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.

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.

Redefining Elizabethan Literature examines the new definitions of literature and authorship that emerged in one of the most remarkable decades in English literary history, the 1590s. Georgia Brown analyses the period's obsession with shame as both a literary theme and a conscious authorial position. She explores the related obsession of this generation of authors with fragmentary and marginal forms of expression, such as the epyllion, paradoxical encomium, sonnet sequence, and complaint. Combining developments in literary theory with close readings of a wide range of Elizabethan texts, Brown casts light on the wholesale eroticisation of Elizabethan literary culture, the form and meaning of Englishness, the function of gender and sexuality in establishing literary authority, and the contexts of the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and Sidney. This study will be of great interest to scholars of Renaissance literature as well as cultural history and gender studies.

An original survey of the Renaissance painter’s life and work. This book is a concise survey of the life of the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) within his social and cultural surroundings. Delving into the artist’s deliberately idiosyncratic life, the book shows how di Cosimo chose to live in squalor—eating nothing but boiled eggs cooked fifty at a time in his painting glue. Sarah Blake McHam shows how the artist became a favorite among sophisticated patrons eager for pagan artworks featuring Greco-Roman mythological subjects as well as orthodox, but never ordinary, religious altarpieces and private devotional paintings. The result is a newly accessible introduction to the life of this important Renaissance artist.

Publisher description

Written in the late sixteenth century, at the pinnacle of the English Renaissance, the rich and ingenious works of Thomas Nashe uniquely reveal the ambivant nature of the Elizabethan era. Mingling the devout and the bawdy, scholarship and slang, they express throughout an irrepressible, inexhaustible wit and an astonishing command of language. This collection of Nashe's finest works includes The Unfortunate Traveller, the sharp and grotesque tale of Jack Wilton, an Englishman travelling through Europe; Pierce Penniless, a biting satire on the society of his age; Terrors of the Night; Lenten Stuff; the sensual poem The Choice of Valentines; and extracts from Christ's Tears over Jerusalem and other works. Wide-ranging in subject, all capture the unique voice and fantastic ingenuity of one of the most entertaining Elizabethan writers - a man regarded by his contemporaries as the 'English Juvenal'.

Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617 is the first book to consider railing plays and pamphlets as participating in a coherent literary movement that dominated much of the English literary landscape during the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. Author Prendergast considers how these crisis-ridden texts on religious, gender, and aesthetic controversies were encouraged and supported by the emergence of the professional theater and print pamphlets. She argues that railing texts by Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson, Jane Anger and others became sites for articulating anxious emotions-including fears about the stability of England after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the increasing factional splits between Protestant groups. But, given that railings about religious and political matters often led to censorship or even death, most railing writers chose to circumvent such possible repercussions by railing against unconventional gender identity, perverse sexual proclivities, and controversial aesthetics. In the process, Prendergast argues, railers shaped an anti-aesthetics that was itself dependent on the very expressions of perverse gender and sexuality that they discursively condemned, an aesthetics that created a conceptual third space in which bitter enemies-male or female, conformist or nonconformist-could bond by engaging in collaborative experiments with dialogical invective. By considering a literary mode of articulation that vehemently counters dominant literary discourse, this book changes the way that we look at late Elizabethan and early Jacobean literature, as it associates works that have been studied in isolation from each other with a larger, coherent literary movement.

Crossing the disciplinary borders between political, religious, and economic history, Aaron Kitch's innovative new study demonstrates how sixteenth-century treatises and debates about trade influenced early modern English literature by shaping key formal and aesthetic concerns of authors between 1580 and 1630. The author's analysis concentrates on a commonly overlooked period of economic history-the English commercial revolution before 1620-and, utilizing an impressive combination of archival research, close reading, and attention to historical detail, traces the transformation of genre in both neglected and canonical texts. The topics here are wide-ranging but are presented with a commitment to providing a concrete understanding of the religious, political, and historic context in literary thought. Kitch begins with the emerging wool trade and explosion of economic writing, Spenser's glorification of commerce and the Protestant state as presented in The Faerie Queene, and writers such as Thomas Nashe who drew on the same economic principles to challenge Spenser. Other topics include the reaction to the herring trade in prose satire and pamphlets, the presentation of Jewish trading nations in Shakespeare and Marlowe, and the tension between the crown and London merchants as reflected in Middleton's city comedies and Jonson's and Munday's pageants and court masques.

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594 draws together leading scholars of text, performance, and theatre history to offer a rigorous re-appraisal of Shakespeare's early career. The contributors offer rich new critical insights into the theatrical and poetic context in which Shakespeare first wrote and his emergence as an author of note, while challenging traditional readings of his beginnings in the burgeoning theatre industry. Shakespeare's earliest works are treated on their own merit and in their own time without looking forward to Shakespeare's later achievements; contributors situate Shakespeare, in his twenties, in a very specific time, place, and cultural moment. The volume features essays about Shakespeare's early style, characterisation, and dramaturgy, together with analysis of his early co-authors, rivals, and influences (including Lyly, Spenser and Marlowe). This collection provides essential entry points to, and original readings of, the poet-dramatist's earliest extant writings and shines new light on his first activities as a professional author.