Thomas Nashe

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Richard Lichfield's rough woodcut (1597) by Thomas Nashe from the hostile text The Trimming of Thomas Nash Gentleman , intended as a malicious caricature to discredit Thomas Nash as a "prison brother"

Thomas Nashe , also Thomas Nash (* 1567 in Lowestoft , † probably 1601 in Great Yarmouth , Norfolk?) Was an English poet, playwright and satirist of the Elizabethan era .

life and work

There is little clearly established data about his life. He was baptized in Lowestoft , Suffolk . He was the third son of pastor and pastor William Nashe and his wife Margaret (nee Witchingham). His family moved to West Harling, near Thetford, in 1573. From around 1581 he studied at St. John's College in Cambridge. After graduating in 1586, he became one of the University Wits , a circle of poets and playwrights ( Christopher Marlowe , Robert Greene , George Peele , John Lyly and Thomas Lodge ) who came together in London and wrote for the theater and the public. From about 1588 (?) He lived in London. His twelve-page preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon has survived from 1589, giving a brief definition of art and an overview of contemporary literature. It attacked poets who took plagiarism from classical authors and praised poets such as Robert Greene and Edmund Spenser . In September 1588, his Anatomy of Absurdity , a satire on contemporary customs and literature that went to press in early 1590, was submitted for print.

His remaining decade in London was marked by his participation and involvement in various controversies. In 1589 and 1590 he was drawn into the "Martin Marprelate Controversy ". The controversy was triggered by puritanical satirical pamphlets such as Hay any worke for Cooper , Theses Martinianae , The just censure and reproofe of Martin junior , The protestatyon of Martin Marprelat and More worke for Cooper , published between 1588 and 1589 , which were secretly printed under the pseudonym Martin Marprelate and attacked the Church of England and its bishops such as John Whitgift , Archbishop of Canterbury from 1583. The Church of England, very likely at the suggestion of the later Bishop of London Richard Bancroft, secretly commissioned contemporary writers, including John Lyly , Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene and others, to write against these pamphlets using similar satirical means. They created various anti-Puritan, so-called anti-Martinist pieces and performances such as Cardboard with an Hatchet , An Almond for a Parral . Nashe is suspected of using the pseudonym “Pasquil”, which Ronald B. McKerrow , the editor of his complete works, has decidedly questioned because Pasquil identifies himself as a youth who was accepted into the household of John Jewels , the bishop of Salisbury found. John Jewel died in 1571 when Nashe was four years old. Only An Almond for a Parrat (1590) is certainly from his pen .

The exact identity of Martin Marprelate has never been clarified, overall, John Penry and Job Throckmorton , who initially fled to Scotland but returned secretly in 1592, were most suspected of having been the main authors of the Puritan pamphlets. Penry and three other people were apprehended and executed in connection with the Marprelate controversy in 1593, and several suspects were tortured to extort testimony. The Martin Marprelate scandal was one of the most obvious rebellions against the Church of England and against repressive tendencies in Elizabethan England at that time.

In 1592, Nashe wrote the preface to Thomas Newman's unauthorized publication of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591). Although Nashe wrote an elaborate dedication to Sidney's sister Frances, the Countess of Pembroke and daughter of Francis Walsingham , the book was withdrawn and published again in the same year without Nose's preface.

His friendship with Robert Greene involved Nashe in another controversy, the so-called Harvey Controversy. Nashe participated in this literary dispute, which was led with the poet Gabriel Harvey (1545-1630) and his brother Richard Harvey. Richard Harvey had sharply criticized Nashes foreword to Greene's Menaphon , which Nashe repaid him in Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil (1592), with which he became very popular in London. This work, a prose satire, was partly an attack on the Harvey brothers as well as on Nose's opponents in the Marprelate controversy, and at the same time protested against the public neglect of valuable fellow poets. Harvey then wrote an unpleasant account of Robert Greene's last days in his Four Letters in 1593 , to which Nashe responded in 1593 with his Four Letters Confuted (also known as Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters ) to defend the reputation of his friend Greene .

Nashe had attempted to apologize in his preface to Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem 1593 with a prose piece warning Londoners that if they did not implement reforms they would suffer from the "fate of Jerusalem" Away. The religious pamphlet took him to Newgate Prison , which he was only able to leave again with the help of Sir George Carey. The following appearance of Pierce's Supererogation, or a New Prayse of the Old Asse injured Thomas Nashe again. In it, Gabriel Harvey again attacked Nashes Pierce Penniless (1593), which Nashe violently countered with the pamphlet Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596), with a suspected malicious dedication to Richard Lichfield , a barber from Cambridge. Saffron-Walden was the home of Gabriel Harvey. Harvey did not reply, but Lichfield responded with a treatise The Trimming of Thomas Nash (1597), a pamphlet that included a crude woodcut portrait of Nashe as a disreputable "prison brother" in bondage. This literary "war" ended in 1599 when Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft decreed that "all Nashes bookes and Doctor Harveyes bookes be taken wherever they maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee ever printed hereafter."

In parallel with this ongoing literary dispute, Nashe wrote his more famous works. While staying with the Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift in his country estate in Croydon , he wrote Summer's Last Will and Testament . After the play The Isle of Dogs (which he wrote with Ben Jonson ) was immediately suppressed (and is now considered lost) in 1597 , Jonson was arrested while Nashe was able to flee to the country. He stayed in Great Yarmouth for some time before returning to London after two years. He later apologized for the piece ("an imperfit Embrion of my idle hours"). It is believed that Nashe was still alive in 1599 when his last known work, Nashes Lenten Stuffe , was published; however, he had probably already died in 1601 when he was mentioned in a Latin verse in Affaniae by Charles Fitzjeoffrey .

Nashes best-known work, the novella The Unfortunate Traveler, or The Life of Jack Wilton (1594), is now regarded as the first variant of the adventure novel, a picaresque novel in English , originally from Spain . Nose's other important works include Summers Last Will and Testament (1600), a mask game, The Terrors of the Night , an attack on the doctrine of demons, and Lenten Stuff (1599). The erotic poem The Choice of Valentines is also attributed to Thomas Nashe and his name appears on the front page of Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage , although it is not clear what contribution Nashe made to it. Some editions that had survived in the 18th century but have since been lost contain reminiscent verses of Marlowe. - The time and place of his death are not known.

Chronology of the work

  • The Anatomy of Absurdity , 1589
  • Preface to Greene's Menaphon , 1589
  • To Almond for a Parrot , 1590
  • Preface to Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella , 1591
  • Pierce Penniless , 1592
  • Summers Last Will and Testament , 1592 (played 1592, published 1600)
  • Strange News , 1592
  • Christ's Tears over Jerusalem , 1593
  • Terrors of the Night , 1594
  • The Unfortunate Traveler , 1594 (German: The luckless traveler or The life of Jack Wilton. An Elizabethan picaresque novel , 1986, ISBN 3-351-00228-9 )
  • Have with You to Saffron-Walden , 1596
  • Isle of Dogs , 1597 (lost)
  • Nashe's Lenten Stuff , 1599

Text output

  • RB McKerrow (Ed.): The Works of Thomas Nashe. 5 volumes. 1904-1910. Reprint: Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1958

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Nashe, Thomas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nash, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English poet, playwright and satirist of the Elizabethan era
DATE OF BIRTH 1567
PLACE OF BIRTH Lowestoft
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: 1601
Place of death uncertain: Great Yarmouth , Norfolk