The Age of Thomas Nashe

Text, Bodies and Trespasses of Authorship in Early Modern England

Stephen Guy-Bray, Joan Pong Linton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317045335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Traditional literary criticism once treated Thomas Nashe as an Elizabethan oddity, difficult to understand or value. He was described as an unrestrained stylist, venomous polemicist, unreliable source, and closet pornographer. But today this flamboyant writer sits at the center of many trends in early modern scholarship. Nashe's varied output fuels efforts to reconsider print culture and the history of the book, histories of sexuality and pornography, urban culture, the changing nature of patronage, the relationship between theater and print, and evolving definitions of literary authorship and 'literature' as such. This collection brings together a dozen scholars of Elizabethan literature to characterize the current state of Nashe scholarship and shape its emerging future. The Age of Thomas Nashe demonstrates how the works of a restless, improvident, ambitious young writer, driven by radical invention and a desperate search for literary order, can restructure critical thinking about this familiar era. These essays move beyond individual and generic conceptions of authorship to show how Nashe's career unveils the changing imperatives of literary production in late sixteenth-century England. Thomas Nashe becomes both a marker of the historical milieu of his time and a symbolic pointer gesturing towards emerging features of modern authorship.

Section 1 Beyond the City

Chapter 1 Sex and the City: Nashe, Ovid, and the Problems of Urbanity

Georgia Brown

DOI: 10.4324/9781315612331-2

Critics have devoted a lot of energy to Ovid and the ways his texts were reinterpreted by English Renaissance writers.¹ This work has been very important, but it has tended to concentrate on Ovid as an erotic poet, or as the author of the Metamorphoses, and has tended to overlook the fact that Ovid is also a poet of urbanization. For their part, Elizabethan writers like Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe certainly did recognize Ovid as a city poet and adapted his model to their own confrontations with emerging urban forces. Marlowe had probably finished his translation of Ovid's Amores by the time he left Cambridge in 1587, and Nashe certainly knew this translation, as he quotes from it in The Vnfortunate Traueller (1594).² The Amores is well known for its frank descriptions of sexual desire, but the poet-lover also emphasizes the sequence's Roman setting and articulates a self-consciously urban way of life. The Amores are not only poems about sex, they are poems about sex and the city.³ Indeed, Rome is the other object of desire in the sequence, as we are reminded by the play on the word amor (love) as an anagram of Roma (Rome).

¹ For example: Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 35 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000); Heather James, Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), to cite but a few examples of the best work on Ovid. ² For Anthony Ossa-Richardson, “Ovid and the ‘freeplay with signs’ in Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller,” MLR 101 (2006): 945–56, Nashe cites Ovid in such a way as to produce a “downward transposition” (253). In this particular case, he quotes Ovid to introduce eroticism into a discussion of religion and Anabaptism. I would argue that, in doing so, Nashe is only developing a sceptical tendency already present in Ovid, and that this kind of rhetorical flexibility, the ability to apply one's knowledge to any argument or situation, is not only a humanist goal, it is also characteristic of the successful urban-dweller. For the quotation from the Amores, beginning “Crede mihi,” see The Vnfortunate Traueller, in, The Works of Thomas Nashe, V vols., ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, revised F.P. Wilson (1957; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), vol.II: 217–18. All quotations from Nashe will be taken from this edition and will be identified by volume and page numbers in the text. ³ On Ovid as an urban poet, see, for example: L.P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955); Robert W. Hanning, Serious Play: Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Catherine Connors, “Field and forum: culture and agriculture in Roman rhetoric,” Roman Eloquence, ed. William J. Dominik (London: Routledge, 1997) 71–89; Edwin S. Ramage, Urbanitas: Ancient Sophistication and Refinement, University of Cincinnati Classical Studies 3 (Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Press, 1973).

In the Amores and the Ars amatoria, Ovid sets a distinctly urban, sophisticated and knowing mode of behaviour, which he terms “cultus,” against clumsy, prudish rusticity.⁴ Urbanity for Ovid is modern, while rusticity is associated with the past. Implicit in Ovid's criticism of rusticity is his resistance to the emperor Augustus's program of moral reform and its invocation of idealized, rural values for Augustus's own political ends. Although Ovid also expresses scepticism about the state of being “cultus,” which one might also translate as the state of being cultivated and urbane, he is obsessed with the city. The love poems are not only poems about human relationships, they are also poems about who controls Rome and what it is to be Roman. Even the Tristia, the poems of exile, written after Ovid had been banished from Rome to the Black Sea, express his desire for Rome, and apply the terms he once used in his erotic lyrics to the city, even though the poet now knows Rome is a flawed lover.

⁴ See, for example, Amores, Book 1, elegy 8, and the Ars amatoria, Book 3, ll.107–28, where rustic simplicity is rejected in favour of the cultured life of the modern city. At the same time, Ovid is also having a dig at Virgil's Georgics. References to the Ars amatoria are to The Art of Love and Other Poems, trans. J.H. Mozley, revised G.P.Goold, The Loeb Classical Library (1979; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). All references to the Amores are to Marlowe's translation, entitled All Ovids Elegies, which was published in 1600. See, Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).

Ovid's definition of “cultus” acknowledges that self-cultivation and self-construction are crucial in achieving success in the city, and it is this definition of urbanity that Thomas Nashe develops in his early works. Like Ovid, Nashe not only writes about the city, he also incorporates the city into his own identity, fashioning himself as a wit and man-about-town. Partly through his own efforts at self-promotion, for which Ovid's own blend of fiction with autobiographical fact is an important model, Nashe pushed himself to the centre of Elizabethan culture. His self-proclaimed role as the champion of print culture and professional authorship, together with the creativity and satirical dynamism of his style, which redefined the possibilities for English prose, made him a forceful cultural presence. No less important to his contemporaries was the way Nashe developed contemporary debate about London and contributed to the establishment of an urban sensibility and new forms of affiliation to the city. The questions Nashe raises about the relationship between city and country, about the moral status of the city, about the possibility of specifically urban forms of behaviour and specifically urban forms of language, are so compelling for late Elizabethan writers because, by the late sixteenth century, London had become by far the largest city in England and also the economic, political and cultural focus of the country. Never before had London's dominance been so diverse or so powerful. Nashe confronts this phenomenon with a mixture of excitement, fear, and self-conscious bravado, and helps define new discursive spaces within the city, which offer writers and readers new chances for social, political, and cultural engagement.

Though a growing number of critics have explored Nashe in an urban context, few have done justice to the pressure the city exerts on every page of Nashe's output.⁵ Urban life generates the conditions in which Nashe's kind of professional authorship could emerge. Elizabethan responses to Nashe identify him as an urban writer. Nashe's Pierce Penilesse His Supplication To The Diuell was published in 1592, and describes how the city dweller, Pierce, “[h]auing spent many yeeres in studying how to liue,” still finds himself in poverty and without a patron, and so decides to make supplication to the devil, the only source of generosity left in the city (I: 157). To this end, Pierce enlists the help of the Knight of the Post, and both the text he prepares for the devil, and the conversation he has with the Knight, contain powerful satirical attacks on London vices. The invective force and wit of the writing in Pierce Penilesse, combined with colloquial vigour, contemporary reference, apparently boundless linguistic creativity, and the free combination of modes, had a profound impact on other writers. Pierce Penilesse was far and away Nashe's most popular text, and the identification between the vigorous, witty, Pierce and Nashe himself, became so strong that Nashe was often referred to as Pierce, the name of his own urban protagonist. At the end of this essay, I will explore some of the ways Shakespeare uses Nashe's status as an urban writer and how he develops his association of urbanity and linguistic wit in The Taming of the Shrew, written between 1590 and 1594. But before I discuss The Taming of the Shrew and its relationship to Nashe, I will explore how Nashe adapts Ovid to refine his own response to the intellectual and imaginative challenges posed by the city.

⁵ Among the studies that deal imaginatively and in detail with Nashe as an urban author are: Jonathan V. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (London: Routledge, 1984) 39–61; Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 320–40; Steve Mentz, “Jack in the city: The Unfortunate Traveler, Tudor London, and literary history,” A Companion To Tudor Literature, ed. Kent Cartwright, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) 489–503; Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe In Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Per Sivefors, “’This Citty-sodoming trade:’ the Ovidian authorial persona in Thomas Nashe's Christs Teares Over Jerusalem,” Urban Preoccupations. Mental and Material Landscapes, ed. Sivefors (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2007) 143–57.

Images of prostitution are characteristic of both Nashe's and Ovid's representations of the town as the site for particular kinds of monetary, sexual, and cultural transactions. Like Ovid, Nashe explores commerce and the exchange of money as expressions of urbanity, and both the market-place and the city are characterized by multiplicity, open-endedness, ceaseless movement, and superficial social exchanges. Nashe differs from Ovid, however, in giving more attention to the linguistic effects of such febrile, multifaceted encounters. Words acquire unpredictable connotations when they enter the realms of exchange. In fact, word-play and sound-play have both positive and negative consequences for Nashe. On the one hand, they can establish and refine meanings, and may even provide the structure of the text. On the other hand, they can undermine and confuse meanings. Nashe recognizes urbanization as a material reality and a spiritual challenge, but it also has profound cultural consequences, for Nashe, as it transforms the way people think and behave, and even alters the very language they use.

London provokes an even more ambivalent response in Nashe than Rome does in Ovid, and in Christs Teares Ouer Ierusalem Nashe's dismantling of urban pretensions and urban authority actually got him into trouble with the City of London and forced him to lie low for a while on the Isle of Wight.⁶ Yet his condemnation of the urban environment goes hand in hand with a disturbing fascination with, and self-implication in, its processes. In Christs Teares Ouer Ierusalem, first published during the plague year of 1593, Nashe draws a fearsome parallel between London and Jerusalem. According to Nashe, the plague which is raging through London is a punishment for sinfulness and, if London does not repent, it will suffer the same terrible punishments as Jerusalem: “The Land is full of adulterers, & for this cause the Land mourneth. The Land is full of Extortioners, full of proude men, full of hypocrites, full of murderers. This is the cause why the Sword deuoureth abroade, and the Pestilence at home.” (II: 158)⁷ Nashe's text is in a long tradition that associates cities with catastrophe. It is as if cities like Rome, Sodom, Jerusalem, London, Antwerp, even Troy, are so big, so complex and/or so monstrous that they defy representation as a totality. They are rendered more manageable by being imagined at the moment of their destruction and disintegration. As is the case in Christs Teares Ouer Ierusalem, apocalypse is a moment of destruction, but also a moment of disclosure and revelation when we see the city for what it is.

Nashe uncovers many terrible sins which will lead to London's desolation, if they are left unchecked, and one of these sins is the capital's notorious lechery:

⁶ Nashe revels in the role of compulsively outspoken satirist, but in Christs Teares this had very serious, and potentially dire, consequences, as Katherine Duncan-Jones points out in, “Christs Teares: Nashe's “forsaken extremities,” RES ns 49 (1998): 167–80. ⁷ These lines refer to London, and also allude to Isaiah's attack on, and lament for, Jerusalem. Compare Isaiah, ch.1–5.

To my iourneys end I haste, & discend to the second continent of Delicacie, which is Lust or Luxury. In complayning of it, I am afrayd I shall defile good words, and too-long detayne my Readers. It is a sinne that nowe serueth in London in steade of an after-noones recreation. It is a trade that heeretofore thriued in hugger-mugger, but of late dayes walketh openly by day light, like a substantiall graue Merchant. Of hys name or profession hee is not ashamed: at the first beeing askt of it, he will confesse it. Into the hart of the Citty is vncleannesse crept. (II: 148)

Lust is a ubiquitous and spectacular feature of London life. No attempt is made to hide it in back alleys or in darkness. In fact, lust is so common and so ordinary in the shameless metropolis that it has become the quintessential afternoon pastime: “It is a sinne that nowe serveth in London in steade of an after-noones recreation.” Afternoons have a long and torrid history, and the poet-lover of Ovid's Amores famously consummates his love in the afternoon, as he admits in one of his prayers to Jove: “Jove send me more such afternoons as this” (Amores, Book 1, elegy 5, l.26).

In Christs Teares, prostitution defines London as a social space that favours certain kinds of debased social transac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Age of Thomas Nashe
• Section 1: Beyond The City
• Section 2: Mediating Bodies
• Section 3: Trespasses of Authorship
• Postscript: Nashe Untrimmed: The Way We Teach Him Today
• Bibliography
• Index