The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works

by Thomas Nashe

  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 u
nwonted 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.

  At all events, Nashe made his own apology in Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem: ‘those that have been perverted by my works, let them read this, and it shall thrice more benefit them’ (M., II, 13). He does in fact cut an unwittingly comic figure in the prefatory address ‘To the Reader’, from which that quotation comes. He says farewell ‘to fantastical satirism’, desires ‘to be at peace with all men’, and begs pardon of all his enemies, ‘even of Master Doctor Harvey’. Edward IV’s death-bed reconciliations in Richard III and Richard’s own protestations (‘’Tis death to me to be at enmity.… I thank God for my humility’25) come to mind all too readily: but perhaps unfairly. For there is little reason to doubt Nashe’s sincerity, and the genuineness of his intentions in this homiletic work can hardly be in question when there is so much evidence of care over structure and expression, and when the piece is so resolutely sustained (it is easily the longest of Nashe’s works. It is severely criticized in Hibbard’s study: ‘Christ’s Tears is a monument of bad taste, tactlessness and unremitting over-elaboration for which it is not easy to find a parallel; a kind of gigantic oxymoron in which style and content, tone and intention are consistently at odds.’26 Actually, these strictures are made to apply principally to the first half, the second containing some lively observation and social criticism in a manner more naturally Nashe’s own. But, although many points are acutely noted in Hibbard’s chapter, and although Nashe’s faulty taste is sometimes glaringly obvious, I still think there is merit ignored. For example, Hibbard says that Nashe ‘seems to have had no understanding of how much the Gospel owes to the nakedness and directness of its prose’; yet, following on the very passage whose quotation has led up to that remark, there are a couple of pages in which the parable of the owner of the vineyard is told with admirable simplicity and directness, and, what is more, with a feeling for prose rhythms which is closely akin to that of the Authorized Version, and which is beautiful. When Nashe says he wishes to be God’s ‘pure simple orator’, he means that he desires purity and singleness of purpose, simple in that it shall be unmixed with baser matter, including any desire for personal glory. And to a degree that is quite remarkable with him, he does keep himself out of the spotlight and focus it upon the objects in question without personal intrusion. ‘I hate in thy name to speak coldly to a quick-witted generation’, he says in his introductory paragraph. ‘Now help, now direct’, he prays at the end of it: ‘for now I transform myself from myself, to be thy unworthy speaker to the world’. Mr Hibbard says he didn’t mean it, and that the Holy Ghost didn’t listen to him. It is, of course, a far cry from this to Milton’s

  What in me is dark

  Illumine, what is low raise and support.

  Yet, if we are to suppose ourselves so well-informed about the Holy Ghost, we might conclude that it did the same for both men: hear and obey sometimes, turn a deaf ear at others.

  In any case, the powers above probably had little time just then for the spiritual ambitions of reformed satirists, for these were times of plague, and the cries of the dying were raised to heaven day and night. This is what had changed Nashe’s tune:

  How the Lord hath begun to leave our house desolate unto us, let us enter into the consideration thereof with ourselves. At this instant is a general plague dispersed throughout our land. No voice is heard in our streets but that of Jeremy: ‘Call for the mourning women, that they may come and take up a lamentation for us, for death is come into our windows and entered into our palaces.’27

  He was writing this probably in the early autumn of 1593, after nearly twelve months in which the plague had run and God supposedly executed judgement. Twelve months earlier, as the summer of 1592 was making its last will and testament, the plague had loomed darkly, if less terribly, as part of the backdrop to the ‘show’ which Nashe wrote for the Archbishop’s household at Croydon, and in which the poet in him called out, as it never did elsewhere:

  Go not yet hence, bright soul of the sad year

  and:

  I am sick, I must die,

  Lord, have mercy upon us.

  Summer’s Last Will and Testament has a great deal of charm and happiness in it, and critical discussion is always in danger of misrepresenting it because it finds the sombre backdrop the most interesting thing to discuss. But the whole play, not just the most famous of its lyrics (‘Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss’), is deeply in the tradition of the medieval ubi sunt poem. The basic dramatic structure in which each of the seasons appears in turn, as in a pageant, keeps transience before us as readily as any grimmer memento mori. ‘Forsooth, because the plague reigns in most places in this latter end of summer, Summer must come in sick,’ ‘All good things vanish, less than in a day,’ ‘This world is transitory; it was made of nothing, and it must to nothing,’ ‘Death waiteth at the door for thee and me,’ ‘Sickness, be thou my soul’s physician,’ ‘The plague full swift goes by, ’‘The worms will curse thy flesh another, day,’ ‘withered flowers and herbs unto dead corpses, for to deck them with’,

  London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn.

  Trades cry Woe worth that ever they were born…

  From winter, plague and pestilence, good Lord deliver us.

  The quotations are taken evenly from all parts of the play; and there might be many more of them. As against this, there is ‘Spring, the sweet spring’ (when ‘Old wives a-sunning sit’); there is the joy of singing and dancing, the providence of Harvest, the mirth of Will Summers. There are also some dull patches. But when Michael Ayrton calls it ‘on the whole a dull and clumsy piece’ (‘all Nashe’s finest verse is embedded in it like diamonds in paste’),28 one has again to exclaim against injustice, and to refer the reader to an ex
cellent chapter by a more appreciative writer. C. L. Barber sees it as ‘a kind of serio-comic Everyman’, and presents his judgements as the outcome of a genuine reading:

  This poised two-sidedness is apparent even in the complaints about perishing: for a small example, Summer’s line ‘Harvest and Age have whitened my green head’, links Age’s sad white hair with the paling out of grain as it ripens, so that Death is connected to the consummation of harvest. The playfulness of the wit with which grain is made hair implicitly recognises that men are more durable than one season’s wheaten crown – though they have their season too. In this two-sidedness, Nashe’s piece anticipates Shakespeare’s way of simultaneously exhibiting revel and framing it with other sorts of experience.29

  It is not wise to risk a collocation of any writer with Shakespeare, except on the firmest ground, and in many ways Nashe is demonstrably un-Shakespearean. Yet it is a comparison which has been made also by another critic, normally fairly cautious in his praise. Walter Raleigh wrote of him in The English Novel: