Traditional literary criticism once treated Thomas Nashe as an Elizabethan oddity, difficult to understand or value. He was described as an unrestrained stylist, venomous polemicist, unreliable source, and closet pornographer. But today this flamboyant writer sits at the center of many trends in early modern scholarship. Nashe’s varied output fuels efforts to reconsider print culture and the history of the book, histories of sexuality and pornography, urban culture, the changing nature of patronage, the relationship between theater and print, and evolving definitions of literary authorship and 'literature' as such. This collection brings together a dozen scholars of Elizabethan literature to characterize the current state of Nashe scholarship and shape its emerging future. The Age of Thomas Nashe demonstrates how the works of a restless, improvident, ambitious young writer, driven by radical invention and a desperate search for literary order, can restructure critical thinking about this familiar era. These essays move beyond individual and generic conceptions of authorship to show how Nashe’s career unveils the changing imperatives of literary production in late sixteenth-century England. Thomas Nashe becomes both a marker of the historical milieu of his time and a symbolic pointer gesturing towards emerging features of modern authorship.

"From 1570 to 1630 prose fiction was an upstart in English culture, still defined in relation to poetry and drama yet invested with its own considerable power and potential. In these years, a community of writers arrived on the scene in London and strove to make a name for themselves largely from the prose that they produced at an astonishing rate. Modern scholars of the Renaissance have attempted to measure this prose against such standards as humanist culture or the emerging novel. But the prose fiction written by Lyly, Greene, and their imitators has eluded modern readers even more than the works of Shakespeare and Spenser. In Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction, Reid Barbour studies three interwoven case histories - those of Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Dekker - and explores their favorite tropes and figures. In response to one another, these three writers attempt to define, liberate, and question the boundaries of prose. That is, they want to secure for prose a new and powerful status in an age when its parameters are unclear and its rivals still valorized but its parameters unbounded. Barbour argues that Nashe absorbs but also rejects the agendas of Greene's prose, offering alternative tropes in their place. Dekker parodies Nashe but unsettles any scheme for stabilizing prose, including those set forth by Nashe himself." "This work centers on three terms that Greene, Nashe, and Dekker obviously could not get off their minds: decipher, discover, and stuff. The first two terms, pervasive in Greene, make specific and complex demands on narrative and its readers. With stuff however, Nashe and Dekker cultivate an extemporal and a material prose, and challenge the fictions that decipher and discover, from romance to roguery. These key words not only situate prose in regard to poetry, drama, and the world; they also raise crucial Renaissance questions about order and duty, faith and doubt. Accordingly, their frame of reference extends from Renaissance poetics and narratology to a nascent Epicureanism and neoskepticism. In an about-face, prose becomes the standard by which the rest of Elizabethan and early Stuart culture is measured, even as prose is constituted by that culture." "With three of the most popular English Renaissance writers as his focus, Barbour reassesses the question of how (or whether) Elizabethan fiction is an ancestor of the novel. Students of the novel have recently intensified their search for the origins of Defoe, Dickens, and Woolf. But Elizabethan prose fiction challenges the novel rather than founds it. In its conclusion, then, Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction considers responses to Elizabethan prose, from Behn to Joyce."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The current surge of interest in the Elizabethan poet, dramatist, prose-writer and critic, Thomas Nashe, follows years of neglect or undisguised hostility. Yet, as early allusions testify, Nashe was a name which imposed itself on contemporary culture. Nashe annoyed and even disturbed his contemporaries, but they certainly paid attention to him because he pioneered new approaches to writing, and indeed to living, and because he was an astute critic. The essays in this volume have been chosen for the skill with which they present diverse approaches to key issues in Nashe. All Nashe's texts are covered, as are his relationships with contemporaries, like Shakespeare. The introduction analyses different approaches, locating them in the history of Nashe criticism, and suggests areas for future research. It argues that Nashe's importance to Renaissance studies lies in his anomalousness, as he forces us to rethink the Renaissance. He makes the Renaissance unfamiliar again, and pushes criticism out of its comfort zone.

As an instigator of debate and a defender of tradition, a man of letters and a popular hack, a writer of erotica and a spokesman for bishops, an urbane metropolitan and a celebrant of local custom, the various textual performances of Thomas Nashe have elicited, and continue to provoke, a range of contradictory reactions. Nashe’s often incongruous authorial characteristics suggest that, as a ‘King of Pages’, he not only courted controversy but also deliberately cultivated a variety of public personae, acquiring a reputation more slippery than the herrings he celebrated in print. Collectively, the essays in this book illustrate how Nashe excelled at textual performance but his personae became a contested site as readers actively participated and engaged in the reception of Nashe’s public image and his works.

Thomas Nashe was in a pickle. During the summer of 1597, he was banished from London for his co-authorship of the "scandalous" play "The Isle of Dogs." With its publishing houses and theaters, London was the place to be for a professional humorist, pamphleteer, and playwright like Nashe. In January, 1598, humorist Thomas Dekker came to life in the London record books; curiously, he wrote just like Nashe. The Archbishop of Canterbury destroyed Nashe’s works in 1599 and banned him from future publishing, and at some point between then and 1601 Nashe died, although details of his death are lacking. Thomas Dekker took up Nashe’s banner, however, specializing in Nashe’s mediums, plays and pamphlets plus poetry within them, tackling many of the same subjects in a similar style. Coincidence or deception? The Mysterious Connection between Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker, and T. M.: An English Renaissance Deception? sets forth substantial linguistic evidence that the witty Nashe out-witted authorities by assuming the identity of Thomas Dekker and writing under that name as well as T. M., Adam Evesdropper, Jocundary Merry-brains, Jack Daw, William Fennor, and Anonymous, making it appear that several authors could write in Nashe’s seemingly distinctive style. Under these names, it proposes, Nashe shed light onto societal abuses, and bestowed the gift of lightheartedness to all.

A critical biography of one of the most celebrated prose stylists in early modern English. This book provides an overview of the life and work of the scandalous Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe (1567–c.1600), whose writings led to the closure of theaters and widespread book bans. Famous for his scurrilous novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Nashe also played a central role in early English theater, collaborating with Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. Through religious controversies, pornographic poetry, and the bubonic plague, Andrew Hadfield traces the uproarious history of this celebrated English writer.

This study takes a fresh look at the abundant scenarios of disguise in early modern prose fiction and suggests reading them in the light of the contemporary religio-political developments. More specifically, it argues that Elizabethan narratives adopt aspects of the heated Eucharist debate during the Reformation, including officially renounced notions like transubstantiation, to negotiate culturally pressing concerns regarding identity change. Drawing on the rich field of research on the adaptation of pre-Reformation concerns in Anglican England, the book traces a cross-fertilisation between the Reformation and the literary mode of romance. The study brings together topics which are currently being strongly debated in early modern studies: the turn to religion, a renewed interest in aesthetics, and a growing engagement with prose fiction. Narratives which are discussed in detail are William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, Robert Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon, Philip Sidney’s Old and New Arcadia, and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd and A Margarite of America, George Gascoigne’s Steele Glas, John Lyly’s Euphues: An Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England, Barnabe Riche’s Farewell, Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller.

This book establishes new information about the likely content of ten lost plays from the period 1580-1642. These plays’ authors include Nashe, Heywood, and Dekker; and the plays themselves connect in direct ways to some of the most canonical dramas of English literature, including Hamlet, King Lear, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi. The lost plays in question are: Terminus & Non Terminus (1586-8); Richard the Confessor (1593); Cutlack (1594); Bellendon (1594); Truth's Supplication to Candlelight (1600); Albere Galles (1602); Henry the Una (c. 1619); The Angel King (1624); The Duchess of Fernandina (c. 1630-42); and The Cardinal's Conspiracy (bef. 1639). From this list of bare titles, it is argued, can be reconstructed comedies, tragedies, and histories, whose leading characters included a saint, a robber, a Medici duchess, an impotent king, at least one pope, and an angel. In each case, newly-available digital research resources make it possible to interrogate the title and to identify the play's subject-matter, analogues, and likely genre. But these concrete examples raise wider theoretical problems: What is a lost play? What can, and cannot, be said about objects in this problematic category? Known lost plays from the early modern commercial theatre outnumber extant plays from that theatre: but how, in practice, can one investigate them? This book offers an innovative theoretical and practical frame for such work, putting digital humanities into action in the emerging field of lost play studies.

The English language in the Renaissance was in many ways a collection of competing Englishes. Paula Blank investigates the representation of alternative vernaculars - the dialects of early modern English - in both linguistic and literary works of the period. Blank argues that Renaissance authors such as Spenser, Shakespeare and Jonson helped to construct the idea of a national language, variously known as 'true' English or 'pure' English or the 'King's English', by distinguishing its dialects - and sometimes by creating those dialects themselves. Broken English reveals how the Renaissance 'invention' of dialect forged modern alliances of language and cultural authority. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance studies and Renaissance English literature. It will also make fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in the history of English language.