by Thomas Nashe
The strongest and best of his writing… merits the highest praise – it is the likest of all others to Shakespeare’s prose writing. The same irrepressible, inexhaustible wit, the same overpowering and often careless wealth of vocabulary, the same delight in humorous aberrations of logic distinguish both writers. And Shakespeare alone of his sixteenth century contemporaries can surpass Nashe in the double command of the springs of terror and of humour.30
I think the last sentence claims too much, for I do not see the springs of terror as truly being under Nashe’s command at all: the quiet elegiac tone of Summer’s Last Will comes nearer than the tortures and depravities of The Unfortunate Traveller in realizing the tragic qualm, but even there the intense fright and urgency of ‘terror’ are hardly in question.31 But Raleigh’s second sentence surely is just, and its truth is demonstrated on most pages of the prose works which remain for a brief consideration.
Rather than Shakespeare, however, I would suggest Dickens, if some other writer is to be invoked in order to help define Nashe’s quality. It is Dickens who comes most constantly to mind as one recognizes the vividness and wit of Nashe’s thumbnail character-sketches. In Pierce Penniless, for instance, the ‘old straddling usurer’ with ‘a huge, worm-eaten nose, like a cluster of grapes hanging downwards’ (p. 58); or the affected pseudo-traveller behaving ‘like a decayed earl… all Italianato is his talk’ when in reality he is merely some ‘dapper Jack that hath been but over at Dieppe’ and who will now ‘wring his face round about, as a man would stir up a mustard pot, and talk English through the teeth like Jacques Scabbed-hams or Monsieur Mingo de Mousetrap’ (p. 65); or the Dutchman whose education is begun so late in life ‘that you shall see a great boy with a beard learn his ABC and sit weeping under the rod when he is thirty years old’ (p. 39). The Dickensian touch is there in the specificity: the dapper Jack has been ‘but over at Dieppe’ (another writer would have said ‘but over to France’); he contorts his face ‘as a man would stir up a mustard pot’ (the non-Dickensian writer says ‘in an absurd grimace’); the weeping Dutch school-man is ‘a great boy with a beard’, (he could so easily have been just ‘an overgrown schoolboy’).
The sheer energy of the writing is also Dickensian. There is often the resourcefulness of a musician devising variations on a theme. In the opening of Have with You to Saffron Walden, for example, his theme is the fact that Doctor Harvey has published some more pamphlets, and the aspect that he takes up for comical exploitation is the great bulk or weight of them. Variation I is the problem of transport: ‘More letters yet from the Doctor? Nay, then we shall be sure to have a whole Gravesend barge full of news… Out upon’t, here’s a packet of epistling as big as a pack of woollen cloth or a stack of salt-fish. Carrier, did’st thou bring it by wain or on horseback?’ ‘By wain, sir, and it has cracked me three axletrees.…’ The cart, we gather, ‘cried creak under them forty times every furlong.’ Variation II: how to accommodate it. You may believe me if you will, I was fain to lift my chamber door off the hinges, only to let it in, it was so fulsome a bonarobe and terrible rounceval’, (he says he weighed it first on an ironmonger’s scales and found it ‘counterpoiseth a cade of herrings and three Holland cheeses’). Variation III: its possible interest to athletes, and its future in sporting events. ‘Credibly it was rumoured about the court that the guard meant to try masteries with it before the Queen, and instead of throwing the sledge or the hammer, to hurl it forth at the arms’ length for a wager.’ The zest is infectious because it appears to be so spontaneous, and one laughs with him because he scores off his opponent through what might be the observations of any impartial observer with a sense of humour. Thus a happy misprint in one of Harvey’s publications is joyfully acclaimed: ‘But it would seem he is ashamed of the incomprehensible corpulency thereof himself, for at the end of the 199 pages he begins with one 100 again, to make it seem little.’32 And the laughter is Dickensian because of the penmanship: he has that rare way with the pen, whereby it can communicate zest, laughter, personality, quick shifts of mood, as though it were the actual speaking-voice of a man who (as a different kind of artist) knows that he can set the table on a roar or hold an audience, from the stalls to the gods, in the palm of his hand.
One is never so aware of this skill of Nashe’s essential character, and hence of his limitations, as in his last published writing, called Nashe’s Lenten Stuff; and in this the comparison is not with Shakespeare or Dickens as much as with James Joyce. People who knew Joyce well sometimes say that in his last years the only passion he had was for words themselves. Granted, one does not quite feel this to be so with Lenten Stuff (the birch-branch-swinging prose-style takes him heavenwards, but he comes back, feet firmly on the ground, to say, for instance, that ‘that which especially nourished the most prime pleasure’ in him was the sight next morning in Yarmouth harbour of ships driven in by storm overnight, their sails now spread out against the sky). Nor does one feel that he could quite have said, as Joyce did with rueful realism, that all he asked of his readers was that they should spend their lifetime in the study of his works. But words qua words are certainly a main delight in the author’s mind here: he indulges his own kind of scribbledehobble as the nonce words come thick and fast (‘those greybeard huddle-duddles and crusty cum-twangs were strook with such stinging remorse of their euclionism and snudgery’, p. 379), and the full vigour of the English language matches up with the zestful humour (so ‘Cerdicus bellicosus Saxo’ in Camden’s Britannia becomes ‘one Cerdicus, a plashing Saxon, that had revelled here and there with his battle-axe’, p. 385). And Nashe is also quite ready to leave the reader standing and breathless:
The posterior Italian and German cornugraphers stick not to applaud and canonize unnatural sodomitry, the strumpet errant, the gout, the ague, the dropsy, the sciatica, folly, drunkenness, and slovenry. The Galli Gallinacei, or cocking French, swarm every pissing while in their primer editions, Imprimeda iour duy, of the unspeakable healthful conducibleness of the Gomorrian great Poco a Poco, their true countryman every inch of him, the prescript laws of tennis or balonne (which is most of their gentlemen’s chief livelihoods), the commodity of hoarseness, blear-eyes, scabbed hams, threadbare cloaks, potched eggs, and panados.33
And if one should say ‘These words are not mine’, Nashe would quite probably reply ‘No, nor not mine now’, and pass on, reflecting that a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear. For there is a certain cavalier indifference to the world and its opinions in this book: the dedication is to no nobleman or patron but to ‘Lusty Humfrey’ King, author of An Half-Pennyworth of Wit in a Pennyworth of Paper, and the Introduction addresses Nashe’s readers, ‘he care not what they be’. As to ‘my huge words which I use in this book’, well, he despises measured, demure, soft moderation, he says. He is following his own ‘true vein’ for once, and as for the rest of the world, ‘you are your own men to do as you list’.
Suppose ‘doing as we list’ includes analysing, wresting for meaning, and, ultimately, assessing value. If we were to ‘analyse’ the dazzling piece of apparent jabberwocky quoted above, we would find it had a meaning, and a place in the argument. Nashe’s subject is ‘the praise of the red herring’; and ‘Why not?’ he asks, seeing that there are learned treatises on every trivial and/or obscene subject under the sun, from tennis to sodomy, from fashionable ball-games to the effects of the pox. Rather like Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot, the crazy jumble of words yields more on inspection; unlike that, however, it does not have a part in the expression of a view of life that finally has to be taken seriously. Nashe’s writing is a performance, done for the delight of the thing itself. It is a virtuoso piece, allegro con brio, by a man who can make his pen move in a variety of measures: this one is, he says, ‘a light friskin of my wit’, whereas Terrors of the Night, for example, is simple and direct in style and moves at an easy walking-pace. The use of the medium fits the mood of the piece; and, of course, there is an essential artistic sensitivity and implicit
success in that. ‘But beyond it?’ one still asks. What, ultimately, has Nashe to offer beyond the pleasures of watching a painter work with his colours, hearing a pianist go through his studies, or laughing with the others at the table as Yorick jibes and gambols?
We might, for instance, look to a critic and satirist for an underlying passion for justice, or at any rate for a radical analysis of the sources of injustice. Nashe is not entirely without either; but for understanding I would sooner go to Jonson, and for feeling to Dekker. In Christ’s Tears he says that we should ‘keep and cherish the casual poor among us’ and give ‘pensions to maimed soldiers and poor scholars as other nations do’ (M., II, 161), but there is nothing as sympathetic as in Dekker’s very comparable piece The Seven Deadly Sins of London or his Work for Armourers, and nothing so trenchant as the motto of that book: ‘God help the poor, the Rich can shift’. Nashe was, in fact, curiously conservative in many ways. For levellers, who would ‘take away the title of mine and thine from amongst us’, he has nothing but contempt; for the pretensions of common folk, and the absurdities of seeing ‘Cli. the cobbler and New. the souter jerking out their elbows in every pulpit’ (Almond for a Parrot, M., III, 351–2), he has nothing but ridicule. Nor do we find that more general standards, such as those of kindness, common-sense, beauty or order, are invoked with much more consistency or depth of conviction.
And yet Nashe does represent something more than a collection of laughs and images, vivid lines and well-rounded sentences. What he enunciates is little to what he knows; what is explicit doctrine is little to what is expressed and communicated. Summer’s Last Will is a branch which has grown, out of roots that have clutched: an age-old condition of life is presented, where the seasons are no mere backdrop, and where the medieval ubi sunt theme is given a modern realization through the imminence and urgency of the plague. Yet this is not the essential Nashe, though it is an essential part of him. The nearest he comes to a declaration of doctrine is in the introduction to Lenten Stuff (p. 377): ‘I had as lieve have no sun as have it shine faintly’, and ‘not caring for… water and wine mixed together: but give me the pure wine of itself, and that begets good blood and heats the brain throughly’. The intention voiced in this statement (for one is implied) is what Lenten Stuff itself achieves, without any explicit doctrine or moralizing. In its Falstaffian way (‘Banish plump Jack and banish all the world’) it gives us the world. We are creatures who want food and love food (the actual physical stuff that goes into our stomachs and keeps us alive): so praise the red herring. We spend our strength and our skill getting it: so praise the fishermen of East Anglia. There is splendour in our life too: ‘history’ (and Yarmouth has had its share), power (even the Pope likes his sea-food), love (tragically and absurdly caught up in the wrig-wrag enmity of two ancient towns which were just like Yarmouth and Lowestoft). There is also the energy which is eternal delight, and which finds expression in the writer’s love for words. And this writer knows he may be censured for ‘playing with a shuttlecock, or tossing empty bladders in the air’ (but at least not every fool, he says, ‘can wring juice out of a flint’, and he has brought it off with ‘the right trick of a workman’). But (although he himself would never say anything so pretentious) his shuttlecock, like that of all good jesters, is nothing less than this absurd globe; and his bladder nothing less than the bubble of a man’s life.
Nashe is an entertainer, an artist conscious of his craft, proud of success, apprehensive of failure. But ‘no man ever wrote so well’, Chesterton said of Stevenson, ‘…who cared only about writing’. Nashe wrote of the human scene without reverence but with savour. We can at least do the same for him.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
EDITIONS OF NASHE
The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, in five volumes, with corrections and supplementary notes edited by F. P. Wilson, Oxford, 1958.
Thomas Nashe (selected works), ed. Stanley Wells, The Stratford-upon-Avon Library, London, 1964.
Three Elizabethan Pamphlets (includes The Unfortunate Traveller), ed. G. R. Hibbard, London, 1951.
The Unfortunate Traveller (with illustrations), ed. Michael Ayrton, London, 1948.
CRITICAL WORKS
Thomas Nashe, A Critical Introduction, G. R. Hibbard, London, 1962.
Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, C. L. Barber, Princeton, 1959.
Two Elizabethan Writers of Fiction, R. G. Howarth, Cape Town, 1956.
See also
The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman, London, 1949.
The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. A. Grosart, The Huth Library, 1884.
PART II
1
Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil
Barbaria grandis habere nihil1
A private Epistle of the Author to the Printer, wherein his full meaning and purpose in publishing this book is set forth.
FAITH, I am very sorry, sir, I am thus unawares betrayed to infamy. You write to me my book is hasting to the second impression: he that hath once broke the ice of impudence need not care how deep he wade in discredit. I confess it to be a mere toy, not deserving any judicial man’s view. If it have found any friends, so it is; you know very well that it was abroad a fortnight ere I knew of it, and uncorrected and unfinished it hath offered itself to the open scorn of the world. Had you not been so forward in the republishing of it, you should have had certain epistles to orators and poets to insert to the latter end; as, namely, to the ghost of Machevill, of Tully, of Ovid, of Roscius,2 of Pace,3 the Duke of Norfolk’s jester; and lastly, to the ghost of Robert Greene,4 telling him what a coil5 there is with pamphleting on him after his death. These were prepared for Pierce Penniless first setting forth, had not the fear of infection detained me with my lord6 in the country.
Now this is that I would have you to do in this second edition: first, cut off that long-tailed title,7 and let me not in the forefront of my book make a tedious mountebank’s oration to the reader, when in the whole there is nothing praiseworthy.
I hear say there be obscure imitators that go about to frame a second part to it and offer it to sell in Paul’s Churchyard and elsewhere, as from me. Let me request you, as ever you will expect any favour at my hands, to get somebody to write an epistle before it, ere you set it to sale again, importing thus much: that if any such lewd device intrude itself to their hands, it is a cozenage and plain knavery of him that sells it to get money, and that I have no manner of interest or acquaintance with it. Indeed if my leisure were such as I could wish, I might haps, half a year hence, write The Return of the Knight of the Post8 from Hell, with the devil’s answer to the supplication; but as for a second part of Pierce Penniless, it is a most ridiculous roguery.
Other news I am advertised of, that a scald9 trivial lying pamphlet, called Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, 10 is given out to be of my doing. God never have care of my soul, but utterly renounce me, if the least word or syllable in it proceeded from my pen, or if I were any way privy to the writing or printing of it. I am grown at length to see into the vanity of the world more than ever I did, and now I condemn myself for nothing so much as playing the dolt in print. Out upon it, it is odious, specially in this moralizing age, wherein everyone seeks to shew himself a politician by misinterpreting.
In one place of my book, Pierce Penniless saith but to the Knight of the Post, ‘I pray how might I call you,’ and they say I meant one Howe, a knave of that trade, that I never heard of before.
The antiquaries are offended11 without cause, thinking I go about to detract from that excellent profession, when (God is my witness) I reverence it as much as any of them all, and had no manner of allusion to them that stumble at it. I hope they will give me leave to think there be fools of that art as well as of all other. But to say I utterly condemn it as an unfruitful study, or seem to despise the excellent qualified parts of it, is a most false and injurious surmise. There is nothing that if a man list he may not wrest or pervert. I cannot forbid any to think
villainously, Sed caveat emptor, 12 let the interpreter beware; for none ever heard me make allegories of an idle text. Write who will against me, but let him look his life be without scandal; for if he touch me never so little, I’ll be as good as The Black Book13 to him and his kindred.
Beggarly lies no beggarly wit but can invent. Who spurneth not at a dead dog? But I am of another metal; they shall know that I live as their evil angel, to haunt them world without end, if they disquiet me without cause.
Farewell, and let me hear from you as soon as it is come forth. I am the plague’s prisoner in the country as yet: if the sickness cease before the third impression, I will come and alter whatsoever may be offensive to any man, and bring you the latter end.14
Your friend,
THO. NASH
Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil
HAVING spent many years in studying how to live, and lived a long time without money, having tired my youth with folly and surfeited my mind with vanity, I began at length to look back to repentance, and address my endeavours to prosperity. But all in vain I sat up late and rose early, contended with the cold, and conversed with scarcity; for all my labours turned to loss, my vulgar Muse was despised and neglected, my pains not regarded, or slightly rewarded, and I myself, in prime of my best wit, laid open to poverty.* Whereupon, in a malcontent humour, I accused my fortune, railed on my patrons, bit my pen, rent my papers, and raged in all points like a madman. In which agony tormenting myself a long time, I grew by degrees to a milder discontent; and pausing a while over my standish,16 I resolved in verse to paint forth my passion,† Which best agreeing with the vein of my unrest, I began to complain in this sort:
Why is’t damnation to despair and die,
