The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works Read online

  THE UNFORTUNATE TRAVELLER AND OTHER WORKS

  THOMAS NASHE was born in Lowestoft in 1567, the son of a minister, and in 1573 the family moved to West Harling, near Thetford in Norfolk. There is no record of Nashe’s schooling but in 1581 or 1582 he entered St John’s College, Cambridge, where he became a Lady Margaret scholar, receiving his B.A. in 1586. He left the University in 1588 and began publishing in 1589 with The Anatomy of Absurdity. Nash was strongly anti-Puritan and this together with his natural combativeness drew him into the Marlprelate controversy: An Almond for a Parrot (1590) is now widely accepted as his along with a number of pseudonymous pamphlets. In his defence of Robert Greene, the first and most prolific of Elizabethan professional writers, Nashe was drawn into a prolonged and bitter literary quarrel with Gabriel Harvey. The latter proved an effective target for Nashe’s brilliant, satiric wit, as is shown in Strange News (or The Four Letters Confuted) and the unsparing pseudo-biography of Harvey contained in Have with You to Saffron Walden. The vivid social satire, Pierce Penniless, was the most successful of Nashe’s pamphlets and went through three editions in 1592. The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) relating the knavish adventures of Jack Wilton is an important example of picaresque fiction and a considerable influence on the development of the English novel. Nashe was also part-author (along with Ben Jonson among others) of The Isle of Dogs, which was judged by the authorities to be seditious and thus Nashe was forced to flee from London. In his writings he reveals the conflict in cultural standards which arose between the humanist values of civility and eloquence and the racy vigour of popular folk-tradition. His play Summer’s Last Will and Testament pleads for the patronage of letters and also defends the seasonal pastimes of the countryside against the Puritan arguments for thrift. Nashe lived for most of his life in London. The date of his death is uncertain, it is known he was alive early in 1599 and dead in 1601, but it is not known how, when or where he died.

  J. B. Steane was a scholar of Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English. He is the author of Marlowe: A Critical Study (1964) and Tennyson (1966). He has also edited several Elizabethan texts, including plays by Dekker and Jonson. His edition of Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays is also published in the Penguin Classics. For some time now he has been engaged in music criticism, writing reviews for many music magazines and periodicals including Gramophone, The Musical Times and Opera Now; he has also contributed to the New Grove Dictionary of Opera and has been a frequent broadcaster on Radio 3. His books on musical subjects include The Grand Tradition (1974) and Voices; Singers and Critics (1992).

  THOMAS NASHE

  The Unfortunate Traveller

  AND OTHER WORKS

  Edited with an introduction by

  J. B. STEANE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Published in the Penguin English Library 1972

  Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1985

  24

  Introduction copyright © J. B. Steane, 1971

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 9781101492017

  To Dick and Tag

  Contents

  PART I

  Acknowledgements and References

  Introduction

  Select Bibliography

  PART II. COMPLETE TEXTS:

  1. Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil

  2. Summer’s Last Will and Testament

  3. The Terrors of the Night

  4. The Unfortunate Traveller

  5. Lenten Stuff

  6. The Choice of Valentines

  PART III. EXTRACTS:

  1. The Anatomy of Absurdity:

  Prodigal Sons

  Poor Scholars

  Advice to Scholars

  2. Preface to Greene’s Menaphon:

  English Seneca, Whole Hamlets and St John’s in Cambridge

  3. Strange News:

  Robert Greene

  4. Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem:

  Atheists

  Frost-Bitten Intellect

  Gorgeous Ladies of the Court

  Stews and Strumpets

  Prayer for London

  5. Have with You to Saffron Walden:

  Gabriel Harvey

  PART I

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND REFERENCES

  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.

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘THE 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, Marl
owe 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 1590s 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.

  He was an active professional writer for ten years, his surviving works bearing the following dates on the title-page of the first edition:

  The Anatomy of Absurdity

  1589 (Stationer’s Register 19 September 1588)

  Preface to Greene’s Menaphon

  1590 (S.R. 23 August 1598)

  An Almond for a Parrot1

  1590 (S.R. none)

  Pierce Penniless

  1592 (S.R. 8 August 1592)

  Summer’s Last Will

  performed 1592 published 1600 (S.R. 28 October 1600)

  Strange News

  1592 (S.R. 12 January 1592)

  Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem

  1593 (S.R. 8 September 1593)

  Terrors of the Night

  1594 (S.R. 30 June 1593)

  The Unfortunate Traveller

  1594 (S.R. 27 September 1593)

  Have with You to Saffron Walden

  1596 (S.R. none)

  Lenten Stuff

  1599 (S.R. 11 January 1598)

  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 Herring3), but the passage reads like a portrait from life, the man depicted being recognizably that of his own writings, both critical and convivial.