The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works

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.

‘T
HE
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
1590
s 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.