Thomas Nashe

Born in Lowestoft in 1561 Thomas Nashe was educated at St John's College, Cambridge. In 1586 after graduation he became one of the "University Wits", a circle of writers who came to London and wrote for the stage and the press. It was normal at that time to go on to a Masters Degree but it is thought that Nashe did not do this and that he left Cambridge completely sometime in 1588. Indeed William Covell writing about Nashe a few years later seems to indicate that he was "sent down" for some misdemeanour. However Nashe himself boasts he might have remained at college had he so desired ("it is well knowen I might have been a Fellow if I had would"). Later that year his pamphlet, The Anatomie of Absurditie was registered for publication (19th September 1588).

Apart from occasional absences to avoid the threat of the plague (and arrest) Nashe spent most of his subsequent life in London.

In his preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon which was published in 1589 he attacked contemporary writers who plagiarized from classical authors, and praised Spenser and Greene. His own Anatomie of Absurditie, also published in 1589, was a satire of contemporary literature, especially of romances.

Nashe took part in the Martin Marprelate controversy, taking it upon himself to answer attacks made on the Church of England by a Puritan group of writers known as Martin Marprelate. He used the pen name 'Pasquil' and Cuthbert Curry-knave, several satiric pamphlets were written under this alias but An Almond for a Parrat (1590) is the only one attributed to Nashe with any certainty.

Nashe also took part in a violent literary controversy with the brothers Gabriel and Richard Harvey. Richard Harvey had been extremely critical of Nashe's preface to Richard Greene's Menaphon, and Nashe retaliated in Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil (1592). The work, a prose satire, was in part an attack on the Harveys, as well as on Nashe's opponents in the Marprelate controversy. It also protested against the public's neglect of other worthy writers. Gabriel Harvey wrote an unpleasant account of Greene's final days in his Four Letters the same year, and Nashe responded by writing Four Letters Confuted to defend his dead friend's memory.

The latter was published in 1593, and is also known as Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters. Nashe may have tried to make peace in Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), a prose work warning Londoners that unless they reformed, London would suffer the fate of Jerusalem.

Gabriel Harvey further attacked Nashe's Pierce Penniless in Pierce's Supererogation (1593), which Nashe countered with Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596). This "war" was finally ended in June 1599, when Archbishop Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft decreed that "all Nashes bookes and Doctor Harveyes bookes be taken wheresoever they maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee ever printed hereafter."

Nashe's best-known work, the novel The Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton (1594) is a loosely connected account of adventures real and fictional of a young man (a page) on the Continent. It is viewed as the first picaresque novel in English.

Nashe collaborated with many other writers such as Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene
The satirical play The Isle of Dogs in 1597 was written in collaboration with Johnson but it so upset the court of Queen Elizabeth that some of the performers, including Johnson, were arrested. Nashe's home was raided and papers were seized but he escaped arrest by fleeing to Great Yarmouth and not returning for over a year.

Important among Nashe's other writings are Summers Last Will and Testament (1600), a masque; The Terrors of the Night, an attack on demonology; and Lenten Stuffe (1599). Nothing is recorded of Nashe after Lenten Stuffe Charles Fitzjeoffrey penned Affaniae, a Latin verse memorialising Nash. Nash was referred to by other writers and an anonymous offering (Parnassus plays) provides this epitaph.

Let all his faults sleep with his mournful chest
And there for ever with his ashes rest
His style was witty, though it had some gall;
Some things he might have mended, so may all.
Yet this I say, that for a mother of wit,
Few men have ever seen the like of it.