#thomas nashe

Globe Research Intern Sam Plumb discusses the prose style of Thomas Nashe.

A budding Elizabethan prose writer seeking stylistic inspiration would probably turn first and foremost to euphuism. Named after John Lyly’s popular prose narrative Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, euphuism may seem peculiar to modern readers. Here is a typical passage from the beginning of Euphues, introducing the titular central character and his prodigal ways: ‘Alexander valiant in war, yet given to wine; Tully eloquent in his glosses, yet vain-glorious; Solomon wise, yet too too wanton; David holy, but yet an homicide; none more witty than Euphues, yet at the first, none more wicked’. Learned references, complex syntax, insistent repetition and alliterative antitheses combine for an experience that recalls Cassandra Mortmain’s musical critique of Bach in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle: reading euphuism is like ‘being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon’.

Despite its unfamiliarity today, euphuism was hugely popular among Elizabethan readers and writers. One of its many imitators was the prose writer and dramatist Thomas Nashe, as he himself hints in a late work: ‘Euphues I read when I was a little ape in Cambridge’. Significantly, Nashe goes on in the same sentence to distance himself from it: ‘to imitate it I abhor’.

In fact, although scholars have seen the influence of euphuism in Nashe’s early works, his very first publication endorses a departure from the mannered and ornate style. Nashe seized upon the prestigious platform provided by his Preface to Menaphon, a popular romance by Robert Greene, to announce a new style in-the-making. ‘Give me the man,’ he demands, ‘whose extemporal vein in any humour will excel our greatest art-masters’ deliberate thoughts; whose inventions, quicker than his eye, will challenge the proudest rhetorician to the contention of like perfection with like expedition’.

What Nashe is asking for here is an art which seems spontaneous, a prose style reading like free, extemporal speech. This ‘extemporal vein’, also sometimes called ‘Nasherie’ in honour of its most famous advocate, gets its earliest airing in one of Nashe’s most successful prose works, an entertaining, topic-leaping pamphlet called Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil. Talented but poor, the author-persona figure of Pierce (the name puns on ‘purse’) asks for a loan from the devil, but the daft antics of the supernatural narrative are perhaps less memorable than its breathlessly realistic style. One typically anecdotal passage describes ‘a young heir or cockney that is his mother’s darling, if he have played the waste-good at the Inns of the Court or about London, and that neither his student’s pension nor his unthrift’s credit will serve to maintain his college of whores any longer, falls in a quarrelling humour with his fortune…’ Like spoken gossip, this is copious, colloquial and deceptively simple.

Though seemingly artless, Nashe’s ‘extemporal vein’ was artfully forged, a fact perfectly obvious to both his supporters and detractors. Nashe’s most prominent critic, the Cambridge don Gabriel Harvey, denigrates his writing by aligning it with ‘Tarlton’s amplifications’. This reference requires some unpacking. Richard Tarlton was the most famous clown of the Elizabethan stage, and was particularly known for his ability to extemporise, or perform spectacular comedy apparently entirely off-script. It is no coincidence that in his non-dramatic work Kindheart’s Dream, Henry Chettle urges Nashe to revenge himself on Harvey through the mouthpiece of Tarlton’s Ghost.

Nashe himself alludes to Tarlton many times, and frequently invokes the extemporal performance style associated with the clown. In many of the lost plays in which he may have had a hand, extemporisation seems to have been deployed, most notably in the infamous Isle of Dogs, some of which was, he claimed, ‘supplied’ by the players. Nashe’s only surviving play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, memorably features a Tarlton-like clown who, in a spontaneous-sounding ‘prologue’, rails against the author for not having written him enough lines and insists on sitting at the side of the stage, mocking the rest of the action. (Intriguingly, some recent scholars have suggested that the part of the clown, Will Summers, may have been played by a playwright and player with the same initials, William Shakespeare.)

Although the enmity between Nashe and Harvey was deep and complex, perhaps one of the more obvious provocations to Harvey was that Nashe’s style had been so clearly inherited from a ‘mere’ player, himself a lightning rod to a common audience. For Harvey, there is something frightfully common about the extemporal vein, or, in Karen Kettnich’s phrase, ‘lusciously low class’.

Yet this is also what elevates it. In a section of Strange News, the first full pamphlet in his literary skirmish with Harvey, Nashe defends his dead friend Robert Greene against the Cambridge don in his usual scurrilous style: ‘A good fellow he was, and would have drunk with thee for more angels than the lord thou libelledst on gave thee in Christ’s College; and in one year he pissed as much against the walls as thou and thy two brothers spent in three’. In a section of 1 Henry VI possibly authored by Nashe, Joan la Pucelle astonishes her royal auditors with what she calls her ‘unpremeditated’ speech. She claims that this extemporal gift is heaven sent. Reading Nashe’s disarmingly powerful prose, it’s tempting to agree.

On Saturday 20 May, a Read Not Dead event will explore the lifelike spontaneity of Nashe’s extemporal prose with a live reading of his ‘incredible narration’, The Terrors of the Night. Book tickets.

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