best wisdom. Many times he must tell of events whereof he can yield no cause; or if he do, it must be poetical” (p. 110). According to Sidney's amateur code, the sweet and exalted discourse of what “should be” may be sufficient, but to a professional intent on offering up new herrings to the market, sheer poetry is stultifying. Nashe sought a more complex mode of poetic fiction, one that did not cut off the possibility of its own continuance. Whether or not he had read Sidney's essay at this time, he saw the potential in a discourse that lacked a perfect pattern and would not yield a cause.³¹

In his dedication of The Unfortunate Traveller to the Earl of Southampton, Nashe presents himself as more historian than poet. “All that in this phantasticall Treatise I can promise, is some reasonable conueyance of historie, & varietie of mirth. … Amongs their sacred number [i.e., ‘Poets’] I dare not ascribe my selfe, though now and then I speak English” (II, 201-02). Obviously, these claims need not be taken too seriously. No one could mistake Wilton, the “out-landish Chronicler” (II, 328) who makes gigantic leaps through space and time, for a conveyor of reasonable history. But if the work is not quite what Nashe says it is, it has as much in common with the historical chronicle as with Elizabethan poetic fiction.

While Nashe takes something from both history and poetry throughout The Unfortunate Traveller, he does not blend them together evenly. This may be, as Robert Weimann suggests, because the task is too much. The attempt to interweave fabula and historia exposes “an undecided conflict between privilege and representation”; humanist universals are ill equipped to encounter the grubbier particulars of history (p. 26). But Nashe really seems less interested in accomplishing such an interweaving than he is in contrasting two distinct discourses, much as he contrasts open and closed representation in the paired scenes of violence. The opening jest-book section aside, the text divides rather evenly into a chronicle of historical and pseudo-historical events mostly in Northern Europe and a fictional tale of Jewish perfidy and Italian vice. In the chronicle part, every significant character save Wilton and the orator Vanderhulke is taken from history. Jack is almost always a passive observer of events which actually took place, and he describes nothing which he did not personally witness. In the second part, only one historical figure is introduced (Aretino) and only one real event is described (the Roman plague). In place of a series of discrete events we get an increasingly complex and tightly woven tale complete with developed subplots. And suddenly Jack has the poet's license to describe events he cannot have personally witnessed, since he spends most of the second part locked up.

One of the most striking aspects of the shift from history to fiction is the loss of freedom experienced by Jack Wilton. In the first part Jack is an unbounded spirit, able to traverse hundreds of miles and many years backwards or forwards in a single sentence. He begins the historical section with militant insistence on this freedom:

sleepe an houre or two, and dreame that Turney and Turwin is wonne, that the King is shipt againe into England, and that I am close at harde meate at Windsore or at Hampton Court. What, will you in your indifferent opinions allow me for my trauell no more signiorie over the Pages than I had before? yes, whether you will part with so much probable friendly suppose or no, Ile haue it in spite of your hearts.

(II, 227)

As soon as he arrives in Italy and poetic fiction, “friendly suppose” avails Jack no more. A plot against his life is followed by his own arrest and imprisonment. He is liberated by Aretino, a holdover from the world of history, but soon after he arrives in plague-stricken Rome his freedom ends. First he is locked in a room by Bartol while Heraclide is raped, and released only to be imprisoned and almost executed for this crime. Set free by an English nobleman, he at once falls into a cellar and is taken by Zadoch, who sells him to Doctor Zacharie, who locks him up to await vivisection. From there he is transferred without his feet touching the ground to imprisonment by Juliana, whose sexual demands cause him to waste away. Once free of her, he flees to Bologna, witnesses Cutwolfe's death, and the tale ends.

Jack's constant confinement in the fictional part of the book coincides with the author's loss of freedom as he submits to convention. While Sidney thought of the historian as “captived to the truth of a foolish world,” Nashe demonstrates that the real captivity lies within poetic narrative (p. 111). Thus Wilton's supposedly penitent return to Henry's camp is in one sense a liberation. It invites us to dream of a return to his former “signiorie over the Pages.” At the same time we are reminded that Wilton's wanderings are really only a footnote to the life of Henry the Eighth, “the onely true subiect of Chronicles” (II, 209), whose story still has far to go (Shakespeare's history play begins with his return from the Field of the Cloth of Gold). As Jack's offer of “more paines in this kind” suggests, this is as good a place to begin a tale as to end one. Some have seen the offer of a sequel as giving the lie to Jack's reformation, but the point is simply that reformation does not mean the end of history. Unlike comedies or tragedies, history plays frequently have sequels.

III

One of the most astonishing facts of Nashe's career is that within a few months of writing The Unfortunate Traveller, he produced Christs Teares Over Jerusalem. One text refuses to move beyond the physical and mocks those who make arrogant assumptions about the divine plan or the afterlife. The other puts words into Christ's mouth, describes heaven and hell, and demonstrates that the plague is God's judgment on London, explicitly condemning those who dare to jest about it. For almost any position taken up in one work it seems possible to find a refutation in the other (the exception is anti-Puritanism, perhaps Nashe's strongest piece of ideology). If these texts are sisters, each seems to look on the other as its evil twin.

Although loosely situated in the genre known as “literature of warning,”³²Christs Teares is unique. The pamphlet consists of a long and astonishing oration in the persona of Christ himself, followed by a graphic description of the destruction of Jerusalem, including a speech made by the matron Miriam over the baby son she proceeds to slay and devour. It concludes with a drawn-out attack on the sins of London and a warning to repent before this city too is destroyed. With its fervent religious tone and apparent total lack of humor, it resembles nothing else Thomas Nashe wrote.

It is a common and not always unspoken feeling among writers on Nashe that Christs Teares should not have been written at all. It easily undermines any simple categorization of Nashe as a certain kind of writer. There is a natural tendency to explain it away in some fashion. Jonathan Crewe, for instance, comments that “It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Christs Teares Over Jerusalem is a gigantic hoax sprung, not without malicious pleasure, on the God-fearing citizens of London,” while Charles Nicholl, Nashe's recent and confident biographer, suggests that “What one is witnessing, through the veil of ‘holy complaint,’ is an actual nervous breakdown, of which the whole work is a product.”³³

Rarely can one express a negative interpretation of Nashe without finding that Gabriel Harvey got there first. Harvey repeatedly expressed his doubts regarding Nashe's sincerity and sanity, and following the publication of Christs Teares he was in print almost at once to warn that “There is a great distance betwixt Hell and Heaven: the Divell and God: Rakehells, and Sainctes: the Supplication to the Divell and the Teares of Christ,” and to hope that “the promised Teares of Repentance, prove not the Teares of the Onion upon the Theater.”³⁴ To counter Nashe's relentless antagonist we have the word of “J. R.” in 1600 that Christs Teares, “if you have any grace in you, will make you to shed tears for your sins.”³⁵ The work's early publication history (editions in 1593, 1594 and 1613) indicates that J. R. was far from alone in finding Christs Teares sincere and effective. The explanation for the differing responses of Harvey and J. R. may be not so much that one was Nashe's professed enemy, the other presumably indifferent, but that one was familiar with Nashe's career while the other shows no such awareness. Harvey's suspicions, like those of later critics, are based not so much in Christs Teares itself as in its author's notoriety and the nature of his other works. Stephen Hilliard notes that these factors in a sense doomed his “conversion” from the start: “the former self he wanted to leave behind was already public property.”³⁶

Sincere or not, Nashe was certainly aware of the hurdle to be crossed in bringing out a volume like Christs Teares. The induction “To the Reader” in the first edition insists that the author has changed his ways: “A hundred vnfortunate farewels to fantasticall Satirisme. In those vaines heere-to-fore haue I mispent my spirite, and prodigally conspir'd against good houres. … To a little more witte haue my encreasing yeeres reclaimed mee then I had before. Those that haue been peruerted by any of my workes, let them reade this, and it shall thrice more benefite them” (II, 12-13). Nashe's renunciation extends not only to past publications but to works forthcoming: “Two or three triuiall Volumes of mine at this instant are vnder the Printers hands, ready to be published, which being long bungled vp before this, I must craue to be included in the Catalogue of mine excuse.”³⁷The Unfortunate Traveller is clearly caught in the net of Nashe's past transgressions. He implies that he would have blocked its publication had he been able to, not expecting his readers to know how recently it had been “bungled up” and that it was not yet even entered in the Stationers' Register.

On the whole, Nashe is as good as his word in turning his back on his former style. The witty irreverence which elsewhere is almost synonymous with the name of “Nashe” seems to be wholly absent from this work. But the suspicion that “fantasticall Satirisme” must be lurking somewhere in Christs Teares is not a matter of prejudice alone. The work is not so completely divorced from Nashe's previous writings as the preface suggests. More than one passage in Christs Teares seems to evoke (or invoke) Pierce Pennilesse, His Supplication to the Divell (1592), unquestionably Nashe's most notorious work at the time. Harvey and others had intentionally misunderstood it as an actual diabolical text, and Christs Teares may have been intended in part to refute this damaging accusation. But while there may be a great distance between Hell and Heaven, the Devil and God, this distance is not nearly as apparent in these two works as one might expect. Both take the theme of complaint and railing on sin, and not always from appreciably different angles. More disturbing yet, there is a distinct similarity between the Satanist Pierce and Christ himself. Stephen Hilliard's description of Pierce Pennilesse as a work “about the despair and anger of the title character at the unjust society that rejects him” (p. 62) would also serve as a neat summation of Christs Teares.

There are also unsettling links with that “triuiall volume,” The Unfortunate Traveller. Stylistic similarities appear on several occasions, with implications that are often hard to digest. There is something in Nashe's preacher-persona of Jack Wilton, with his easy shifts from “high” to “low” style. Even in the opening sentence he slips perhaps too comfortably from the symbolism of Scripture (“the axe of his anger is put to the roote of the Tree” [II, 15]) to his own homely metaphor of Jerusalem as London's advice-laden “great Grand-mother.” The Unfortunate Traveller's narrator characteristically “exposes the pretensions of ornamental rhetoric by exaggerating its characteristic devices and by contrasting it with a more colloquial idiom.”³⁸ No such obvious effect is felt here by any means, but from the opening sentence on we are aware that Nashe's preaching persona may really be Jack Wilton in disguise.

The most striking stylistic similarity between these two works is a highly disturbing one, forging a link between “a more desperate murtherer than Caine” and Christ himself. Consider Cutwolfe's rant against Esdras:

Looke how my feete are blistered with following thee from place to place. I have riuen my throat with overstraining it to curse thee. I have ground my teeth to pouder with grating & grinding them together for anger when any hath namde thee. My tongue with vaine threates is bolne, and waxen too big for my mouth: my eyes haue broken their strings with staring and looking ghastly, as I stood deuising how to frame or set my countenance when I met thee. I haue neere spent my strength in imaginarie acting on stone wals, what I determined to execute on thee.

(II, 324)

Agnes Latham remarked of Cutwolfe's saga that it “is a revenge story to end all revenge stories, a reductio ad absurdum of revenge. It is not realism, it is criticism, and the form it takes is literary satire.”³⁹ If Latham is right, how are we to understand the words Nashe puts into the mouth of Christ in his oration to Jerusalem?

No sword but wil loose his edge in long striking against stones.

My leane withered hands (consisting of nought but bones) are all to shiuerd and splinterd in their wide cases of skinne, with often beating on the Anuile of my bared breast. So penetrating and eleuatedly haue I prayd for you, that mine eyes would fayne haue broke from theyr anchors to have flowne vp to Heauen, and myne armes stretcht more then the length of my body to reach at the Starres. … Then (ô Ierusalem) would I haue rent my body in the midst (lyke a graue) so I might have buried thy sinnes in my bowels. (II, 37). …

I haue crackt mine eye-strings with excessiue staring and stedfast heauen-gazing, when with fast-fortified prayer and eare-agonizing inuocation I haue distressed my Fathers soule for her.

(II, 56-57)

A close link between Cutwolfe and Christ does not easily occur to the mind, even the mind of a critic. Only the striking similarity of these passages forces us to perceive a link between two men with a grievance, both doomed to execution, ranting against two irredeemably sinful figures whom they have determined to destroy. Should the juxtaposition of these passages alter our assumption that one man feels hatred for his victim, the other divine love? That one will perform an act of unsanctioned vengeance, the other carry out infallible judgment? Above all, should we continue to believe, as we surely would without this juxtaposition, that one passage is intentionally overwritten as a piece of satire while the other achieves humor owing only to the author's poor judgment?⁴⁰

This is only one of many difficulties posed by Christ's “continued Oration,” the strangest part of this strange text.⁴¹ As the source of so many questions and of the work's greatest fascination, this section deserves our particular attention. Nashe constructs the entire oration out of two verses, Matthew 23.37-38: “O Ierusalem, Ierusalem, that stonest my Prophets, and killest them I sent unto thee: How often would I haue gathered thy chyldren together, as a Henne gathereth her Chickins under her wings, but thou woldest not! Therefore shall thy house be left desolate unto thee.” Phrases and individual words of this text are played with for pages on end, applied in diverse ways. C. S. Lewis wrote that Nashe “uses a strange artifice of which I do not know the history. … A series of key-words (stones, gather, echo, would not and desolate) are used in turn like leitmotifs” (p. 414). We come closer to Nashe's artifice if we exchange Lewis' musical metaphor for hard currency. As we have seen, Nashe always insisted that the market was his master, and in a sense it was. Economic forces may have failed to guide his career in print, but they appealed powerfully to his imagination.⁴² In the preface to the second edition of Christs Teares Nashe presents himself working not only for the market but in the market of the English language:

For the compounding of my wordes, therein I imitate rich men who, hauing gathered store of white single money together, conuert a number of those small little scutes into great peeces of gold, such as double Pistols and Portugues. Our English tongue of all languages most swarmeth with the single money of monasillables, which are the onely scandall of it. Bookes written in them and no other seeme like Shop-keepers boxes, that containe nothing else saue halfe-pence, three-farthings and two-pences. Therefore what did me I, but hauing a huge heape of those worthlesse shreds of small English in my Pia maters purse, to make the royaller shew with them to mens eyes, had them to the compounders immediately, and exchanged them foure into one, and others into more, according to the Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian?

(II, 184)

The compound words Nashe has in mind in this passage include passionatiue-ambitious, tender-starued, sinne-gluttonie and yeares-dimnesse among many others. If Nashe is interested simply in avoiding excess of words his coinages are not particularly impressive. These compounds have their most significant effect on the level of the signified, dispersing it beyond logocentric recovery. While in other works Nashe explores and exploits the ambiguity that words attain in usage, here he compounds language so that ambiguity need not wait upon usage, being present in essence. “Tender-starued,” for instance, could not be broken into small change without losing this special value. Is Miriam a tender woman who is starving? Or starved out of all tenderness, and thus capable of eating her own son? Or starving for tenderness, specifically his tender flesh? Through the compounding, Nashe invites us to grasp all of this, and nothing.⁴³

Lewis' leitmotifs are the result of a technique opposite from compounding, yet equally susceptible to the metaphor of currency. In Christ's oration Nashe seems intent on breaking up words into the smallest change possible, denying the word its capacity to signify anything beyond a particular case. While the oration seems modeled on the pulpit style of squeezing every drop of meaning out of a brief text, it is quickly apparent that Christ can no more control the meaning of (for instance) “stones” than he can those sinners who wield them:

O Ierusalem, Ierusalem, that stonest, and astoniest thy Prophets with thy peruersnesse. … The raine mollifieth hard stones; ô that the stormie tempest of my Teares might soften thy stony hart! … (II, 23) For this shalt thou grinde the stones in the Myll with Sampson, and whet thy teeth vpon the stones for hunger; and if thou askest anie man Bread he shall gyue thee stones to eate. The dogges shall licke thy blood on the stones lyke Iezabels, & not a stone be found to couer thee when thou art deade. One stone of thy Temple shall not be left vppon another … There shall be no Dauid any more amongst you, that with a stone sent out of a sling, shall strike the chiefe Champion of the Philistines in the for-head: And finally, you shall worship stockes and stones, for I will be no longer your God.

(II, 25; italics in text)

Jonathan Crewe sees in this passage the city becoming “a single image of pure stone, against which the pure force of rhetoric seemingly beats in vain. The very resistance of the stone continually reignites the rage of the word, while the violence of the word invites a further barrage of stones” (p. 61). I would say that the stone imagery is too widely dispersed to coalesce into a single image, but Crewe is right in suggesting that a sort of dialogue is taking place. Nashe's method here and elsewhere in the oration is to take a single word or phrase and distribute it in all directions, making the pieces of language out of which the oration swells polyphonic.

At different points in this passage stones speak for the inner nature of Jerusalem and the specific nature of its sin, for Christ's present human anger and future divine vengeance, and for Jerusalem's response to that vengeance. All of these are voices in the oration, and while it continues no one voice has primacy or final authority. The continuous banter is summed up perfectly in Christ's complaint that “Should I raine stones vpon her, with them shee woulde arme herselfe against my holy ones” (II, 23). Jerusalem and its sinners are “not only objects of the author's word, but subjects of their own directly significant word.”⁴⁴ It should be apparent that “the author” in this case refers to Christ, not to Nashe; polyphony only exists while the Savior continues to speak. If his oration came to a real conclusion, we would not be able to speak of polyphony at all. But in fact it is explicitly unfinalized, for every word of the text from Matthew can be spun outward indefinitely, without victory or resolution for any participant. Thus Nashe cannot conclude Christ's “collachrimate oration,” he can only “confine” it (II, 60). Somewhere outside of the text it continues to expand and replicate itself into infinity.

All of the words which Lewis calls leitmotifs in Christ's oration are taken from Matthew 23, with one significant exception:

Her streets and al her hie places are filled with the ecchoes of Gods voyce. The stones of her Turrets haue beene so mou'd with it, that they haue opened theyr eares & receiued his eccho into them, and that the Cryer myght knowe they attended the wordes which he spake, they (ecchoing) repeated them againe. The very eccho of the walls and the stones shall eccho vnto God for sharpe punishment against you; And let any but reade or rehearse thys sentence, O Ierusalem, Ierusalem, how often would I haue gathered thy chyldren together, as the Henne gathereth her Chickins! the eccho shall replye, But they would not. They would not.

(II, 45)

It is no accident that this is the one non-scriptural word used in this way. Nashe is offering us effective interpretation of his exotic exegesis. In the first part of Christs Teares, the words of Scripture echo and their very echoes echo. Christ's oration is essentially Matthew 23.37-38 in an echo chamber. One word after another rebounds on speaker and reader from all directions. We would be mistaken to think that the effect of this could simply be to amplify the message by repetition. Nashe's echo is a trickier spirit, responding to the verse of divine love with the unrequested reminder of inevitable failure. And even when an echo is content to repeat the words it hears, it can be a challenging partner in dialogue—when Jerusalem responds to Christ's “stones” with “stones,” the repetition is a rebuttal rather than an assent.⁴⁵ In including the echo among his leitmotifs, Nashe offers a description of his strange technique which seems to have gone unnoticed. For the individual word or phrase made polyphonic and unfinalized, no image could be more suitable than the echo.

But if we have recognized an appropriate image, we must still wonder how such qualities are allowed to exist within what should be the ultimately monologic and final Word. Nashe's Christ offers the answer in another metaphor descriptive of his oration, saying “this present houre that is graunted, I will put out to vsury” (II, 51). Here we are returned forcefully to the image of the word as coin. I would suggest that precisely the monetary nature of language in Christs Teares makes possible Nashe's “strange artifice.” He took his images from the marketplace, and that sphere was undergoing a strange transformation: “Money now appeared to be a source of productive possibilities, not just a protection against them. The desire for liquidity … suggested a simultaneous readiness and reluctance to transact—a threshold moment of indecision in the cycle of exchange, a moment frozen in the money form itself.”⁴⁶

Nashe's Christ is both ready and reluctant to transact. The transaction he must make is the purchase of humanity from sin through his passion on the cross.⁴⁷ The reluctance is deep—Nashe emphasizes the Christ who prayed for the cup to pass from him. He is reluctant not only because he fears the ordeal but because he knows that his passion will finalize the Word and yet fail to save Jerusalem. This is intolerable, for Jerusalem is the city he loves “impatiently,” as “one halfe of my soule” (II, 22). He hangs back from the deed, spinning out the text even at the risk that he “detract from my Passion to adde to my Teares” (II, 54). As long as the oration continues, words retain their liquidity and are not yet the Word. Nashe's Christ is a man reluctant to make an expensive purchase, who loiters in the doorway of the shop, counting and fiddling with his change.⁴⁸

IV

This interpretation of Christs Teares gestures toward a daring conclusion. I seem to be in a position to argue that Nashe accomplished much more than a run-of-the-mill hoax on an unsophisticated audience, that in fact he offered a radical critique of his society's most deeply held religious and economic beliefs. In both Christs Teares and The Unfortunate Traveller Nashe appears to offer highly subversive images of God. Some of his literary artifices seem almost uncannily made-to-order for modern theories which often hold such practices to be inherently subversive. Unfortunately or otherwise, I am compelled to argue that these works do not subvert or undermine authority in the way we might expect. Ultimately, Nashe upholds the orthodoxy, or thinks he does.⁴⁹ He defers the purchase of (strictly orthodox) meaning, but he does not refuse it. And while in modern criticism “deferral” generally connotes “infinite deferral,” in the works I have discussed this is demonstrably inappropriate. Nashe likes to feel the coins in his hands, to explore the possibilities of the free play of signs. This play can go on indefinitely without becoming threatening for one reason only: the transaction which is supposedly being deferred has already been made.

Christ's oration, based in the imagined deferral of the revealed truth, is the model of how Nashe constructs this moment in his own career. The Savior's tears may be presented as endlessly productive and unfinalized only because His passion is universally understood to have already taken place. If we could not rely with absolute certainty on the final Word, the words of the oration would be at once incoherent and heretical. Nashe is able to slip back before finalization to explore free play because the end is beyond question. In the same way Nashe can offer us a world apparently without causes in The Unfortunate Traveller only because he is slipping back to a moment before he found the principle of causation to which he bears witness in Christs Teares Over Jerusalem. This should explain the order in which the two works were published. The Unfortunate Traveller was produced first—or at the same time, and back-dated so as to produce this vital impression—but released only after Christs Teares had made the world safe for it.

There really is a sense in which the preacher-persona is Jack Wilton, but he is Wilton finally and fully reformed. There is a sense in which Christ is linked to Cutwolfe, in that he is the true scourge whose arrival confirms the other as a “petty usurper.” A similar relationship is apparent between Christ and Pierce Penilesse. In the context of Nashe's career Christs Teares is meant to act almost as a testament of saving faith. His repentance of previous wantonness is understood to be absolute and final, and thus it need not be proved at every turn.⁵⁰ He can dip back “before” his reformation to publish a “triuiall Volume” like The Unfortunate Traveller without fear of reproof. Thus the seasonal metaphors with which this discussion began turn out to be meaningful after all. When the leaves have fallen away the concealed fruit of summer is revealed, and in this case we may even say it is preserved.

To what extent Nashe's readers “bought” this scheme is open to question. But perhaps that is not the central question, since the strategy was probably something more than a public relations maneuver. Nashe may have pursued this approach primarily for reasons personal to himself. His career combined compulsive and radical experimentation in literature with consistent professions of a deep social and religious conservatism. The writer impelled to try something “new” at every turn was in many ways opposed to innovation. It seems altogether possible that he would have been disturbed by the moral implications of some of his experiments. I suspect that in order to write a work exploring openness and closure, an approach necessitating an unknowable God, Nashe had to imagine the work as “before.” The near-concurrent production of an explicitly religious work created a safe space for his disturbing experiment, as well as being an interesting challenge in its own right. Through the confinement of his potentially subversive play to an imagined time before truth, Nashe solved his problem to his own satisfaction.

Unfortunately, if Christs Teares took the curse off The Unfortunate Traveller, it also provoked its own accusations of subversion from the civil authorities.⁵¹ This was only one of several run-ins with authority in Nashe's career, the final one coming in the form of an order from Archbishop Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft in 1599 “that all Nasshes bookes and Doctor Harvyes bookes be taken wheresoeuer they maye be found and that none of theire bookes be euer printed hereafter” (V.110).

I have attempted throughout this essay to confine myself to a single season, a space of a few months in a decade-long career. But in a discussion of the extent to which Nashe's works may be subversive of orthodoxy and authority, it would be irresponsible in the extreme to ignore the fact of his silencing.⁵² The conclusions I have reached lend an ironic, perhaps tragic, aspect to his career's abrupt conclusion. Christs Teares and The Unfortunate Traveller do not seem to be the work of a radical but of a man with an excessive faith in the truths of his time. In works such as these he felt able to defer or ignore established truths for the sake of experimentation precisely because he saw these truths as established beyond all doubt. His misfortune was to live in a time when the orthodoxy he thought of as immutable saw itself as threatened on all sides. He drastically underestimated the extent to which literary conventions participated in that orthodoxy's perpetuation. Never, or not until too late, did he realize that his insistence on doing something new and different in the literary marketplace could be seen as linked to forms of social innovation which he himself despised. Nashe was dancing on the roof of the temple, thinking it was made of marble. Its occupants knew it was full of rotten timber, and eventually they had to pull him down.

Notes

1. All citations are to The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols., ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1966). I would like to thank Steven Goldsmith and Stephen Greenblatt at the University of California, Berkeley, for their invaluable encouragement and assistance with this project. My thanks go to Anna Brown.

2. This view is shared by Reid Barbour, whose study of somatic prose in both texts came to my attention after this essay was accepted for publication. See Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction (Newark, Delaware, 1993), pp. 82-99.

3. Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley, 1976), p. 5. For the literary environment in flux at the beginning of Nashe's career, see Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford, 1989), esp. pp. 55-71.

4. Pamphleteers received about 40 shillings for their work—£4 at best—and nothing at all for later editions. Playwrights received slightly more. (See Edwin Haviland Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England [Cambridge, Mass., 1959].) Even assuming that Nashe was paid the best fees for everything he wrote or co-wrote for the press and for the stage, his income from all the works produced under his own name between 1588 and 1600 can hardly have been more than £50. Nashe was poor, but not this poor.

5. See Miller, pp. 28-29.

6. Traditionally this has been thought his fatal flaw: “Nashe is essentially an improviser. … Interested in the immediate, local effect he can extract from an idea or situation, he works on it until he has exhausted its possibilities or grown bored with it, and then moves on to something else, unconcerned with its relationship to what has gone before.” G. R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 147. More recent criticism has tended to reverse the traditional values without challenging the underlying assumptions: “his digressiveness, the absence of an organizing principle or sustained theme … the very features which orthodox criticism has singled out as debilitating flaws are in fact the source of his strength and originality.” Kiernan Ryan, “The Extemporal Vein: Thomas Nashe and the Invention of Modern Narrative,” in Narrative: From Malory to Motion Pictures, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn (London, 1985), p. 43.

7. It is also an effective protective device. When Nashe does not claim to be writing off the top of his head, he has some other excuse for not being at the top of his form. In Strange News he is suffering from a fever. If the concluding part of The Terrors of the Night fails to satisfy, it is because Nashe is terribly sleepy: “my muse inspyres me to put out my candle and goe to bed” (I, 384). And writing Lenten Stuffe from Great Yarmouth, he has another excuse: “of my notebooks and all books else here in the countrey I am bereaued … a workman is nothing without his tooles” (III, 176). All of these are essentially ways of avoiding the same negative judgments which an amateur could dodge with the claim that he wrote only in his spare time.

8. We can be reasonably sure of this because the preface contains an offer of peace to Gabriel Harvey, which would not have been made after Harvey's attack in A New Letter of Notable Contents, registered on September 16.

9. Richard Lanham (“Tom Nashe and Jack Wilton: Personality as Structure in The Unfortunate Traveller,” Studies in Short Fiction 4 [1967], 207-16) concludes that the violence is evidence only of the narrator's neurotic personality, beyond which the work has no structure or meaning. Mihoko Suzuki (“‘Signorie ouer the Pages’: The Crisis of Authority in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller,” Studies in Philology 81 [Summer, 1984], 348-71), finds unity, if not structure, in that “the violence arises from Nashe's preoccupation with the problem of ineffectual authority, not only in the political and hence the social realm, but in the moral and religious realm as well” (p. 349).

10. See Jonathan Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore, 1982), p. 72.

11. Little is known about this disease, which had its last outbreak in 1551. “It impressed contemporaries because it was spectacular. It killed within twenty-four hours.” Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), p. 70.

12. It is worth noting how completely the sweating sickness escapes René Girard's account of “The Plague in Literature and Myth” (In “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology [Baltimore, 1978], pp. 136-54). In an essay ranging from Sophocles to Ingmar Bergman, Girard explores the plague as the “supreme undifferentiation” (p. 137). Through the dissolution of difference and degree, plague symbolizes and spurs anarchy, with unbearable reciprocity bringing on violent and futile attempts at individuation until order is finally restored by means of ritual sacrifice. In Nashe's account no such sacrifice is necessary. The social order adapts to and even strengthens itself through the epidemic, as the king takes possession of the cooks' hall and laws are passed against the overweight. The “long arm of the law” is refigured in the sergeant's nose that kills at a distance.

13. “Your communication poured vials of joy over my head. … Good God, what a mighty joy proceeded from your epistle! … May I perish if I ever met with anything in my whole life more agreeable than your letter. … Sugar is not sugar when set beside your letter. … Your letters are to me like wine to a thirsty man.” Desiderius Erasmus, De Copia. In Collected Works of Erasmus, (Toronto, 1978), V, 348-54.

14. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford, 1979), pp. 25, 34.

15. J. Goeurot, The Regiment of Life [1543?], quoted by Slack, p. 26.

16. Neil Rhodes, The Elizabethan Grotesque (London, 1980), p. 13.

17. Stephen Greenblatt, “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre and the Representation of Rebellion,” in Learning to Curse (New York, 1990), p. 114.

18. Like Spenser and Sidney, Nashe had to find a way to avoid the danger of an “inadvertent ennobling of rebellion in the commemoration of its defeat” (Greenblatt, p. 119). Unlike Spenser and Sidney, he was faced with a historical rebellion—for sixteenth-century Europeans, the rebellion—and so could not resort to disguised heroes or allegorical giants and iron men. He “solved” the problem by opting out of it. No real conflict is allowed to take place, for this is not a battle but a slaughter, as Wilton says, of “sheepe.”

19. Éliane Cuvelier, “Horror and Cruelty in the Works of Three Elizabethan Novelists,” Cahiers Elisabetháins 19 (1981), 42-43.

20. McKerrow (followed by Cuvelier) notes that Zadoch's torments “are little worse than those suffered in 1591 by Dr. Fian for witchcraft,” (IV, 292) as recorded in the pamphlet Newes From Scotland. While the idea that deaths by torture may be graded on a scale of relative horror is offensive, it is necessary to point out that Zadoch's execution differs from and “exceeds” that of Dr. Fian in one significant respect. Dr. Fian's death could and probably did take place in the manner recorded, while the process of execution described by Jack Wilton is physically impossible.

21. The movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail includes a duel between King Arthur and the Black Knight in which the knight loses one limb after another. Through the course of his dismemberment he stubbornly refuses to admit defeat. “Just a flesh wound!” “Tis but a scratch!” “I've had worse.” In the end he is reduced to a mere trunk with a helmet, calling out, “Come back! I'll bite your legs off!” I cannot think of a better parallel to the violent comedy of Zadoch's execution.

22. Karen Cunningham, “Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death,” PMLA 105 (1990), 211.

23. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), p. 56.

24. The single most influential judgment on Nashe in this century has been Lewis' comment that Nashe wrote “‘pure’ literature: literature that, as nearly as possible, is without a subject. In a certain sense of the verb ‘say,’ if asked what Nashe ‘says,’ we should have to reply, Nothing.” English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), p. 416. Even most contemporary critics have tended not to question this assumption, preferring instead to argue that saying nothing sure is something.

25. P. 219. Hutson is generalizing about the text as a whole, but would surely agree that this disclosure is far more evident at Munster than at Marignano.

26. The City of God (London, 1945), I, 24. I am aware that “Lucrece figures … had long been canonised by poets and playwrights” (Rowland Wymer, Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama [Brighton, 1986], p. 100), but I doubt that Heraclide's sin is expiated by literary convention. Where other authors pass lightly over the theological implications of such suicides, Nashe makes the fate of the soul the sole concern of Heraclide's final soliloquy. The contradiction of penitential self-murder becomes impossible to ignore. Far from participating in the Lucrece convention, Nashe is exposing it to the sharpest criticism.

27. Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 73.

28. Nashe of course did not write a sequel, and probably never planned to, since he apparently had no interest in writing more than once in the same vein. The function of Jack's offer is to snatch away the promise of closure.

29. See Margaret Ferguson, “Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller: The ‘Newes of the Maker’ Game,” English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981), 165-82.

30. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London, 1965), p. 110.

31. The tension between poetry and history in this work has been the subject of Robert Weimann's powerful analysis. In “Fabula and Historia: The Crisis of the ‘Universall Consideration’ in The Unfortunate Traveller,” he explores the attempted intermingling of the two discourses and their inevitable rupture, most notably in the description of the massacre of the Anabaptists. While I agree largely with his analysis, I am interested in reversing the terms of the encounter. Where Weimann sees privileged humanist universals seeking to impose themselves on the unassimilable particulars of history, I conceive of a historia that does not merely engage in passive resistance, but enters the fiction as an active and potentially liberating discourse.

32. See E. D. Mackerness' study, “Christ's Teares and the Literature of Warning,” English Studies 33 (1952), 251-54.

33. Crewe, p. 59. Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (London, 1984), p. 169. Most other writers on Nashe have had more to offer in the way of execration than explanation: “far and away the worst thing Nashe ever wrote. Neither trivial nor dull, it has about it all the fascination of the positively and thoroughly bad” (Hibbard, p. 122); “Christs Teares is dreadful … a failed experiment in an extreme style and a new polemic mode” (Stephen Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe [Lincoln, 1986], p. 91); “This is a thoroughly bad piece of work” (Lewis, p. 412). Beyond this abuse, Christs Teares has been virtually ignored. Lorna Hutson does not explore it in her excellent book on Nashe; this grim text poses a serious obstacle (although not, I believe, an insurmountable one) to her vision of Nashe as the perpetrator of a comic assault on rhetoric, “emptying it of power and restoring it to readers as … pure gesture, pure pleasure” (p. 134).

34. Gabriel Harvey, A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593; rpt. Menston, 1970), sigs. D1, D2.

35. A most strange and true Discourse of the wonderfull Judgment of God, of a monstrous deformed Infant (1600) cited by McKerrow, IV, 214.

36. Hilliard, p. 120. Considering the speed of Harvey's response, it seems quite possible that he had not yet even read Christs Teares, knowing of it only by hearsay.

37. The number is two, The Unfortunate Traveller and The Terrors of the Night. The latter was written in 1592 and seems to have started out as a private commission rather than as a work intended for publication, and thus falls outside the scope of this essay.

38. David Kaula, “The Low Style in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller,” Studies in English Literature, 6 (Winter, 1966), 49-50.

39. Agnes Latham, “Satire on Literary Themes and Modes in Nashe's ‘Unfortunate Traveller,’” English Studies n.s. 1 (1948), p. 90.

40. Without commenting on this particular instance, Latham was aware of the tension between the two works. Of the purple passages in the rape of Heraclide she wrote: “It is possible that Nashe thought this a very fine conception—so he apparently thought, or hoped his readers would think, that shockingly overwritten pamphlet Christs Teares … but in view of his mocking, critical attitude, and the deliberate exaggeration elsewhere in the book, I suspect that he thought very much as we do about it.” The problem here is that The Unfortunate Traveller and Christs Teares are too closely linked. The similarities in the passages above, not only of style but of specific imagery, suggest to me that Nashe was thinking of one passage as he wrote the other, if not (as is possible) writing them concurrently. The suggestion that Nashe merely “hoped his readers would think” Christs Teares fine (the hoax theory) is difficult because it asks us to believe that the two works were written with two distinct audiences in mind, the one thick-headed and god-fearing, the other sophisticated and sensitive to parody. Every indication is that Nashe imagined a single body of readers following his career; in the first preface to Christs Teares he assumes his readers are familiar with his sophisticated and parodic assaults on Harvey, and in the second his defense of “my Iacke Wilton” against the charge of satirizing Cambridge presupposes that the readership includes the over-sensitive dons.

41. This was not at all a common device in sixteenth-century religious literature. Thomas More had tried it in De Tristitia Christi, an experiment which C. S. Lewis termed “unfortunate” (p. 179). In More's work the words put into Christ's mouth are explicitly glosses: “‘Behold,’ He said, ‘the hour has almost come when the son of man will be betrayed into the hands of sinners,’ as if to include the following implications: ‘I predicted to you that I must be betrayed by one of you—you were shocked at the very words. I foretold to you that Satan would seek you out to sift you like wheat—you heard this carelessly and made no response, as if his temptation were not much to be reckoned with’” (The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. and tran. Clarence H. Miller [New Haven, 1976], V, 14, Part One, p. 331.) In addition to going on much longer, Nashe seems to me to go much farther than More. While the words he puts into Christ's mouth are in some sense a gloss on two verses of Matthew, Nashe's Christ is aware of himself as orator, making a speech much longer and more passionate than the verses in Scripture: “Further I may not proceed, except I should detract from my Passion to adde to my Teares” (II, 54). Christ's oration is as much character-study as exegesis. Unlike More, Nashe imagines Christ speaking real extra-scriptural words.

42. At times his imagery seems to nudge us toward a strangely modern conception of the market that pervades all human activity. Lorna Hutson has discussed this aspect of Nashe's style in Thomas Nashe in Context. “Nashe's grotesque, we could say, is the grotesque vision of a society in which all material is potentially available for resourceful exploitation by some interest group” (p. 17).

43. The result resembles that achieved by Adam and Eve in a semiotic parable by Umberto Eco. Faced with the apple which is at once “red” (visually) and “blue” (the color of all things forbidden), “they prefer to devise a metaphor, a compound substitutional name. This releases them from the logical contradiction and also opens up the possibility of an intuitive and ambiguous grasp of the concept (by way of a fairly ambiguous use of code).” (See “Is there a way of generating aesthetic messages in an Edenic language?” Twentieth Century Studies 7 [1972], 168.) They call it the “redblue.” While most of Nashe's compounds do not embody this sort of contradiction, they do invite the intuitive grasp of ambiguous concepts.

44. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ardis, 1973), p. 54.

45. Compare Nashe's use of the echo with Sidney's in the Second Eclogues of Arcadia, and Webster's in The Duchess of Malfi, Act 5 scene 3.

46. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), p. 46. Significantly, this passage concludes with a quotation from Christs Teares: “shrewd Alcumists there are risen vp, that will pick a merchandise out of euery thing, and not spare to set vp theyr shops of buying and selling even in the Temple.”

47. “Holie Crosse, Adams of-spring, onely holinesse, I grieue that upon thee I can spend none of my God-head as wel as my humanity” (II, 50).

48. In the terms of Renaissance word play, Christ does not wish to exchange the cross (a common coin) for the Cross. Nashe makes no explicit use of this common pun in Christs Teares, although he was fond enough of it elsewhere. It may be that he considered it inappropriate to such a serious subject, but this seems unlikely in a work which is hardly characterized by sobriety and decorum. If, as I have suggested, the purpose of Nashe's compounds is to inscribe ambiguity more deeply into language, then “crosse” may well be the ultimate compound.

49. Ann Rosalind Jones has demonstrated how The Unfortunate Traveller corresponds to Bakhtin's polyphonic novel and Kristeva's unbounded text while failing to deliver the promised subversive kick. See “Inside the Outsider: Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller and Bakhtin's Polyphonic Novel,” ELH 50 (1983), 61-81. Stephen Hilliard stresses Nashe's ideological orthodoxy and suggests that it was only the author's insistence on his singularity that got him into trouble with authority.

50. While it would be interesting to speculate about what light his reformation was supposed to cast on works written afterwards, I think it wisest not to. In Christs Teares Nashe promised to leave satire, but not to turn permanently to explicitly religious publications. Rather, he plugged two upcoming works, a “complete historie” wherein Lady Carey's “perfections shall be the chiefe argument” (II, 10), and a discourse on the proper handling of military affairs(!) (II, 79). Neither of these ma'terialized, and Nashe did not publish a new work, at least under his own name, for three years after he wrote Christs Teares, by which time his circumstances had changed significantly. I suspect that if the Carey patronage had lasted Nashe would have remained “reformed” in tone, although no less experimental than before. As things didn't work out that way, there is little ground for speculation.

51. See Lorna Hutson, “The Persecution of Thomas Nashe by the Aldermen, 1593,” Notes & Queries 232 (1987), 199-200.

52. I fully agree with Lorna Hutson's observation that “In a sense we endorse the silencing of Nashe by assuming that the fate of the texts and their author is a consideration beyond the scope of literary criticism” (Thomas Nashe in Context, p. 267).