The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (2 page)

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 Herring
³
), 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
1520
s and
30
s which were Ascham's time there.
⁶
By the
1580
s, 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.