THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

infect the clearest complexion, and the caterpillar cleaveth unto the ripest fruit. The most delicate wit is allured with
small enticement unto vice and most subject to yield unto vanity.’ Although the structure of Euphues and his England
is marginally less dependent on formal speechifying, it too attempts to elucidate the educational ideas contained in
treatises such as Ascham’s The Scholemaster. Like Ascham, Lyly flatters the learning of Queen Elizabeth and her
chief courtiers and even allows the infatuated Euphues to write back to Naples, describing England as ‘a place in my
opinion (if any such may be in the earth) not inferior to a Paradise’. It is, however, a paradise peopled exclusively by
gentlemen and ordered by the demands of gentlemanly behaviour.
The fiction of Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) tends to exhibit less confidence in the traditional standing, values, and
authority of an aristocratic elite. Like Lyly, Nashe was fascinated by the potential of a learned, innovative, allusive,
and polemical English prose; unlike him, he delighted in a precarious virtuosity and he plays with a style which
experiments with the effects of lexical novelty, violence, and disconnection. He allows his various narrators to express
themselves in styles appropriate both to their condition and to the often disorienting circumstances in which they find
themselves. Even when Nashe purports to speak in propria persona, as he does in the burlesque encomium of herrings
in Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599), his style can veer towards the carnivalesque. When, for example, he glances at the
instance of the English ambassador to the Ottoman Sultan (‘the Behemoth of Constantinople’) pleading for the release
of certain captives, he refers his readers to documentary sources with a neologistic flourish: ‘How impetrable
[successful] hee was in mollyfying the adamantinest tiranny of mankinde, and hourely crucifier of Jesus Christ
crucified, and wrooter up of Pallestine, those that be scrutinus to pry into, let
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them resolve the Digests of our English discoveries cited up in the precedence, and be documentized most locupeatley
[richly].’ Alternatively, when he meditates on the sins of modern London in the extravagant tract Christs Teares over
Jeusalem (1593), he attacks the ‘gorgeous’ ladies of the court by evoking horrors of the grave where funereal toads
steal ‘orient teeth’ and engender their young in ‘the jelly of ... decayed eyes’ while the hollow eye-sockets (‘theyr
transplendent juyce so pollutionately employd’) are left to become houses for ‘shelly snails’. Nashe’s various and
episodic fictional works have proved difficult to classify. Both Pierce Pennilesse his Supplication to the Divell (1592)
and The Unfortunate Traveller. Or The Life of Jacke Wilton (1594) have been seen anachronistically as a species of
‘journalism’, as precursors of the picaresque novel, and as experiments in ‘realism’. Pierce Pennilesse, the complaint
of an impoverished professional writer in search of patronage, takes the form of a satirical diatribe against the
‘lamentable condition of our times’, times which oblige ‘men of Arte’ to ‘seeke almes of Cormorantes’. Pierce
desperately bemoans the decline of aristocratic patronage, but in addressing himself to gentlemen whose
circumstances parallel his own he seems both to regret the advent of a market economy for literature and also to
acquiesce to a necessary evil. Pierce emerges as an Elizabethan malcontent but not as a displaced Romantic outsider
or as the self-proclaimed representative of an alienated intelligentsia; he supports the social system as it is, but regrets
that it does not work more directly to his benefit. The Unfortunate Traveller (dedicated in its first edition to the Earl
of Southampton) is equally sanguine in its view of the shortcomings of the ruling class. Jack Wilton’s account of his
adventures as ‘a Gentleman at least ... a certain kind of an appendix or page belonging or appertaining in or unto the
confines of the English court’ looks back to the reign of Henry VIII, ‘the onely true subject of Chronicles’, the patron
of chivalry, and the promoter of milita enterprise (most of it we realize, vainglorious). A reader’s view of manners
and events is controlled by Jack’s vigorous and various first-person narration and by his generally unflattering
observation. It is not just what Jack sees, but how he sees. He sharply ‘particularizes’ the singularly inelegant
performances of the noble jousters in Surrey’s tournament at Florence; he voyeuristically watches a sordid rape
‘thorough a crannie of my upper chamber unseeled’, and he makes a point of exactly recording the revolting details of
two executions at Rome after disarmingly proclaiming, ‘Ile make short worke, for I am sure I have wearyed all my
readers’.
Thomas Deloney’s four short, best-selling novels, Jack of Newberie, the two parts of The gentle craft, and Thomas
of Reading, were all published in the three closing years of the sixteenth century. Each is informed by the values of a
hard-working and successful tradesman rather than by those of a gentleman and courtier. Deloney (?1560-1600), the
author of ballads on, amongst other things, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, was able to adapt the simple directness
of popular ballad narrative to shape what he described in the address to shoe-
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makers prefaced to the first part of The gentle craft as ‘a quaint and plain discourse ... seeing we have no cause herein
to talk of Courtiers or Scholars’. Jack of Newberie (or Newbury) is particularly forthright in its proclamation of the
sturdy and independent virtues of a Berkshire clothier in the reign of ‘that most noble and victorious prince’, Henry
VIII. Its hero, ‘a poore Clothier, whose lands are his looms’, ostentatiously shows off both his wealth and his loyalty