The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (3 page)

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.