Daryna Borovets Group 2.3: Pierce Penilesse His Supplication To The Divell (1592), A Satire Focused On The

Daryna Borovets Group 2.
Thomas Nashe, Nashe also spelled Nash, (born 1567, Lowestoft, Suffolk, Eng.—

died c. 1601, Yarmouth, Norfolk?), pamphleteer, poet, dramatist, and author
of The Unfortunate Traveller; or, The Life of Jacke Wilton (1594), the
first picaresque novel in English.
Nashe was educated at the University of Cambridge, and about 1588 he went

to London, where he became associated with Robert Greene and other professional
writers. In 1589 he wrote The Anatomie of Absurditie and the preface to
Greene’s Menaphon. Both works are bold, opinionated surveys of the
contemporary state of writing; occasionally obscure, they are euphuistic in style
and range freely over a great variety of topics.
In 1589 and 1590 he evidently became a paid hack of the episcopacy in the
Marprelate controversy and matched wits with the unidentified Puritan “Martin.”
Almost all the Anglican replies to Martin have variously been assigned to Nashe,
but only An Almond for a Parrat (1590) has been convincingly attributed to him.
He wrote the preface to Thomas Newman’s unauthorized edition of Sir Philip
Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591). Though Nashe penned an extravagant
dedication to Sidney’s sister, the countess of Pembroke, the book was withdrawn
and reissued in the same year without Nashe’s foreword.
Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592), a satire focused on the

seven deadly sins, was Nashe’s first distinctive work. Using a free
and extemporaneous prose style, full of colloquialisms, newly coined words, and
fantastic idiosyncrasies, Nashe buttonholes the reader with a story in which a need
for immediate entertainment seems to predominate over any narrative structure or
controlling objective. Having become involved in his friend Greene’s feud with the
writer Gabriel Harvey, Nashe satirized Harvey and his brothers in Pierce and then
joined the combat in an exchange of pamphlets with Harvey, Strange
Newes (1592) and Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596). If Harvey is to be
credited, Nashe was a hack for the printer John Danter in 1593. The controversy
was terminated in 1599, when the archbishop of Canterbury ordered that “all
Nasshes bookes and Doctor Harveyes bookes be taken wheresoever they maye be
found and that none of theire bookes bee ever printed hereafter.”
Apparently Nashe wrote Strange Newes while he was living at the home of

Sir George Carey, who momentarily relieved his oppressive poverty.
In Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), Nashe warned his countrymen during
one of the country’s worst outbreaks of bubonic plague that, unless they reformed,
London would suffer the fate of Jerusalem. The Terrors of the Night (1594) is
a discursive, sometimes bewildering, attack on demonology.
Pierce Penilesse excepted, Nashe’s most successful works were his

entertainment Summers Last Will and Testament (1592, published 1600); his
picaresque novel The Unfortunate Traveller; or, The Life of Jacke Wilton; Dido,
Queen of Carthage (1594; with Christopher Marlowe); and Nashes Lenten
Stuffe (1599). The Unfortunate Traveller is a brutal and realistic tale of adventure
narrated with speed and economy. The book describes the travels through
Germany and Italy of its rogue hero, Jacke Wilton, who lives by his wits and
witnesses all sorts of historic events before he is converted to a better way of
life. Lenten Stuffe, in praise of herrings, contains a charming description of the
town of Yarmouth, Norfolk, a herring fishery. Nashe retreated to Yarmouth when
he and Ben Jonson were prosecuted as a result of their satirical play The Isle of
Dogs (1597).
Nashe was the first of the English prose eccentrics, an extraordinary inventor of

verbal hybrids. The Works were edited by R.B. McKerrow, 5 vol. (1904–10;
reprinted and reedited by F.P. Wilson, 1958).
The Unfortunate Traveller.
All this pamphleteering work, however, was completely overshadowed by his

picaresque novel The Unfortunate Traveller or the life of Jack Wilton, which
appeared in 1594, and which was the most remarkable work of its kind before
the time of Defoe. It relates the lively adventures of the rogue-hero, an
English page, who wanders abroad, and comes into contact with many kinds
of society. He enters taverns and palaces, makes acquaintance with people
worthy and unworthy, and so passes in review the Germany and Italy of his
day. The scene opens in the English camp before Tournay, where the page is
engaged in his knavish tricks. He terrifies, for instance, a dull army victualler
into distributing his stores, so that the army had “syder in boules, in scuppets
and in helmets … and if a man would have fild his bootes, there hee might
have had it.” Such a humorist became, perforce, a traveller, and he first
appears at Münster in time to enjoy the conflict between the emperor and the
anabaptists; then, in the service of the earl of Surrey, he makes for Italy.
Passing through Rotterdam, the two travellers meet with Erasmus and Sir
Thomas More; they witness at Wittenberg an academic pageant and the old
play Acolastus, besides solemn disputations between Luther and
Carolostadius, and, finally, they strike up an acquaintance with the famous
magician, Cornelius Agrippa. At Venice, Jack elopes with a magnifico’s
wife, but is overtaken once more by the earl at Florence, where the latter
enters a tournament on behalf of his English lady-love Geraldine. 33 The
page then moves on alone to Rome, where he remains for a short period in an
atmosphere of plague, robbery and murder, and, having learned, both by
experience and hearsay, the gruesome horrors of the place, he finally leaves
the “Sodom of Italy” for the less lively scenes of his own country.
The form of this work, in the first place, is of great interest, for it resembles 51
the picaresque type indigenous to Spain. But this need not imply that Nashe
was a mere imitator; on the contrary, though he may have derived a definite
stimulus from Lazarillo de Tormes, the elements of his work represent a
spontaneous English growth. The Spanish rogue-novel was the outcome of a
widespread beggary brought about by the growth of militarism and the
decline of industry, by the increase of gypsies and the indiscriminate charity
of an all-powerful church. Similar social conditions prevailed in Elizabethan
England, though from different causes, and the conditions which
produced Lazarillo produced The Unfortunate Traveller. It has, moreover,
been shown that, while Lyly and Sidney were indebted to Spain for certain
elements in their works, yet the ultimate origins of English courtesy-books
and of the Euphuistic manner, were wholly independent of Spanish influence.
And so, in general, it may be said, that parallels existing between the Spanish
and English literatures of the time were the result of similar national
conditions, of influences which were common to both. 34 In each case, the
English development was later than the Spanish but not due to it. Moreover,
as regards Nashe in particular, the matter and design of his novel would be
quite naturally suggested by the material of his pamphlets, and, possibly, by
reminiscences of his travels; while his choice of the realistic form is partly
accounted for by his strongly expressed scorn of romances in general, as “the
fantasticall dreams of those exiled Abbie lubbers [the monks].”
When compared with the Spanish picaresque type, The Unfortunate
Traveller will be found to possess many points of similarity. There is the
same firm grasp of the realities of life, the same penetrating observation and
forceful expression; there are the same qualities of humour and satire, the
same rough drafts of character-sketches; and the aim is that of entertainment
rather than reform. From the picaresque novel, however, it diverges in its
English mixture of tragedy with comedy, and, again, in the fact that the
animating impulse of its rogue-hero is not avarice but a malignant and
insatiable love of mischief. The Spanish picaro, also, generally belonged to
the lowest class and was wont to confine his attentions very largely to
Spanish society, but Jack Wilton, a page, moves further afield and reviews no
less expansive a scene than that of western Europe in the first half of the
sixteenth century.

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Daryna Borovets Group 2.

Thomas Nashe, Nashe also spelled Nash, (born 1567, Lowestoft, Suffolk, Eng.—

Nashe was educated at the University of Cambridge, and about 1588 he went

Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592), a satire focused on the

Apparently Nashe wrote Strange Newes while he was living at the home of

Pierce Penilesse excepted, Nashe’s most successful works were his

Nashe was the first of the English prose eccentrics, an extraordinary inventor of

The Unfortunate Traveller.

All this pamphleteering work, however, was completely overshadowed by his

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