by Thomas Nashe
A similar picture emerges from The Three Parnassus Plays, in the character Ingenioso. These plays (their author is anonymous), amusing and valuable for the humorous, sympathetic insight which they afford into the universities and the prospects and problems of their graduates, are quite clear in the personal reference to Nashe as this satirist who ‘carried the deadly stockado in his pen’.4 For one thing, he is identified by his projecting tooth: the phrase ‘whose muse was armed with a gagtooth’ recalls, as the editor, J. B. Leishman, points out, Harvey’s sentence on Nashe: ‘Take heed of the man whom Nature hath marked with a gagtooth, Art furnished with a gagtongue, and Exercise armed with a gagpen, as cruel and murderous weapons as ever drew blood.’ But Ingenioso’s complaints are also characteristic of Nashe. When first met, he is ‘following a gouty patron by the smell, hoping to wring some water from a flint’, and in the second play he is seen again cursing the way of the world:
I see wit is but a phantom and idea a quarrelling shadow, that will seldom dwell in the same room with a full purse, but commonly is the idle follower of a forlorn creature. Nay, it is a devil that will never leave a man till it hath brought him to a beggary, a malicious spirit that delights in a close libel or an open satire. Besides, it is an unfortunate thing: I have observed that that head where it dwelleth hath seldom a good hat, or the back it belongs unto, a good suit of apparel.
No doubt there is some amusement here at Nashe’s expense (the pot says too much to the kettle about libels and satires, and the descent from spiritual melancholy to canny material interest is comically observed). But essentially the portrait of Ingenioso is a friendly one. He is a good fellow, who writes his pamphlets over ‘a pint of wine and a pipe of tobacco’. And the serving man likes him: ‘Faith, he seems a mad greek, and I have loved such lads of mettle as that seems to be from my infancy.’ Although Ingenioso has the last speech in the play, Thomas Nashe in Ingenioso’s person is given an epitaph earlier on by Iudicio; and it is one which with its balance and generosity speaks surely with affection:
Let all his faults sleep with his mournful chest,
And there for ever let his ashes rest.
His style was witty, though it had some gall;
Some things he might have mended, so may all.
Yet this I say, that for a mother wit,
Few men have ever seen the like of it.5
It is a happy event that these lines should come from his own university. For, however much his popular ‘image’ was that of the ‘mad greek’, the ‘lad of mettle’, nevertheless he was a man of considerable learning, and his respect for scholarship was great. Almost every page of McKerrow’s notes on the texts contains its allusions to Ovid, Virgil, Horace and other standard classical writers. Theologians from Augustine and Athanasius to Tyndale and Erasmus; European writers such as La Primaudaye and Castiglione; Spenser, Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Sidney, Thomas Watson, William Warner and Sir John Davies among his near contemporaries: these were no doubt the standard authors of the educated Elizabethan, but Nashe had them in his system, not just in his notebooks, for the allusions come (in his own phrase) ‘thick and three-fold’ and are clearly a part of the mind. He had also read closely some more recondite works: Cornelius Agrippa’s De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum is a frequent source of reference, a discourse on devils by Georgius Pictorius (De Illorum Daemonum, called the Isagoge) is another. Chronicles, ballads, grammars, translations, tales and plays: all sorts of reading become a part of his own writing. McKerrow lists over one hundred books by modern authors quoted in his work; and, though his classical learning is no doubt exceeded by that of his great editor, it is in some ways all the more impressive for its inaccuracies, for they suggest reliance on a memory which may be defective in detail but is plentifully stored.
Cambridge was clearly a prime influence in Nashe’s life. St John’s was a college with a great tradition, and Nashe several times points proudly to its former scholars and masters. It had been a notable supplier of men to Church and State: William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was the greatest of several eminent statesmen who were also Johnsmen, and the college produced at least twenty-six bishops during Tudor times. ‘The most flourishing society in the University at this time’, L. V. Ryan calls it, writing on the 1520s and 30s which were Ascham’s time there.6 By the 1580s, when Nashe was up, the College had come under Calvinist influence, and the University itself had, from mid-century onwards, become too much a Church recruiting-centre for broader studies to prosper. Nashe was strongly opposed to the puritans in national as well as university life, and he writes severely about the decline of standards at Cambridge. Cheke, Ascham and others, he says, had ‘set before our eyes a more perfect method of study’:
But how ill their precepts have prospered with our idle age, that leave the fountains of sciences to follow the rivers of Knowledge, their over-fraught studies and trifling compendiaries may testify. For I know not how it cometh to pass, by the doting practices of our divinity dunces, that strain to make their pupils pulpit-men before they are reconciled to Priscian. But those years which should be employed in Aristotle are expired in epitomies; and well too, they may have so much catechism-vacation to rake up a little refuse-philosophy.7
The complaint against ‘epitomies’, the second-hand acquaintance with philosophers through other men’s summaries, comes from a scholar with standards; just as the irony of the last clause comes from a critic with a pen he knows how to use. And his criticisms have all the more power for being voiced by a man who has just spoken, with obvious sincerity, of his pride in the University and affection for his College. St John’s, he says (echoing Ascham’s words in The Schoolmaster):
was as an university within itself, shining so far above all other houses, halls and hospitals whatsoever, that no college in the town was able to compare with the tithe of her students; having (as I have heard grave men of credit report) more candles light in it every winter morning before four of the clock than the four-of-the-clock bell gave strokes.8
This comes from the Preface to Greene’s Menaphon, addressed ‘To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities’, and written when Cambridge was a memory not above a year old. He was to revert to it nearly ten years later in Lenten Stuff: ‘St John’s… in Cambridge, in which house once I took up my inn for seven year together lacking a quarter, and yet love it still, for it is and ever was the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all that University.’9
The London pamphleteer still had the Cambridge scholar within him, and it would no doubt be a source of posthumous pride to him to know that his extant writings should eventually have become the subject of a monumental work of scholarship in McKerrow’s edition. And another side of him might well have been quite pleased to see himself, four hundred years later, slipping into a somewhat outside pocket at the expense of a few new pence.
He might also have been interested to note that this selection of his work contains relatively little of what won him the reputation which stuck to him in his own time. The ‘young Juvenal, that biting satirist’, as Greene described him the Martin-queller and Harvey-baiter, has receded in vividness along with the issues involved.
The Marprelate controversy was a minor episode in one of the great debates of English history. From Wycliffs time to Wesley’s, the reformation of the Church was a cause that drew to it good men who wished that true religion should prosper and abuses be checked. Such aims touched the life of everybody in the country, and touched them at one of the points where the basic quality of a culture is in question. There were great things said and great things done. Somewhere in the middle of it all, a slanging-match blew up among some by-standers; the bishops look on, the people cheer and counter-cheer; it has been a bit of light relief, and it is soon over. One of the main contestants is lost again in the crowd; the other is Nashe, who is remembered for other reasons.
In 1587 Dr John Bridges wrote a tract called Defence of the Government Established. The contents were as little appetizing as the title, and i
n fact it appears to have been a bad piece of work and an embarrassment to the authorities whose defence it undertook. But some defence seemed necessary, for although the reformers were concerned about the Church, the whole power-structure was affected by an attack on one part of it. A better Church was a fine general aim, but in particular it meant better bishops – or none. The implications of this in terms of power were to become abundantly clear to the Stuarts; but even in Elizabeth’s time the puritan movement was strong enough to make the government, temporal as well as spiritual, uncomfortably aware that it could not stand idly by. But then, governments are always saying that, and up to this time the situation had been niggling rather than tense. The temperature was raised, however, when, late in 1588 and throughout 1589, a series of pamphlets, eluding the Church’s grip on the printing presses, appeared under the signature of Martin Marprelate, Gentleman. These disposed of the Defence of the Government Established without great difficulty and with much relish: Oh, read over D. John Bridges the fourth pamphlet was called, its popular style matching the lively title just as Bridges matched his stuffy one with a dull text. The pamphlets made a strong impression: for about the only time in its history, the puritan cause became fun.
The alarm of the Government Established was great enough for some of the Church authorities to look round for a David to take aim at this laughing Goliath. Precisely how they happened upon Nashe we do not know; his first publications, the Preface to Greene’s Menaphon and The Anatomy of Absurdity, had established him as a writer best on attack, and as one with no love for the influence of puritans in the universities; perhaps that was enough. In fact, several writers became involved, but in the whole pamphleteering war the only counterblow to match ‘Marprelate’s’ own was the one now attributed with fair certainty to Nashe, An Almond for a Parrot.
It strikes the right note. Beginning ‘Welcome, Master Martin from the dead,10 and much joy may you have of your stage-like resurrection,’ and ending ‘And so bon nute to your noddiship,’ it made it clear that there were laughs to be had. And so there are. On his first page he comes up with a good story of a mean puritan of Northampton who
fetched a more thriftier precedent of funerals piping hot from the primitive church, which, including but a few words and those passing well expounded, kept his wainscot from waste and his linen from wearing; sufficeth, he tumbled his wife naked into the earth at high noon, without sheet or shroud to cover her shame, breathing over her in an audible voice: ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return again.’
He is well primed in debate-technique (gain a laugh, gain a point); the points follow, and he strikes them home unsparingly. ‘Malicious hypocrite,’ he is soon saying, ‘didst thou so much malign the successful thrivings of the gospel, that thou shouldst filch thyself, as a new disease, into our government?’ Impugn the motives of your opponent, then turn his own words against him. ‘The filth of the stews, distilled into ribaldry terms, cannot confectionate a more intemperate style than his pamphlets.’ He quotes a few of Martin’s ‘milder terms’, piling them up with Dickensian relish:
wicked priests, presumptuous priests, proud prelates, arrogant bishops, horseleeches, butchers, persecutors of the truth, Lambethical whelps, Spanish inquisitors
and then asks:
Think you this miry-mouthed mate a partaker of heavenly inspiration, that thus abounds in his uncharitable railings.11
As for his ‘ancient burlibond adjuncts’ and ‘unwieldy phrases’, ‘no true syllogism can have elbow room where they are’. There is more of this kind, and a good deal of by-play, including some that is amusingly at the expense of Philip Stubbs and his Anatomy of Abuses (‘tickle me my Phil a little more in the flank’). Occasionally argument succeeds abuse. But generally all is subsidiary to the great denunciation, for Nashe has identified (correctly, it seems) Martin as John Penry, another Cambridge man, eight years Nashe’s senior, and he proceeds to denounce, at first like Micawber on Heep:
Pen., J. Pen., welch Pen., Pen. the protestationer, demonstrationer, supplicationer, appellationer, Pen., the father, Pen., the son, Pen. Martin Junior, Martin Martinus, Pen. the scholar of Oxford to his friend in Cambridge, Pen. totum in toto…12
then in the language of Apemantus or Thersites:
Predestination, that foresaw how crooked he should prove in his ways, enjoined incest to spawn him splay-footed. Eternity, that knew how awkward he should look to all honesty, consulted with conception to make him squint-eyed, and the devil, that discovered by the heaven’s disposition on his birthday how great a limb of his kingdom was coming into the world, provided a rusty superficies from his mother’s womb; in every part whereof these words of blessing were most artificially engraven: Crine ruber, niger ore, brevis pede, lumine lustus.13
Quoting this passage, G. R. Hibbard remarks:
The whole thing is in the worst of taste, but the sheer nastiness of it all is palliated in some measure by the fantastic ingenuity of invention. The malicious invective is shot through with a kind of perverted poetry.… Brutality of image and attitude were nothing new at the time, but the ability to combine them with the play of fancy is something peculiar to Nashe.14
The authorities cleared the ring when they found and dismantled the Martinist press, and when Nashe reappeared in it some two years later it was with other partners. There is a direct link between them, however. Nashe’s writings had irritated one Richard Harvey, a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and a man several years older than the upstart critic (Nashe later said he remembered him ’wondrous well’ and had ‘purged rheum many a time’ during his philosophy lectures 15). Harvey had written a treatise in praise of Ramus, which put him on the wrong side as far as Nashe was concerned, partly because of Ramus’s Calvinism and partly because his Logic was being pushed as against Aristotle’s in Cambridge by all the people whom Nashe regarded as the corrupters of the University (Ramisric logic is one of the ‘newfound toys’ referred to in The Anatomy of Abuses). Moreover, Penry, Martin Marprelate himself, was an admirer of Ramus, and Nashe had taken him to task for it in An Almond for a Parrot. This, together with his irreverent references to his elders in the Preface to Greene’s Menaphon, was sufficient to provoke Harvey to public rebuke. He wrote two pamphlets in 1590, the second one being called The Lamb of God, insignificant enough in themselves, bearing a relationship rather like the assassination at Sarajevo to what followed. Richard Harvey drew a counter-attack from Greene, which brought in Gabriel Harvey, at which Henry Chettle reminded Nashe of his obligations to Greene: the great war was on.
It was Gabriel, Richard’s brother, who became the principal on the other side. Nature had not made him a fighting man, but he was acutely conscious of himself, his deserts and his disappointments, and this made him ready to lash out at an affront, and to conduct a tenacious defence. It also made him an easy and rather tempting target, for it was clear that the hurts would smart. Interestingly, the terms of his first attack on Nashe apply to himself: ‘tormented with other men’s felicity, and overwhelmed with his own misery’ (Harvey’s Four Letters, M., V, 84). Nashe never impresses one in this way in his writing, and the picture of him in The Three Parnassus Plays does not accord either. But Harvey himself certainly was a disappointed man. His university career meant everything to him, and it did not prosper. Professor in Rhetoric from 1574, he failed to become Public Orator when the appointment was made in 1581; he was passed over when he might well have become Master of Trinity Hall in 1585; and in 1592 he lost his Fellowship there. Few men would take such misfortunes in as philosophical humour as they might hope, but with Harvey his vanity must have been sadly hurt: the vanity, for instance, which made him so happy when the Queen met him and remarked that ‘he looked something like an Italian’ that he had to write a poem about it, and another about his kissing her hand (Nashe says he thereupon ‘quite renounced his natural English accents and gestures and wrested himself wholly to the Italian punctilios, speaking our homely island tongue stra
ngely as if he were but a raw practitioner in it’, Have with You, p. 490). And indeed, a defensive-aggressive self-esteem speaks out throughout the controversy, and undercuts his own performance. In many ways he was more worthy than Nashe: he had some good arguments on his side, he was a genuine scholar and often very clear-headed. And not for nothing was he the friend of Spenser, who wrote of him as one:
That, sitting like a looker-on
Of this world’s stage, dost note, with critique pen,
The sharp dislike of each condition
Yet his character is always revealing itself as mean, vain and, in some fatal way, ridiculous. John Buxton says of him: ‘he had an arrogant egotism that at times comes near to megalomania, as he reveals in the privacy of the notes so carefully written in the margins of his books.’16 ‘Tormented with other men’s felicity, and overwhelmed with his own misery’: he was in a glass house, with David outside fresh from his encounter with Goliath, aiming straight at the holes his own stone-throwing had made.
And Nashe hits repeatedly: to good effect in Strange News (or The Four Letters Confuted), devastatingly in Have with You to Saffron Walden. At the heart of that pamphlet is the famous ‘Life’ of Harvey: both a genuine biography in its factual reference, and, as Hibbard says, a ‘mock-life’. The strength lies in the underplaying; or (if that seems a curious thing to say about so exuberant and unsparing a piece of work) in the feeling of laughter welling up from inside at the very thought of this man, somehow inherently absurd. His performance before the Queen at Audley End and his subsequent antics, his petulant, bewildered dismay when he found himself in Newgate, these are some of the ‘best ones’ in a life which is seen throughout as a richly comical jest-book. Sometimes it is as though Nashe had his camera with him, and, click, the expression is caught: Harvey coy and simpering, for example, like a proud schoolmaster when one of his boys hath made an oration before a county mayor that hath pleased’ (Have with You, M., III, 70). His snobbery is caught, and with it, again, the foolish complacency: ‘Only he tells a foolish twittle-twattle boasting tale… of the funeral of his kinsman, Sir Thomas Smith (which word “kinsman” I wondered he caused not to be set in great capital letters)’ (ibid., p. 58). The abuse is sometimes a straightforward concussion-blow on the bald pate (and Harvey had ‘of late very pitifully grown bald’). More often Nashe can afford to play cat and mouse, even to adopt a ‘be-kind-to-Gabriel’ pose, as when, early in the pamphlet, he prints a little drawing of him. Harvey was a thin man, so Nashe considerately draws him in round hose instead of his customary Venetian: ‘because I would make him look more dapper and plump and round upon it, whereas otherwise he looks like a case of tooth-pikes, or a lutepin in a suit of apparel’ (Have with You, M., III, 38).