Thomas Nashe and Late Elizabethan Writing
Andrew HadfieldAn overview of the life and work of the scandalous Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe.
This book provides an overview of the life and work of the scandalous Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe (1567–c. 1600), perhaps the only English author whose work led to the closure of theatres and the widespread banning of printed books. Nashe was famous for writing the scurrilous novel The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), but as Andrew Hadfield shows, there was much more to his career than this brilliant work. Nashe played a vital role in establishing English Renaissance theatre, collaborating with Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. He was involved in religious controversies; wrote pornographic poetry; reflected on the terrifying impact of the plague on London; and wrote intricate sentences that saw him celebrated as one of the finest prose stylists of the age.
An overview of the life and work of the scandalous Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe.
This book provides an overview of the life and work of the scandalous Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe (1567–c. 1600), perhaps the only English author whose work led to the closure of theatres and the widespread banning of printed books. Nashe was famous for writing the scurrilous novel The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), but as Andrew Hadfield shows, there was much more to his career than this brilliant work. Nashe played a vital role in establishing English Renaissance theatre, collaborating with Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. He was involved in religious controversies; wrote pornographic poetry; reflected on the terrifying impact of the plague on London; and wrote intricate sentences that saw him celebrated as one of the finest prose stylists of the age.
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Thomas Nashe and Late Elizabethan Writing gives us a clear, accessible summary of all the surviving works and places them in relation to the various worlds that Nashe inhabited. Such overviews require considerable knowledge and judgement, which Hadfield possesses as one of the general editors of the forthcoming Oxford Complete Works edition.
'Times Literary Supplement
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Andrew Hadfield’s remarkable new book deftly displays the edgy wit and verbal inventiveness with which Nashe gives voice to his provocative understanding of the interrelated social, commercial, and religious worlds that defined the unsettling modernity of his England.
'David Scott Kastan, Yale University
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Thomas Nashe was a bright, fierce light in Elizabethan literature, whose work was banned by the church authorities. From secretly circulated pornography to the herrings of East Anglia, and from Puritan propaganda to the first English novel, Nashe is always productive and provocative. Andrew Hadfield’s lucid new life opens up Nash’s funny, savage, deeply topical works for a new readership, emphasising their range, verve, and specificity. Hadfield’s skill is in contextualising without overshadowing the literary brio of the writing, and in recovering the Nashe whom all his contemporaries – including Shakespeare – wanted to emulate.
'Emma Smith, Hertford College, Oxford
Introduction: Nashe’s Life, Interests and Circle
1 Religion
2 Early Style
3 The Theatre 1
4 Gabriel Harvey
5 Fiction
6 Late Writing, Mature Style
Epilogue
Chronology
List of abbreviations
References
Bibliographical essay
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and a fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature and culture, including Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005), Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012), Lying in Early Modern Culture (2017) and John Donne (Reaktion, 2021).
