Thomas Nashe On and Off the Page

This chapter shifts attention from the literariness of Thomas Nashe’s style to its performability. It recalls the role performance played in his education, and his links to the theatre. It considers what was so meaningful about live performance that he tried to recreate its effect in printed prose. It explores the theatricality of his prose: his use of the rhetorical sentence to represent live thinking; his use of direct address in Summers last will and testament and The Unfortunate Traveller; and his imitation of the university play Pedantius in Have with you to Saffron Walden. Nashe’s attempt to bring the flat page to life with thought, wit, and emotion explains his criticism of Gabriel Harvey, whose pamphlets he represents as material objects that can be reduced to their constituent parts with no loss.

Harvey’s 1593 ‘To Be and Not To Be’

Ever since the discovery of the first quarto of Hamlet (Q1) in 1823, it has generated fierce debate among scholars about its origin. Recently, Terri Bourus has written a powerful book-length argument that Q1 was indeed by Shakespeare, as its title page states, and that he wrote it by 1589. The present article bolsters Bourus’s conclusion with a careful look at its title page claims as well as the literary satires of Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Harvey and Ben Jonson. Specifically, Q1’s title page and apparent allusions to Hamlet in the early 1590s pamphlet war of Nashe and Harvey independently confirm an earlier chronology for the tragedy. Jonson also attributes a line exclusive to Q1 to his caricature of Shakespeare in Every Man Out of His Humor (1600). The evidence suggests Shakespeare had written Q1 much earlier than conventionally assumed and that there was no ‘lost Hamlet’.

Spenser, Raleigh, Harvey, and Nashe on Empire

This article explores the responses to early modern colonial enterprises in the writings of four major English writers: Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe. The article shows how diverse responses to such undertakings were and that there was as much hostility and indifference as there was enthusiasm, not only for political and/or moral reasons but also because expensive overseas ventures were sometimes thought of as a needless waste of money and lives. In doing so the article aims to contribute towards recent calls to ‘decolonize’ the university and the curriculum, showing that responses to colonialism in colonising societies were never monolithic and that it is important that this historical reality is recognised if we are to engage seriously with the impact of colonialism and imperialism. Harvey and Raleigh were enthusiastic proponents of the benefits of colonial settlements, and took their cue from reading Richard Hakluyt the Younger’s Principal Navigations (1589), which suggested that the English had always thrived when they had ventured overseas and expanded their dominions. Spenser was much more ambivalent, despite his status as a colonist in Ireland after 1580, and Nashe was scornful of the purpose of such grand plans. For Nashe, partly inspired by his vitriolic quarrel with Harvey, it was much more important to concentrate on the locality of England itself and he accuses others of failing to see what surrounds them because they have been misled by the prospect of plunder and profit from exotic lands.