Ogden Nash - Salem Press

Critical Survey of Poetry Nashe, Thomas
Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters,
1592 (prose and poetry; also known as The Four
Letters Confuted)
Summer’s Last Will and Testament, 1592 (play and
poetry)
The Unfortunate Traveller: Or, The Life of Jack Wilton,
1594 (prose and poetry)
The Choise of Valentines, 1899
Other literary forms
Almost all that Thomas Nashe wrote was published
in pamphlet form. With the exception of a long poem
(The Choise of Valentines), several sonnets and songs,
and at least two dramas (Summer’s Last Will and Testament,
pr. 1592, and The Isle of Dogs, pr. 1597), all of his
work was prose. His prose works include The Anatomie
of Absurditie (1589); An Almond for a Parrat (1590);
a preface to Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella
(1591); Pierce Peniless, His Supplication to the Divell;
Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters;
Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1593); The Terrors of the
Night (1594); The Unfortunate Traveller: Or, The Life of
Jack Wilton; Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596);
and Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe (1599).
Achievements
Thomas Nashe was more a journalist than an artist, if
the definition of artist is one who follows the Aristotelian
principles of using life as a source from which one
creates a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Nashe
informed and entertained his sixteenth century audience
in the same way that a journalist pleases the public today.
He was known in his time not as a poet or a dramatist,
although he wrote both poetry and plays. He was
known as the worthy opponent of the scholar Gabriel
Harvey, as one who with lively rhetoric, biting invective,
and soaring wit destroyed every argument the pompous
Harvey could muster. He was also known to Elizabethans
as the chief defender of the Anglican Church
against the attack of the Puritans in the Martin Marprelate
controversy. The magnificent invective found in
the speeches of William Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Prince
Hal, and (more especially) Kent was almost certainly
derived from the vituperation Nashe hurled at his adversaries.
Among modern students of literature, Nashe is remembered
for his most unusual work, the picaresque
novel of adventure, The Unfortunate Traveller: Or, The
Life of Jack Wilton. It is the story of a young page who,
after serving in the army of Henry VIII, travels to Europe
to find means of earning a living. The underworld
realism that Nashe presents in his descriptions of Jack
Wilton’s escapades has earned him a reputation for being
something other than a hurler of invective. The book
is not a unified work of art; its characters, other than
Jack himself, are not particularly memorable. Its descriptions
of the harshest elements of human life, such
as disease, hunger, torture, rape, and murder, place it in
stark contrast to the sweet absurdities of romance; it thus
shows the way to the modern novel.
Biography
Thomas Nashe was born in November, 1567, the
son of William Nashe, a minister in Lowestoft, Suffolk.
Since no record exists of William’s being a university
graduate, it can be assumed that he was probably
a stipendiary curate in Lowestoft, not a vicar. Although
the title pages of Pierce Peniless and of Strange News of
the Intercepting of Certain Letters refer to “Thomas
Nashe, Gentleman,” Nashe himself denied that he was
of gentle birth. From his earliest years, indeed, he disliked
the propensity he found in middle-class Englishmen
to pretend to be something other than what they
were.
In 1573, Nashe’s father was granted the living in
West Harling, Norfolk, where young Thomas probably
spent his early years. Nothing is known of Nashe’s basic
education except that it was sufficient to allow him
to enter St. John’s College, Cambridge, in October,
1582. In March, 1586, he received his bachelor of arts
degree and enrolled immediately to work toward the
master of arts degree. In 1588, however, he left Cambridge
without the degree. Perhaps financial difficulties
forced him to leave the university, for his father had
died the year before, in 1587. Without financial support
from home, Nashe likely would not have been able to
continue his education; probably his college, dominated
as it was by Puritans, would not look with favor in the
form of financial assistance upon the satirical young
Nashe, who supported the pursuit of humanistic studies
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