Virtual Grub Street: Thomas Nashe, Real: 1589-92.

In this "Thomas Nashe, Real" series:

Picking up the trail of Thomas Nashe after his letter-preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon, we find him engaging in the infamous Marprelate controversy. Marprelate was the appellation given to an anonymous puritan writer who had attacked the Church of England in print. The government sought out the Marprelate without success. Lyly, Nashe and others replied in defense of the established church. The ensuing pamphlet-contest was highly popular.

A strange pattern prevails in Nashe's contributions. His first venture — A Countercuffe Given To Martin Junior — was published in 1589. The style is very recognizably his own. But the biography of the narrator, “Pasquill of England,” is recognizably that of another of Edward de Vere's servants, Anthony Munday. Munday was a prolific freelance writer who gloried in his role traveling through Kent, London and to the continent to spy on Catholic expatriot networks for Queen Elizabeth's spy masters. The tongue-in-cheek reference can hardly be missed:

Pasquill hath posted very dilligently over all the Realme, to gather some fruitfull Volume of THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS,...¹

The second in the series of pamphlets — The Returne of Pasquill — published later the same year, is a dialogue in which Pasquill again matches the biography of Munday and not at all of Nashe. Moreover, the style doesn't display the mania so popular in Nashe. The part of Pasquill seems to have been written by Munday. His interlocutor, Marforius, was written by a unusually subdued but recognizable Thomas Nashe.

If this is not enough to establish that Nashe and Munday were collaborating at this time, The Life, Adventures, and Times of Edward Webbe and the final Marprelate pamphlet attributed to Nashe were published the next year. What little non-fiction biography Webbe contains belonged to Munday who wrote about his time spying in the English College in Rome at every possible opportunity. The style occasionally suggests Nashe and the tale of the Earl of Oxford challenging all comers would be recycled with Vere's uncle, the famous Earl of Surrey, doing the challenging in Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller (1594). The final pamphlet also only occasionally suggests the hand of Nashe — a fact that highly likely means that his style is already expanding in ways that will soon be evident.

The next work we know Nashe published is also his most famous: Pierce Penniless, his Supplication to the Devil (1592). There is so much to be said about the work that I will close out this segment with an astonishing analysis of the famous Nashe-Harvey pamphlet controversy that followed by Ronald B. McKerrow from his 5 volume Works of Nashe (1904-10).

The quarrel between Nashe and the Harveys seems in its origin to be an offshoot of the well-known one between Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and Sir Philip Sidney in 1579, and to have arisen out of what may have been a simple misunderstanding or misinterpretation of a harmless piece of impersonal satire. In one of the Three Proper Letters, between Harvey and Spenser, published in 1580, Harvey had included a poem in English hexameters entitled Speculum Tuscanismi, in ridicule of an Italianate Englishman, and it chanced that this poem might be read as an attack upon the Earl of Oxford. Whether it was so intended or not we cannot now say, but it must be confessed that, under the circumstances, the suspicion was not altogether unreasonable.

At this time it happened that Lyly, or the future author of Pap with a Hatchet, whom we may take to have been Lyly, was on bad terms with Gabriel Harvey, and he with others brought the poem to the notice of the Earl of Oxford in the hope of incensing him against its author. The Earl, however, appears to have taken little notice of the matter; he was, according to Harvey, not disposed to trouble his joviall mind with such Saturnine paltery, and the affair seems quickly to have blown over.

We have no evidence as to what was the cause which led Lyly to try to incite Oxford against Harvey. Whatever it may have been, the ill will seems to have been chiefly on Lyly’s side, for Harvey tells us that the attempt had been made ‘without private cause, or any reason in the world: (for in truth I looved him, in hope praysed him; many wayes favored him, and never any way offended him).

This old affair between Harvey and a certain group of persons, of whom Lyly was one, if not almost forgotten by the former in the years which elapsed between 1580 and 1589, would probably have had no further consequences, if it had not been for a passage in Pap with a Hatchet, in which Harvey's Three Letters is referred to. On the appearance of Pap, Harvey composed a long reply, the ‘Advertisement for Pap-hatchet, and Martin Mar-prelate', which he afterwards published in Pierce's Supererogation. This ‘ Advertisement ’ Harvey may have circulated in manuscript among his friends, but he appears to have made no attempt to get it printed at the time, and indeed professes that he would never have done so had it not been for the later attacks upon him.²

It bears remembering that McKerrow's take was published in 1910 — well before any Oxfordian theory or theory that Nashe was a boon companion of Oxford existed. But we'll have to take this up in the next installment.

1McKerrow, Ronald B. The Works of Thomas Nashe Edited From The Original Texts (1904). I.60-1.

2McKerrow. The Works of Thomas Nashe Edited From The Original Texts (1910). V.74-5.

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Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”
Robert Greene and the Construction Shakespeare Never Used. August 9, 2022. 'Our first foray “staring intently into” the texts of Robert Greene has noted that his work utilized far fewer feminine endings than Shakespeare’s.'
A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years. Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”
Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.