MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES

Nashe was a remarkable prose stylist. Unfortunately, many readers have used that fact to dismiss his work as “mere style” or “mere rhetoric.” It is not surprising, however, that most readers emphasize style over content, since Nashe self-reflexively calls attention to the importance of style in his works, most famously perhaps in Pierce Penilesse : “I haue tearmes (if I be vext) laid in steepe in Aquafortis , & Gunpowder, that shall rattle through the Skyes, and make an Earthquake in a Pesants eares” (i.195) or in Strange Newes when he says of Gabriel Harvey’s style, “[H]e hath some good words, but he cannot writhe them and tosse them to and fro nimbly, or so bring them about, that hee maye make one straight thrust at his enemies face” (i.282). This use of language as a physical weapon is characteristic of Nashe’s style, especially at times when he seems to care less for the precision of single words than for the cumulative effect of tone and vocabulary. At the same time, Nashe achieves a degree of intimacy through his direct address of the reader and his constant self-reflexiveness that few, if any, of his contemporaries managed to achieve.

It is true that Nashe rarely stays focused on any idea or theme long enough to develop it in a coherent, logical fashion; his writing is a kind of guerrilla warfare. In fact, the most common “theme” in Nashe’s works may be said to be language itself—its fullness, its fertility. Some of the most compelling passages in Nashe’s works are ones in which he almost compulsively rings changes on a phrase or a single word, as he does on Richard Lichfield’s name in the Epistle Dedicatory of Have With You (iii.5–6) or on the word “stone” in Christs Teares (ii.24–25), the word “page” in “The Induction to the dapper Mounsier Pages of the Court” in The Unfortunate Traveler (ii.207–08), or in the mythic treatment of the red herring in Lenten Stuffe (iii.185–90). This linguistic extravagance is explicitly affirmed as Nashe’s personal style in his epistle to the readers in Lenten Stuffe , where he declares that he does not care for this demure soft mediocre genus , that is like water and wine mixt together; but giue me pure wine of it self, & that begets good bloud, and heates the brain thorowly: I had as lieue haue no sunne, as haue it shine faintly, no fire, as a smothering fire of small coales, no cloathes, rather then weare linsey wolsey. (iii.152)

Nevertheless, there are a few consistent themes in Nashe’s work, although they are really mentioned only in passing, as it were, rather than developed coherently and at length. Not surprisingly, the ideas most frequently alluded to have direct or indirect connections to Nashe’s career as a writer—the issue of patronage (and other related economic concerns), literary criticism, and the question of interpretation (or, more accurately, misinterpretation).

As with so much else in his writings, Nashe is clearly self-conscious about his vulnerability as an artist in need of a patron, and, as a result, he constantly plays with the idea of patronage, both as a social and economic ideal and as a source of frustration. His ambivalence about his relationship with patrons and potential patrons is most clearly traced in his dedicatory epistles. For instance, the dedication to Charles Blount that introduces Anatomie of Absurdities is relatively conventional except that the lengthy praise of the dead Philip Sidney risks lumping Sir Charles in with the “many mediocrities” in England since Sidney’s death. The dedication in Nashe’s next work, Pierce Penilesse , is conventional in its lavish praise of the “thrice noble Amyntas ,” but it is totally unconventional in its placement. Instead of beginning his book with the defer-ential gesture of dedication to a patron, Nashe ends with it, as if it were an afterthought. Not only that, but it follows immediately after a long diatribe against stingy courtiers, in which the economic ground of patronage is explicitly stipulated: “[W]hat reason haue I to bestow any of my wit vpon him, that wil bestow none of his wealth vpon me?” (i.241).

In the dedications for Terrors of the Night and Christs Teares the economics of patronage is again unapologetically foregrounded. In the first, Elizabeth Carey is described as one “whose purse is so open to her poore beadsmens distresses’’ (i.342), and in the second, Nashe promises to “memorize” her, “for you recompense learning extraordinarilie” (ii.11). Increasingly, however, Nashe uses comic dedicatory epistles to mock the whole idea of patronage. Strange Newes is dedicated to the “famous pottle-pot Patron” Master Apis Lapis (William Beeston) (I.255); Have With You is dedicated to Richard Lichfield, barber of Trinity College; and Lenten Stuffe is dedicated to the “most unlearned louer of Poetry,” “lustie” Humphrey King (iii.147). For all his mockery, however, Nashe clearly regarded financial support of learning as a critical social issue:

Can Common weales florish where learning decaies? shall not felicitie haue a fall when as knowledge failes? yea, peace must needes perrish from amongst vs, when as we rather seeke to choke then cherrish, to famish then feede, the Nurses of it. (i.36)

The dynamics of patronage colored Nashe’s larger perspective on social issues in contradictory ways. His respect for the power and obligations of patrons encouraged in Nashe a strong commitment to hierarchical politics, which he first expresses in the Anatomie :

To prescribe rules of life, belongeth not to the ruder sort; to condemne those callings which are approoued by publique authoritie, argueth a proude contempt of ye Magistrates superiority. (i.21).

Nashe encourages every man to “endure the destinie whereto he was borne’’ (i.176). On the other hand, his personal experience of the limitations and failures of patronage and his consequent poverty simultaneously sensitized him to the economic plight of England’s underclass: “Our dogges are fedde with the crumbes that fall from our Tables. Our Christian bretheren are famisht for want of the crumbes that fall from our Tables” (ii.161). This sensitivity to economic injustice finds frequent expression in Nashe’s endorsement of almsgiving and “good works.” Speaking of Roman Catholics in The Unfortunate Traveler , the narrator (Jack Wilton) says, “[T]his I must saie to the shame of vs protestants; if good workes may merite heauen, they doe them, we talke of them” (ii.285).

Nashe’s repeated call for “good works” has led some readers (including his biographer Nicholl) to suspect that he was a recusant, but that seems unlikely to me. Nashe’s emphasis on almsgiving and good works has an economic rationale, not a spiritual one. His treatment of Catholicism as “superstition” leaves little doubt where his sympathies lie. Throughout his works he is consistently anti-Catholic, from Pierce Penilesse , where he condemns Catholicism as “a wrong Faith” (I.204), to Lenten Stuffe with its brilliant satire on the pope (iii.206–11).

The other face of patronage is censorship, and, just as Nashe was never really at ease in a patron–client relationship, he was equally anxious about how his works were interpreted. As Lorna Hutson says, Nashe’s pamphlets are “relentlessly topical” (116), and, justifiably or not, contemporary readers sought to apply allegorical interpretations to his works. In his prefaces and in the body of his pamphlets as well Nashe tries consistently to defuse the dangers of misinterpretation, condemning “this moralizing age, wherein euery one seeks to shew himselfe a Polititian by mis-interpreting” (i.154); explicitly disclaiming any topical application in his satires: “[N]o man in thys Treatise I will particulerly tutch, none I will semouedly allude to, but onely attaint vice in generall” (ii.80); and even composing a mock allegory in Lenten Stuffe in order to challenge misreading: “O, for a legion of mice-eyed decipherers and calculaters vppon characters, now to augurate what I mean by this: the diuell, if it stood vpon his saluation, cannot do it” (iii.218). Such a challenge is characteristic of Nashe (or at least of Nashe’s literary persona). Despite his many disclaimers of innocence, Nashe’s pamphlets are filled with exuberant attacks on pettiness, hypocrisy, stupidity, and avarice, which Nashe engages in with a charming sense of impunity. For all his satirical wit, however, there is something finally superficial about his outrage. Despite his admiration for Aretino,* who was famous for his satirical attacks on princes and aristocrats, Nashe was finally too conservative socially to confront the class origins of many of the injustices he saw and experienced. His writing was not particularly thoughtful; it was simply reactive and often blustering. As a result, there are both a powerful immediacy in his tone and subject matter as well as an occasionally appalling devotion to the superficial and the ephemeral. While the astonishing time and energy Nashe devoted to his feud with Gabriel Harvey, for instance, often strike modern readers as a regrettable waste of talents, he simultaneously offers us an almost unmediated access to the feel and flavor of life in the London of the 1590s.