The Unfortunate Traveller

PART I

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND REFERENCES

My principal debt is to the great edition of The Works of Thomas Nashe by R. B. McKerrow. This is in five volumes, reprinted from the original edition (completed in 1910) with corrections and additional notes by F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1958). The debt is pervasive; one can hardly touch Nashe without reference to McKerrow. References to his edition, in my introduction and footnotes, are given by the initial ‘M’ followed by the number of the volume and the page. I have also to thank my colleague, Mr A. Woolley, for invaluable help, generously given, with Latin texts and classical allusions.

References by initial are as follows:

H. = G. R. Hibbard (ed.), Three Elizabethan Pamphlets, London, 1951.

M. = R. B. McKerrow (ed.), The Works of Thomas Nashe, V vols., Oxford, 1958.

W. = Stanley Wells (ed.), Thomas Nashe, The Stratford-upon-Avon Library, London, 1964.

F.P.W. = F. P. Wilson (ed.), McKerrow’s Works of Thomas Nashe, supplementary notes, vol. V.

A.W. = A. Woolley.

In this edition, spelling and punctuation have been modernized by the present editor. Proper names have generally been left in their original form, and an explanatory note added if thought necessary.

INTRODUCTION

‘THE most lively of Elizabethan journalists’: an encyclopedia without much space to spend on the minor classics might well use some such phrase to qualify the inclusion in its pages of Nashe, Thomas (1567–?1601). ‘Author of The Unfortunate Traveller, Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil and Summer’s Last Will and Testament,’ (the entry might continue), ‘he was reputed a formidable controversialist in his time, being involved in the Marprelate debate and in bitter conflict with Gabriel Harvey.’

Dim and dusty associations flicker and stir momentarily: the titles are not unfamiliar, the proper names not unremembered. But no, these controversies long-dead, these terms of reference (‘journalist’, ‘in his day’), they surely suggest an essentially antiquarian interest, chilly and possibly silly, the babble of the curiosity shop; certainly a limited achievement.

It is true that Nashe is ‘minor’ (where ‘major’, among Elizabethans, means Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson). His achievements, however, exceed his contemporary reputation as a mighty polemicist. And if they were merely or essentially those of the journalist, writing of the day for the day, he might be a quarry for social historians, but would not be a classic of our literature, even of the ‘minor’ variety.

His status and character are those of The Entertainer. He is many other things as well; or rather, many things contribute to the entertainment he offers. He is moralist, poet, story-teller, social critic (taking on All England as readily as he will the tribe of Harveys), scholar, satirist, preacher, jester: all these are part of the act. Like all great entertainers, he is a professional: he may tell us that what he is doing is ‘extemporal’, that he has got lost down lanes and by-ways in which he is surprised to find himself, but we are ingenuous if we take him at his word, for he is in control all the time, knows where he is going and what he wants to do on the way. Like most great entertainers, he is much aware of himself and his art. He tells his tales to people whose attentive expressions he can never see; he jests to an audience whose laughter he can never hear. But he is as acutely aware of the audience and of the frail magic of his hold over them as any actor or comedian. He wills the world to dance to his tune, and knows that it can do so only if the words will dance to his pen. He is a very conscious artist, and a very good one; and that is why he is a ‘classic’, but ‘minor’.

Much about his life and character has to be qualified in the same way. His spirit was rebellious, but his doctrine conservative; his thinking was agile, but not often deep. He was a university man, proud of his learning, but his touch was essentially popular. He was cosmopolitan in references, metropolitan in way of life, yet the work which was probably his last and in which he is his most fully and distinctively developed self is basically an encomium of the East Anglia of his birth. He was also very much alive (the energy of his writing taking an individual form, however characteristic of its period); yet in his finest poem and in much of his prose we see him in the midst of death. The 1590s were darkened by the plague, which was particularly bad in London in 1592 and 1593. In 1598 Nashe wrote casually of the time ‘when I am dead and underground’; and within three or possibly two years, he was. His age, at death, cannot have been more than thirty-four.

What we know for certain about this brief life can be briefly told. The second son of a minister, Nashe was born in November 1567, at Lowestoft, from where, in 1573, the family moved to West Harling, near Thetford. There is no record concerning his schooling, but in 1581 or 1582 he went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he became a Lady Margaret scholar, and where he gained his Bachelor’s degree in 1586 He did not take his M.A., but left the University in 1588 and started publishing promptly, with The Anatomy of Absurdity entered in the Stationer’s Register that same September. From this time on, he seems to have lived in London as far as plagues, patrons and enemies permitted. In 1502 ‘the fear of infection detained me with my lord in the country’ (Pierce Penniless, p. 49); and at Christmas of that year, he tells us, ‘I was in the Isle of Wight then and a great while after’ (Have with You, M., III, 96). The ‘lord’ referred to in the first quotation was most probably Archbishop Whitgift, and the ‘country’ his palace at Croydon: Summer’s Last Will and Testament was almost certainly written and performed there. The Isle of Wight, where he stayed at Carisbrook Castle, drew Nashe in the train of Sir George Carey, its Captain-general, and the Lady Elizabeth, Nashe’s patron. He visited Lincolnshire in 1595, and on the return journey called in at Cambridge, where he ‘had not been in six year before’, and where he met again his old enemy Gabriel Harvey. Then in 1597 he retreated to East Anglia, where ‘at Great Yarmouth [he] arrived in the latter end of August’, having made London too hot to hold him; and during Lent 1598 he was still in the country writing Lenten Stuff. The scandal which drove him from London was aroused by a play, no longer extant, called The Isle of Dogs, written partly by him, and judged seditious. The Privy Council ordered a search of his lodgings, and actually imprisoned Ben Jonson (who also wrote part of it) and two members of the cast, while Nashe judiciously made himself scarce. But perhaps he had already begun to feel that he was persona non grata in the City, for the battle of books between himself and Harvey had become so unseemly in the eyes of authority that eventually Archbishop Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft ordered ‘That all Nashe’s books and Doctor Harvey’s books be taken wheresoever they be found, and that none of their books be ever printed hereafter.’ How the man was to live seems to have troubled nobody very much. He himself was used to poverty and had also seen the inside of a debtor’s prison, though he writes cheerfully enough about it (‘Though I have been pinched with want – as who is not at one time or another Pierce Penniless – yet my muse never wept for want of maintenance as thine did…’ Here he is again at sparring practice with Gabriel Harvey – Strange News, M., I, 303). Indeed, the only time we see Nashe seriously dispirited is in what he tells us of the critical period he passed through after the trouble over The Isle of Dogs: in the opening of Lenten Stuff he refers to ‘such a heavy cross laid upon me, as had well near confounded me’ (p. 377). Even then he rallies pretty quickly, and we gather he is on his feet again (‘I have a pamphlet hot a-brooding’). But Fortune’s buffets, and rewards were soon to mean nothing to him. He was alive early in 1599 and dead by 1601, we know not how, when or where, but a Latin epitaph published in that year tells how black death, which would certainly have been struck dead itself if Nashe had had his pen or tongue at command, took away these his twin thunderbolts (‘fulmina bina’) and extinguished his vital flame, on the impartial edict of Jove himself.

He was an active professional writer for ten years, his surviving works bearing the following dates on the title-page of the first edition:

There is also the poem The Choice of Valentines (date unknown), and whatever share Nashe may have had in the lost play The Isle of Dogs (performed in 1587 before the closing of the theatres on 28 July), and in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, first published in 1594. Nashe’s name appears on the title-page of this play, but no internal evidence suggests shared authorship. Nashe’s association with it may have been in preparing the text for the printer, or in writing some verses on Marlowe’s death to be published with the first edition, and now, most unfortunately, lost. He very probably wrote, or had a hand in, other things as well, and boasts in Strange News: ‘I have written in all sorts of humours privately, I am persuaded, more than any young man of my age in England’ (M., I, 320).

He was evidently one of those men who cannot be happy for long without a pen in their hand. Yet there never was a writer whose work is less cloistered, and when the term ‘journalist’ is used about him it is precisely because he is a man out and around in his day: we could follow him in the morning from his room, where ‘by a settee out of sight’ you would find Harvey’s books ‘amongst old shoes and boots’ (Have with You, M., III, 19), out into the city, by boat downstream where ‘a waterman plies for his fares’ (Have with You, M., III, 13) to the book-sellers in St Paul’s churchyard, to the ordinary for a meal if there was money, to dine ‘with Duke Humphrey’ (Pierce Penniless, p. 58) if not, to the theatre in the afternoon (‘the idlest time of the day’, when gentlemen of the Court, captains and soldiers ‘do wholly bestow themselves upon pleasure, and that pleasure they divide… either into gaming, following of harlots, or seeing a play’, Pierce Penniless, p. 112), and so on till lanthorn and candlelight. So much of the material for his writing comes from observant day-to-day living: the look of the people, the individual tones of their voices, the proverbs which were common wisdom to them all. As G. R. Hibbard points out, in what is to date the only full-length critical study of Nashe,² the habit of observing and noting must have started early, for, talking about ‘aged mumping beldams’, their old-wives’ tales and superstitions, he says ‘When I was a little child, I was a great auditor of theirs, and had all their witchcrafts at my fingers’ ends, as perfect as good-morrow and good-even’ (Terrors of the Night, p. 232).

Nor do the sketches of him by his contemporaries, or the testimony of his own writing, suggest a mere observer. Dekker, in an addition to his News from Hell (the 1607 version, called A Knight’s Conjuring), describes Nashe among a company of writers in the underworld:

still haunted with the sharp and satirical spirit that followed him here upon earth. For Nashe inveighed bitterly (as he had wont to do) against dry-fisted, patrons, accusing them of his untimely death, because if they had given his muse that cherishment which she most worthily deserved, he had fed to his dying day on fat capons, burnt sack and sugar, and not so desperately have ventured his life and shortened his days by keeping company with pickled herrings.

The last phrase refers to Nashe’s last published work (Lenten Stuff, with its sub-title In Praise of the Red Herring³), but the passage reads like a portrait from life, the man depicted being recognizably that of his own writings, both critical and convivial.

A similar picture emerges from The Three Parnassus Plays, in the character Ingenioso. These plays (their author is anonymous), amusing and valuable for the humorous, sympathetic insight which they afford into the universities and the prospects and problems of their graduates, are quite clear in the personal reference to Nashe as this satirist who ‘carried the deadly stockado in his pen’.⁴ For one thing, he is identified by his projecting tooth: the phrase ‘whose muse was armed with a gagtooth’ recalls, as the editor, J. B. Leishman, points out, Harvey’s sentence on Nashe: ‘Take heed of the man whom Nature hath marked with a gagtooth, Art furnished with a gagtongue, and Exercise armed with a gagpen, as cruel and murderous weapons as ever drew blood.’ But Ingenioso’s complaints are also characteristic of Nashe. When first met, he is ‘following a gouty patron by the smell, hoping to wring some water from a flint’, and in the second play he is seen again cursing the way of the world:

I see wit is but a phantom and idea a quarrelling shadow, that will seldom dwell in the same room with a full purse, but commonly is the idle follower of a forlorn creature. Nay, it is a devil that will never leave a man till it hath brought him to a beggary, a malicious spirit that delights in a close libel or an open satire. Besides, it is an unfortunate thing: I have observed that that head where it dwelleth hath seldom a good hat, or the back it belongs unto, a good suit of apparel.

No doubt there is some amusement here at Nashe’s expense (the pot says too much to the kettle about libels and satires, and the descent from spiritual melancholy to canny material interest is comically observed). But essentially the portrait of Ingenioso is a friendly one. He is a good fellow, who writes his pamphlets over ‘a pint of wine and a pipe of tobacco’. And the serving man likes him: ‘Faith, he seems a mad greek, and I have loved such lads of mettle as that seems to be from my infancy.’ Although Ingenioso has the last speech in the play, Thomas Nashe in Ingenioso’s person is given an epitaph earlier on by Iudicio; and it is one which with its balance and generosity speaks surely with affection:

Let all his faults sleep with his mournful chest,
And there for ever let his ashes rest.
His style was witty, though it had some gall;
Some things he might have mended, so may all.
Yet this I say, that for a mother wit,
Few men have ever seen the like of it.⁵

It is a happy event that these lines should come from his own university. For, however much his popular ‘image’ was that of the ‘mad greek’, the ‘lad of mettle’, nevertheless he was a man of considerable learning, and his respect for scholarship was great. Almost every page of McKerrow’s notes on the texts contains its allusions to Ovid, Virgil, Horace and other standard classical writers. Theologians from Augustine and Athanasius to Tyndale and Erasmus; European writers such as La Primaudaye and Castiglione; Spenser, Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Sidney, Thomas Watson, William Warner and Sir John Davies among his near contemporaries: these were no doubt the standard authors of the educated Elizabethan, but Nashe had them in his system, not just in his notebooks, for the allusions come (in his own phrase) ‘thick and three-fold’ and are clearly a part of the mind. He had also read closely some more recondite works: Cornelius Agrippa’s De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum is a frequent source of reference, a discourse on devils by Georgius Pictorius (De Illorum Daemonum, called the Isagoge) is another. Chronicles, ballads, grammars, translations, tales and plays: all sorts of reading become a part of his own writing. McKerrow lists over one hundred books by modern authors quoted in his work; and, though his classical learning is no doubt exceeded by that of his great editor, it is in some ways all the more impressive for its inaccuracies, for they suggest reliance on a memory which may be defective in detail but is plentifully stored.

Cambridge was clearly a prime influence in Nashe’s life. St John’s was a college with a great tradition, and Nashe several times points proudly to its former scholars and masters. It had been a notable supplier of men to Church and State: William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was the greatest of several eminent statesmen who were also Johnsmen, and the college produced at least twenty-six bishops during Tudor times. ‘The most flourishing society in the University at this time’, L. V. Ryan calls it, writing on the 1520s and 30s which were Ascham’s time there.⁶ By the 1580s, when Nashe was up, the College had come under Calvinist influence, and the University itself had, from mid-century onwards, become too much a Church recruiting-centre for broader studies to prosper. Nashe was strongly opposed to the puritans in national as well as university life, and he writes severely about the decline of standards at Cambridge. Cheke, Ascham and others, he says, had ‘set before our eyes a more perfect method of study’:

But how ill their precepts have prospered with our idle age, that leave the fountains of sciences to follow the rivers of Knowledge, their over-fraught studies and trifling compendiaries may testify. For I know not how it cometh to pass, by the doting practices of our divinity dunces, that strain to make their pupils pulpit-men before they are reconciled to Priscian. But those years which should be employed in Aristotle are expired in epitomies; and well too, they may have so much catechism-vacation to rake up a little refuse-philosophy.⁷

The complaint against ‘epitomies’, the second-hand acquaintance with philosophers through other men’s summaries, comes from a scholar with standards; just as the irony of the last clause comes from a critic with a pen he knows how to use. And his criticisms have all the more power for being voiced by a man who has just spoken, with obvious sincerity, of his pride in the University and affection for his College. St John’s, he says (echoing Ascham’s words in The Schoolmaster):

was as an university within itself, shining so far above all other houses, halls and hospitals whatsoever, that no college in the town was able to compare with the tithe of her students; having (as I have heard grave men of credit report) more candles light in it every winter morning before four of the clock than the four-of-the-clock bell gave strokes.⁸

This comes from the Preface to Greene’s Menaphon, addressed ‘To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities’, and written when Cambridge was a memory not above a year old. He was to revert to it nearly ten years later in Lenten Stuff: ‘St John’s… in Cambridge, in which house once I took up my inn for seven year together lacking a quarter, and yet love it still, for it is and ever was the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all that University.’⁹

The London pamphleteer still had the Cambridge scholar within him, and it would no doubt be a source of posthumous pride to him to know that his extant writings should eventually have become the subject of a monumental work of scholarship in McKerrow’s edition. And another side of him might well have been quite pleased to see himself, four hundred years later, slipping into a somewhat outside pocket at the expense of a few new pence.

He might also have been interested to note that this selection of his work contains relatively little of what won him the reputation which stuck to him in his own time. The ‘young Juvenal, that biting satirist’, as Greene described him the Martin-queller and Harvey-baiter, has receded in vividness along with the issues involved.

The Marprelate controversy was a minor episode in one of the great debates of English history. From Wycliffs time to Wesley’s, the reformation of the Church was a cause that drew to it good men who wished that true religion should prosper and abuses be checked. Such aims touched the life of everybody in the country, and touched them at one of the points where the basic quality of a culture is in question. There were great things said and great things done. Somewhere in the middle of it all, a slanging-match blew up among some by-standers; the bishops look on, the people cheer and counter-cheer; it has been a bit of light relief, and it is soon over. One of the main contestants is lost again in the crowd; the other is Nashe, who is remembered for other reasons.

In 1587 Dr John Bridges wrote a tract called Defence of the Government Established. The contents were as little appetizing as the title, and in fact it appears to have been a bad piece of work and an embarrassment to the authorities whose defence it undertook. But some defence seemed necessary, for although the reformers were concerned about the Church, the whole power-structure was affected by an attack on one part of it. A better Church was a fine general aim, but in particular it meant better bishops – or none. The implications of this in terms of power were to become abundantly clear to the Stuarts; but even in Elizabeth’s time the puritan movement was strong enough to make the government, temporal as well as spiritual, uncomfortably aware that it could not stand idly by. But then, governments are always saying that, and up to this time the situation had been niggling rather than tense. The temperature was raised, however, when, late in 1588 and throughout 1589, a series of pamphlets, eluding the Church’s grip on the printing presses, appeared under the signature of Martin Marprelate, Gentleman. These disposed of the Defence of the Government Established without great difficulty and with much relish: Oh, read over D. John Bridges the fourth pamphlet was called, its popular style matching the lively title just as Bridges matched his stuffy one with a dull text. The pamphlets made a strong impression: for about the only time in its history, the puritan cause became fun.

The alarm of the Government Established was great enough for some of the Church authorities to look round for a David to take aim at this laughing Goliath. Precisely how they happened upon Nashe we do not know; his first publications, the Preface to Greene’s Menaphon and The Anatomy of Absurdity, had established him as a writer best on attack, and as one with no love for the influence of puritans in the universities; perhaps that was enough. In fact, several writers became involved, but in the whole pamphleteering war the only counterblow to match ‘Marprelate’s’ own was the one now attributed with fair certainty to Nashe, An Almond for a Parrot.

It strikes the right note. Beginning ‘Welcome, Master Martin from the dead,¹⁰ and much joy may you have of your stage-like resurrection,’ and ending ‘And so bon nute to your noddiship,’ it made it clear that there were laughs to be had. And so there are. On his first page he comes up with a good story of a mean puritan of Northampton who

fetched a more thriftier precedent of funerals piping hot from the primitive church, which, including but a few words and those passing well expounded, kept his wainscot from waste and his linen from wearing; sufficeth, he tumbled his wife naked into the earth at high noon, without sheet or shroud to cover her shame, breathing over her in an audible voice: ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return again.’

He is well primed in debate-technique (gain a laugh, gain a point); the points follow, and he strikes them home unsparingly. ‘Malicious hypocrite,’ he is soon saying, ‘didst thou so much malign the successful thrivings of the gospel, that thou shouldst filch thyself, as a new disease, into our government?’ Impugn the motives of your opponent, then turn his own words against him. ‘The filth of the stews, distilled into ribaldry terms, cannot confectionate a more intemperate style than his pamphlets.’ He quotes a few of Martin’s ‘milder terms’, piling them up with Dickensian relish:

wicked priests, presumptuous priests, proud prelates, arrogant bishops, horseleeches, butchers, persecutors of the truth, Lambethical whelps, Spanish inquisitors

and then asks:

Think you this miry-mouthed mate a partaker of heavenly inspiration, that thus abounds in his uncharitable railings.¹¹

As for his ‘ancient burlibond adjuncts’ and ‘unwieldy phrases’, ‘no true syllogism can have elbow room where they are’. There is more of this kind, and a good deal of by-play, including some that is amusingly at the expense of Philip Stubbs and his Anatomy of Abuses (‘tickle me my Phil a little more in the flank’). Occasionally argument succeeds abuse. But generally all is subsidiary to the great denunciation, for Nashe has identified (correctly, it seems) Martin as John Penry, another Cambridge man, eight years Nashe’s senior, and he proceeds to denounce, at first like Micawber on Heep:

Pen., J. Pen., welch Pen., Pen. the protestationer, demonstrationer, supplicationer, appellationer, Pen., the father, Pen., the son, Pen. Martin Junior, Martin Martinus, Pen. the scholar of Oxford to his friend in Cambridge, Pen. totum in toto…¹²

then in the language of Apemantus or Thersites:

Predestination, that foresaw how crooked he should prove in his ways, enjoined incest to spawn him splay-footed. Eternity, that knew how awkward he should look to all honesty, consulted with conception to make him squint-eyed, and the devil, that discovered by the heaven’s disposition on his birthday how great a limb of his kingdom was coming into the world, provided a rusty superficies from his mother’s womb; in every part whereof these words of blessing were most artificially engraven: Crine ruber, niger ore, brevis pede, lumine lustus.¹³

Quoting this passage, G. R. Hibbard remarks:

The whole thing is in the worst of taste, but the sheer nastiness of it all is palliated in some measure by the fantastic ingenuity of invention. The malicious invective is shot through with a kind of perverted poetry.… Brutality of image and attitude were nothing new at the time, but the ability to combine them with the play of fancy is something peculiar to Nashe.¹⁴

The authorities cleared the ring when they found and dismantled the Martinist press, and when Nashe reappeared in it some two years later it was with other partners. There is a direct link between them, however. Nashe’s writings had irritated one Richard Harvey, a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and a man several years older than the upstart critic (Nashe later said he remembered him ’wondrous well’ and had ‘purged rheum many a time’ during his philosophy lectures ¹⁵). Harvey had written a treatise in praise of Ramus, which put him on the wrong side as far as Nashe was concerned, partly because of Ramus’s Calvinism and partly because his Logic was being pushed as against Aristotle’s in Cambridge by all the people whom Nashe regarded as the corrupters of the University (Ramisric logic is one of the ‘newfound toys’ referred to in The Anatomy of Abuses). Moreover, Penry, Martin Marprelate himself, was an admirer of Ramus, and Nashe had taken him to task for it in An Almond for a Parrot. This, together with his irreverent references to his elders in the Preface to Greene’s Menaphon, was sufficient to provoke Harvey to public rebuke. He wrote two pamphlets in 1590, the second one being called The Lamb of God, insignificant enough in themselves, bearing a relationship rather like the assassination at Sarajevo to what followed. Richard Harvey drew a counter-attack from Greene, which brought in Gabriel Harvey, at which Henry Chettle reminded Nashe of his obligations to Greene: the great war was on.

It was Gabriel, Richard’s brother, who became the principal on the other side. Nature had not made him a fighting man, but he was acutely conscious of himself, his deserts and his disappointments, and this made him ready to lash out at an affront, and to conduct a tenacious defence. It also made him an easy and rather tempting target, for it was clear that the hurts would smart. Interestingly, the terms of his first attack on Nashe apply to himself: ‘tormented with other men’s felicity, and overwhelmed with his own misery’ (Harvey’s Four Letters, M., V, 84). Nashe never impresses one in this way in his writing, and the picture of him in The Three Parnassus Plays does not accord either. But Harvey himself certainly was a disappointed man. His university career meant everything to him, and it did not prosper. Professor in Rhetoric from 1574, he failed to become Public Orator when the appointment was made in 1581; he was passed over when he might well have become Master of Trinity Hall in 1585; and in 1592 he lost his Fellowship there. Few men would take such misfortunes in as philosophical humour as they might hope, but with Harvey his vanity must have been sadly hurt: the vanity, for instance, which made him so happy when the Queen met him and remarked that ‘he looked something like an Italian’ that he had to write a poem about it, and another about his kissing her hand (Nashe says he thereupon ‘quite renounced his natural English accents and gestures and wrested himself wholly to the Italian punctilios, speaking our homely island tongue strangely as if he were but a raw practitioner in it’, Have with You, p. 490). And indeed, a defensive-aggressive self-esteem speaks out throughout the controversy, and undercuts his own performance. In many ways he was more worthy than Nashe: he had some good arguments on his side, he was a genuine scholar and often very clear-headed. And not for nothing was he the friend of Spenser, who wrote of him as one:

That, sitting like a looker-on
Of this world’s stage, dost note, with critique pen,
The sharp dislike of each condition

Yet his character is always revealing itself as mean, vain and, in some fatal way, ridiculous. John Buxton says of him: ‘he had an arrogant egotism that at times comes near to megalomania, as he reveals in the privacy of the notes so carefully written in the margins of his books.’¹⁶ ‘Tormented with other men’s felicity, and overwhelmed with his own misery’: he was in a glass house, with David outside fresh from his encounter with Goliath, aiming straight at the holes his own stone-throwing had made.

And Nashe hits repeatedly: to good effect in Strange News (or The Four Letters Confuted), devastatingly in Have with You to Saffron Walden. At the heart of that pamphlet is the famous ‘Life’ of Harvey: both a genuine biography in its factual reference, and, as Hibbard says, a ‘mock-life’. The strength lies in the underplaying; or (if that seems a curious thing to say about so exuberant and unsparing a piece of work) in the feeling of laughter welling up from inside at the very thought of this man, somehow inherently absurd. His performance before the Queen at Audley End and his subsequent antics, his petulant, bewildered dismay when he found himself in Newgate, these are some of the ‘best ones’ in a life which is seen throughout as a richly comical jest-book. Sometimes it is as though Nashe had his camera with him, and, click, the expression is caught: Harvey coy and simpering, for example, like a proud schoolmaster when one of his boys hath made an oration before a county mayor that hath pleased’ (Have with You, M., III, 70). His snobbery is caught, and with it, again, the foolish complacency: ‘Only he tells a foolish twittle-twattle boasting tale… of the funeral of his kinsman, Sir Thomas Smith (which word “kinsman” I wondered he caused not to be set in great capital letters)’ (ibid., p. 58). The abuse is sometimes a straightforward concussion-blow on the bald pate (and Harvey had ‘of late very pitifully grown bald’). More often Nashe can afford to play cat and mouse, even to adopt a ‘be-kind-to-Gabriel’ pose, as when, early in the pamphlet, he prints a little drawing of him. Harvey was a thin man, so Nashe considerately draws him in round hose instead of his customary Venetian: ‘because I would make him look more dapper and plump and round upon it, whereas otherwise he looks like a case of tooth-pikes, or a lutepin in a suit of apparel’ (Have with You, M., III, 38).

The match resolves itself into a public entertainment (there were those who suspected it was deliberately prolonged by the participants), the interests being the wit and skill in language, and the spectacle of such contrasted characters surveying each other with such distaste. Harvey is best when dealing analytically with Nashe’s prose style, at his worst when entering ham-fistedly into the thuggery (‘I will batter thy carrion to dirt, whence thou camst; and squeeze thy brain to a snivel, whereof it was curdled’¹⁷). The contrasts of character do just a little to raise the confrontation to a level slightly higher than the merely personal and incidental. There is the bohemian against the academic; the creative against the analytic; the rashly-expensive against the cautious-mean. Behind the figures also loom two philosophies and historical trends. But, ultimately, the Harvey-Nashe quarrel takes its minor place in literature: the energy goes into devising ways and means of doing battle, not into genuine argument, and the result is that we look at these two clever and sophisticated adults and are entertained by them as we sometimes are by the ingenuities of little children.

Despite his reputation as ‘the English Juvenal’, however, Nashe was not one of those men who can write only if they have something to attack. Though there is a critical element in most of his work, he is not for ever, in Drayton’s phrase, ‘scorching and blasting’ with words. His stories are told for pleasure in the telling, his jokes are cracked for the fun of them, and his whole style speaks of relish for living, not distaste.

He is also a writer with more variety than is commonly accredited him. Before turning finally to those publications which one thinks of as most essentially himself (discourses ranging freely over morals, customs, histories, writings, and allowing a free play of wit and wisdom), we shall look at a religious homily, a ‘dirty’ poem, a play (and yet ‘’tis no play neither, but a show’¹⁸), and what McKerrow and Hibbard warn us must on no account be called a picaresque novel.

Yet in so far as the term ‘picaresque novel’ calls to mind an episodic narrative centring on the adventures of a principal character who is up to all sorts of tricks and gets himself and others into various sorts of difficulty, it is not such a misleading piece of introductory shorthand to represent The Unfortunate Traveller – which in fact resists categorization of any sort. It also resists attempts to find a kind of depth and organization which critics would like it to have: ‘It embodies nothing that can be called a view of life’ (Hibbard¹⁹), ‘It has no organizing principle; it is not a unified work of art’ (Wells²⁰). And yet it does have a distinctive character of its own amongst Nashe’s books, and something that goes beyond the mere facts that it comes nearest to telling a tale, as continuous, if episodic, narrative, and that its setting is European.

It is by far the most brutal of his works; cruelty is like a refrain in it, rarely out of mind for long, sometimes so gratuitous in detail as to be a far from amiable indulgence. It is true that the Elizabethans were not squeamish, that there was plenty of cruelty in their drama, and that Nashe has some bloodthirsty (and tasteless) passages elsewhere. But the sickening story of Miriam and her children (which would be an example) is incidental to Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem;²¹ and the barbaric prophetic gloating over the public disembowelling of Penry is not recognizable as thematic in An Almond for a Parrot:²² whereas, in The Unfortunate Traveller, the execution of Cutwolfe only registers as the last and worst in a procession of cruelties. I think, too, that cruelty is present from the beginning, and that it increases in seriousness and barbarity fairly steadily. The opening pages tell of young Jack Wilton’s witty tricks, how with ‘a cunning shift of the seventeens’ he would cadge and lie, trick, ridicule and hurt. Whether as a soft-hearted twentieth-century liberal, or as suspecting that in real life one would probably be one of his victims, I have never found Jack Wilton’s practical jokes quite as mirthful as he himself (and presumably the author) thinks them to be. Of course, ‘his good ass-headed Honour, mine host’, ‘Captain Cogswounds’, the ‘Switzer captain that was far gone for want of the wench’ should have seen through the young whippersnapper; as he says (and it might have been Ben Jonson’s proverb as well as Jack Wilton’s), ‘Adam never fell till God made fools.’ Still, one is not altogether sorry when the tables are turned, and jolly J.W. is ‘pitifully whipped for his holiday lie’.

The practical joking and pitiful whipping are, of course, in historical context, something less than cruelty and barbarism, but in a playful way they suggest a tune that is to ring out harshly and inescapably enough later in the composition. It is not long before we visit the battlefield and see ‘more arms and legs scattered in the field… than will be gathered up till Doomsday’ (p. 277). If that phrase recalls some words spoken in the night before Agincourt, it will recall tones of pity, terms of thoughtfulness and responsibility. There is none of that in Nashe, however, who shows principally the interest in ingenious horrors which one associates with Lucan, and who, as he sees ‘a bundle of bodies fettered together in their own bowels’, reminds us of an edifying passage of Roman history in which tyrant emperors ‘used to tie condemned living caitiffs face to face with dead corpses’; so, he adds (in case we should have missed the point) ‘were the half-living here mixed with squeezed carcases long putrefied’ (p. 276).

If one does not find a relationship between the ‘tune’ of this and the frisky practical joking of the early pages, it should become clearer a few pages later when the travellers visit Germany and consider the fall of the Anabaptists. As with Jack Wilton’s victims, credulity was their undoing. They saw a rainbow in the sky after they had asked for a sign, and since the rainbow was their own ensign they took it as a favourable omen, and were duly massacred. ‘That which wretches would have, they easily believe’: the tag matches the earlier proverb (‘Adam never fell…’), the difference being simply one of intensity, for the practical joker here is not Jack Wilton, but God or Fate, or whatever it is that is on the side of the big armies. We are not spared details: ‘So ordinary at every footstep was the imbrument of iron in blood, that one could hardly discern heads from bullets, or clottred hair from mangled flesh hung with gore’ (p.286).

What is interesting is that this account is accompanied by some feeling of revulsion, characteristically expressed in terms of common experience in London. He has no time for the Anabaptists, he says, but to think of their slaughter is to be reminded of bear-baiting: you think a bear ‘is the most cruellest of all beasts’, but when he is ‘too too bloodily overmatched and deformedly rent in pieces by an unconscionable number of curs, it would move compassion against kind’. As The Unfortunate Traveller proceeds, so do the horrors succeed one another fairly regularly, in amongst the ‘reasonable conveyance of history and variety of mirth’ which Nashe has promised his readers. I think that Nashe is partly indulging his own bad taste, and that of his readers, but that ultimately The Unfortunate Traveller is an intuitive (rather than intellectual) exploration of national character.

After the execution of Cutwolfe, Jack Wilton comes quickly home. Nashe had written a long enough book: no doubt that was the first reason. But also he has seen enough. That episode is climactic; he shakes off the dust of Italy, and although he does not rule out the possibility of a sequel, he ends: ‘otherwise I will swear upon an English chronicle never to be outlandish chronicler more while I live’. There is a return, with relief, to things English; not only as being ‘home’, but also as being more humane. The long dissertation of ‘the banished earl’ (‘Get thee home, my young lad: lay thy bones peaceably in the sepulchre of thy fathers; wax old in overlooking thy grounds; be at hand to close the eyes of thy kindred’) is, I think, central.²³ Jack Wilton comments on it flippantly, which is in character (it is not really quite true that, in Hibbard’s words, ‘Jack has neither conscience nor character. As a realized human being he does not exist at all,’²⁴). But the words have carried weight: they are effectively placed in the book to summarize experience and direct reaction, though Nashe is obviously conscious of his unwonted gravity (Jack’s reactions to the lecture are rather like Will Summer’s to the serious speeches in Summer’s Last Will) and it is also true that the speech has the mark of set-piece oratory. Even so, it summarizes, defines and directs. The question is sometimes asked why the traveller is ‘unfortunate’, when he is in fact lucky as a cat with nine lives. Perhaps it is that travelling itself is ‘unfortunate’, the title suggesting something like Kingsley Amis’s I Like it Here. The implicit feeling of the book is that England may have its old fools and young rogues: the one gets exploited and the other whipped, and, out of that, folk ‘make themselves merry… many a winter’s evening after’. And England may also have its bear-baiting, which you may come to for amusement and be surprised to find the spectacle ‘moves compassion’. But with the French battlefields, the Minister massacre, Zadoch and Zachary, and the fiendish Esdras of Granada, we, mercifully, cannot compete.

I suppose that if The Unfortunate Traveller failed to secure Nashe’s inclusion in any reasonably comprehensive Anthology of Bad Taste, he might still gain a place through Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem or The Choice of Valentines. Not that I see anything distasteful in the sheer execution, as opposed to the subject, of that poem. Indeed, living in the permissive sixties and (presumably) seventies, one has the opportunity (if not necessarily the intention) to compare the pornography of Nashe’s age and ours. ‘Adult reading’, the modern book-covers would say. But inside, I do not think we would find the literary influences to be those of Ovid and Chaucer, nor would we be aware that this was a world in which

young men in their jolly roguery
Rose early in the morn ’fore break of day
To seek them valentines so trim and gay.

Nor ‘from out the house of venery’ would there step ‘a foggy three-chinned dame’; nor would we realize as we read that the author’s own gratification was to be found in his success not as an aphrodisiac but as a wit. The piece survives only in manuscripts, one of them incomplete and partly in cipher; but it achieved a certain fame in its time (there is a reference in Sir John Davies’s Scourge of Folly, 1611), and it seems worth reprinting both as a curiosity, and for what, at this date, one can see as a certain charm and freshness. In its (not unimportant) way, it even does Nashe’s century some credit.