Abstract
There are certain obvious respects in which Nashe is a marginal figure in English Renaissance literature. His contribution to the central literary forms of the period, drama and poetry, was negligible; he boasted rather unconvincingly that he could have been a university lecturer if he had wanted to; all his early writing was designed to secure a patron. He claimed that he had written ‘in all sorts of humours privately’, and his published work is certainly variegated. Pierce Penilesse (1592) begins as a complaint about the plight of poor arts graduates and drifts into a series of portraits of unsavoury London types. Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593) develops some of this material into a hysterical pseudo-sermon on the iniquities of the city (in which Nashe adopts the persona of Christ), while The Terrors of the Night (1594) is a treatise on nightmares. He wrote two lengthy diatribes against the Cambridge don Gabriel Harvey, Strange Newes (1592) and Have With You to Saffron-Walden (1596); an account of the various mishaps that befall a page boy on a trip to the continent, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594); and finally an elaborate encomium for the Great Yarmouth fishing industry, Lenten Stuffee (1599). (He had lain low in Yarmouth after the banning in 1597 of his lost play, The Isle of Dogs.) There are some other odds and ends.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See N. Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). I should perhaps note that, just as this book uses the term ‘Elizabethan’ to cover early Jacobean literature, so the present volume uses ‘Jacobean’ to cover late Elizabethan literature.
T. Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) p. 1.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. A. Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912) p. 392.
Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, ed. F. J. Furnivall (London, 1877–9) p. 178.
Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (London, 1588).
Desiderius Erasmus, Literary and Educational Writings, vol. 2, ed. C. R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978) p. 295.
As does C. Norris, ‘Post-structuralist Shakespeare: Text and Ideology’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. J. Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985) pp. 51–3. It is Dr Johnson, not Norris, who is responsible for the derogatory aspect of the metaphor.
W. J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance and Technology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971) p. 14 and ch. 5 (’Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’).
Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, 2nd edn (London, 1593).
Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters and Certeine Sonnets, ed. G. B. Harrison (London: Bodley Head, 1922) pp. 30–67.
K. Ryan, ‘The Extemporal Vein: Thomas Nashe and the Invention of Modern Narrative’ in Narrative: From Malory to Motion Pictures, ed. J. Hawthorne (London: Edward Arnold, 1985) p. 53.
A forceful criticism of this kind of argument has been made by J. Dollimore, himself a far from untheoretical critic: ‘there is a naive error, common in literary studies, of describing the inception of a particular movement in terms of its subsequent historical development; that is, of telescoping the development back into its inception and reading it off as already contained (“encoded”) there’ — Radical Tragedy (Brighton: Harvester, 1984) p. 7.
C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1954) p. 416.
The point about Nashe’s entrapment in rhetoric is well made by J. V. Crewe in his excellent theoretical study Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
See S. S. Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1988 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rhodes, N. (1988). Nashe, Rhetoric and Satire. In: Bloom, C. (eds) Jacobean Poetry and Prose. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19590-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19590-9_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-46538-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-19590-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)