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84 The Renaissance 1485–1660
years later, Shakespeare returned to Greene, using his popular prose romance
Pandosto, or The Triumph of Time (1588) as the basis for The Winter’s Tale.
The figure of Thomas Nashe is of major importance in the history
of narrative. Indeed, he is credited by some as having ‘invented’
modern narrative, particularly with The Unfortunate Traveller (1594),
which the author himself described as ‘being a clean different vein
from other my former courses of writing’. These former courses of
writing were criticisms of contemporary fashions in writing, such as
The Anatomie of Absurditie (1589) and Pierce Penniless (1592), which
engaged in the religious controversy of the time, in a satirical lowlife
complaint to the Devil. It is one of the few works in English to
celebrate eating and drinking in the style of the French writer Rabelais.
The Unfortunate Traveller does something quite different: it is a mixture of
genres and styles from picaresque to mock-historical, from parody to character
comedy. Nashe is much more than the journalist he is often described as. He
is an entertainer, an experimenter, a committed social commentator.
This was one of my famous achievements, insomuch as I never
light upon the like famous fool – but I have done a thousand
better jests if they had been booked in order as they were begotten.
It is pity posterity should be deprived of such precious records,
and yet there is no remedy – and yet there is too, for when all fails
well fare a good memory. Gentle readers (look you be gentle
now, since I have called you so), as freely as my knavery was
mine own, it shall be yours to use in the way of honesty.
Not afraid to be controversial, Nashe, like Ben Jonson, ended up in prison
for offending authority. He collaborated with Marlowe, Greene and Jonson,
although most of his dramatic writing has not survived. The Terrors of the
Night (1594) is surprisingly modern, part Gothic fantasy, part treatise on
dreams, nightmares, and apparitions: an early exploration of a theme which
would become a mainstay of fiction and the cinema in future centuries.
Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) was a profoundly
important analysis of human states of mind – a kind of early
philosophical/psychological study. He sees ‘melancholy’ as part of
the human condition, especially love melancholy and religious
melancholy. His concerns are remarkably close to those which