Abstract
The present article suggests that war and peace are explored in the works of Thomas Nashe as figures for the condition of the writer. Throughout his career, including his troubles with the authorities and his conflict with Gabriel Harvey, Nashe makes use of the war metaphor in order to elaborate on the condition of authorship. However, war is also a literal presence in Nashe’s texts, which frequently reference events like the Spanish Armada or the campaign in Ireland. Thus, the article examines the complex interplay between social reality and self-referential metaphor that characterizes Nashe’s use and descriptions of warfare.
For anyone remotely familiar with the life of Thomas Nashe, war would seem like an appropriate theme. In one sense, Nashe’s entire career can be said to be built upon literary warfare; as a writer, he would hardly exist without his conflict with Gabriel Harvey and his extended trouble with the authorities in London. War and peace are prominent in Nashe’s works as metaphors for the condition of the writer, and in his pamphlets, he seems caught up between on the one hand saying that peace – both in a political sense and a more spiritual one – is a necessary condition of literature and on the other hand, recognizing that war – both as a figurative embodiment of intellectual conflict and as a tangible context for his work – is what his work feeds on. It should be remembered in other words that war is both an available trope to Nashe and a tangible historical reality that informs his work to an extent that has not received enough critical attention. Nashe’s career as a writer largely coincided with a decade of intense warfare: his probable first work The Anatomie of Absurditie was entered in the Stationers’ Register just a few weeks after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and his probable last, Lenten Stuffe, makes extensive allusion to the campaign in Ireland, which was at a particularly disastrous stage at the time when Nashe wrote. Between these two are a series of pamphlets in which war and peace appear as convenient metaphors for the condition of the writer – but they also reflect a world that was visible everywhere in and around the London where Nashe spent most of his professional life. 1 As Andrew Hadfield suggests, ‘Nashe, although he never served in the army himself, would have known a large number of soldiers in London, especially as so many writers spent time in the army’. 2 When Nashe mentions actual soldiers, he often does so with a sense of their literal presence: ‘There is a sloth of Souldioury, as of those that come from the warres, and will not fall to any thing afterward, but cosen, begge, and robbe’. 3 Hence, works like Pierce Penilesse, Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, The Unfortunate Traveller and Lenten Stuffe embody war and peace both as tropes and in terms of specific historical contexts. In Pierce Penilesse, figures of war and idle soldiers are connected to Nashe’s defence of the theatre; in Christs Teares, the military man is associated with the poor scholar, both of whom are unjustly neglected by the city of London; in The Unfortunate Traveller, the notion of warfare is intimately connected to the act of narration itself; and in Lenten Stuffe, the Nine Years’ War is a subtext that also impinges on Nashe’s self-projection as a writer. Through Nashe’s career, the various contexts of war in the late 1580s and 1590s find their way into his work, and in most cases, they also furnish a kind of imagery that he would pick up on with typical wit and complexity. War, in other words, certainly exists as an immediate historical context for Nashe’s works, but it is also available to, and used by him as a frame of reference that allows him to elaborate on the condition of authorship.
Obviously, one of the most cataclysmic political events in England during Nashe’s brief life was the Spanish Armada, and while allusions can therefore be expected to occur throughout his works, the most detailed references found their way into a pamphlet by Nashe that was relatively close in time to the Armada itself. Pierce Penilesse (1592) features an extensive and digressive treatment of the seven deadly sins in which the Spanish King – who, according to a marginal gloss, constitutes ‘as great an enemy to mankind as the diuell’ – becomes an embodiment of envy.
4
Unsurprisingly, the passage swells into a patriotic point on the defeat of the Spanish: Onely poore England giues him bread for his cake, and holdes him out at the armes end. His Armadoes (yt like a high wood ouer-shadowed the shrubs of our low ships) fled from the breath of our Cannons, as vapors before the Sun, or as the Elephant flies from the Ram, or the Sea-whale from the noyse of parched bones.
5
I would haue ye perswade an Armie of goutie Vsurers to go to Sea vppon a boon voyage: trie if you can tempt Enuy to embarke himself in the mal’aduenture, and leaue troubling the streame, that Poets and good fellowes may drinke, and Souldiers may sing Placebo, that haue murmured so long at the waters of strife.
6
The State or Kingdome that is in league with all the world, and hath no forraine sword to vexe it, is not halfe so strong or confirmed to endure, as that which liues euery houre in feare of inuasion. There is a certaine waste of the people for whome there is no vse, but warre: and these men must haue some employment still to cut them off.
7
To this effect, the pollicie of Playes is very necessary…For whereas the after-noone beeing the idlest time of the day; wherein men that are their owne masters (as Gentlemen of the Court, the Innes of the Courte, and the number of Captains and Souldiers about London) do wholy bestow themselues vpon pleasure they deuide…either into gameing, following of harlots, drinking, or seeing a Playe: is it not then better (since of four extreames all the world cannot keepe them but they will choose one) that they should betake them to the least, which is Playes?
9
The contrarie to…contention and emulation is securitie, peace, quiet, tranquillitie; when we have no aduersarie to prie into our actions, no malicious eye, whose pursuing our priuate behauiour might make vs more vigilant ouer our imperfections than otherwise we would be.
12
Arguably, this poem forms the key to much of Nashe’s later use of martial imagery. It is true that the conclusion of Strange Newes is a tagline adapted from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, which seems to suggest love more than war: ‘Aut nunquam tentes aut perfice [either don’t try anything, or finish it]’. 14 Nashe had a clear predilection for bon mots from Ovid – Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, Have With You to Saffron-Walden and Summer’s Last Will and Testament all finish in Ovidian Latin, and Pierce Penilesse even acknowledges the Roman poet by name. 15 They are taken from various sources (Metamorphoses, Amores and, in the case of Strange Newes, and Ars Amatoria), but what they at least seem to suggest is that Nashe saw Ovid as a source of identification. 16 In terms of biographical resemblances, what Ovid’s career offered was of course an opportunity to cast himself as the victim of circumstances. However, the poem quoted above opens up a rather different perspective than that of the victimized, and by implication innocent Roman poet. War is here a fundamental condition of the writer’s plight, and it is – Nashe promises – ‘vncessant’ and ‘eternal’.
Needless to say, such outbursts open up Nashe’s extended conflict with Harvey for discussion. While martial imagery is certainly used by both Nashe himself and contemporary critics to describe it, Katherine Duncan-Jones cautions against seeing Nashe’s invective as ‘the vacuous product of a mere paper-war’, since Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593) and the consequences it had for Nashe certainly show that the conflict had a harsh physical dimension as well. 17 The evidence we have even suggests that he risked being hanged for sedition, with only the protection of the Carey family to save him. 18 Of course, Christs Teares, with its apocalyptic tone and theme, can be said to exemplify a more general sense of warfare than just the quarrel with Harvey. Referring to Nashe’s pamphlet, Neil Rhodes lists ‘increasing tension about the succession, the growing number of plots, and the fear of civil war’ as factors that ‘fuelled latent hysteria about social destruction’. 19 But I would argue that Nashe in Christs Teares tends to associate warfare and writing, or more precisely soldiers and poets, their vices but also the mistreatment they receive. Both, for example, are characterized by their excessive vanity: ‘Many Souldiours are most impatient vaine-glorious, in standing vpon theyr honor in euery trifle, & bosting more then euer they did’, Nashe says, and proceeds to writers – ‘Many puny Poets & old ill Poets are mighty vaine-glorious’ – with a bit of Horace’s Epistles thrown in for good measure. 20 Nashe’s list of categories of vain people does not explicitly compare soldiers and poets even if it mentions poets right after soldiers, as if again suggesting a link between them.
This link seems further emphasized when, towards the end of the sermon against the wickedness of London, the narrator laments the ungratefulness and even lack of judgement of the authorities in neglecting provision for soldiers and the learned: ‘No thanks-worthy exhibitions or reasonable pensions will you contribute to maymd Souldiours or poore Schollers, as other Nations doe, but suffer other Nations with your discontented poore to Arme themselues against you’. 21 The image of the poor scholar is of course a commonplace at the time; Christopher Marlowe’s line ‘And to this day is every scholar poor’ in Hero and Leander (a work Nashe was to parody in Lenten Stuffe) is well known. 22 But Nashe’s implication that scholars and soldiers are alike in being neglected or unduly attacked goes well together with the message of his pamphlet and with his mode of self-presentation in the two prefaces he wrote in 1593 and 1594 at the height of the conflict with Harvey. ‘Nothing is there nowe so much in my vowes, as to be at peace with all men’, he says in the first one, published in 1593. However, when Christs Teares was reissued the next year with a new preface and a rewritten passage that had been previously considered an attack on the authorities of London, Nashe resumes the quarrel with Harvey, ‘for treason was shrowded vnder termes of truce’. 23 In passages like these, the metaphorical configuration of war and peace is, as could be expected, enacted at the level of Nashe’s own career.
It can only be speculated whether this pamphlet war induced Nashe to embark on what is unquestionably his most elaborate description of actual warfare, in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). In this work, which opens with the protagonist Jack Wilton swindling his superiors at a military encampment and continues with a gory but largely inaccurate depiction of the siege of Münster in 1535, warfare is consistently paralleled by the act of story-telling itself. Jack’s narration of war is essentially a double exposure, moving around the military camp and, equally deftly, inside the structure of his narrative. Jack’s playing with the expectations of his superiors is paralleled by his playing with the reader’s expectations. One of the innumerable moments of self-reflexivity comes after Jack has framed one of his officers as a traitor. He stops for a moment: ‘Here let me triumph a while, and ruminate a line or two on the excellence of my wit: but I will not breath neither till I haue disfraughted all my knauerie’.
24
The reader is invited to pause with the narrator, although the pause itself turns out to be another piece of ‘knavery’, since the promised rumination is immediately dissolved into a continuation of the story: ‘Another Switzer Captaine that was farre gone for want of the wench, I lead astray most notoriously’. Disguised as a ‘half crowne wench’, Jack is then offered money from the captain, and of course manages to disappear with it.
25
In its literally breathless and cumulative deception, The Unfortunate Traveller, as Ann Rosalind Jones suggests, ‘holds up the narrator’s relationship to the reader as another set of questionable conventions’.
26
Yet what it also does is establish war and military enterprise as the metaphorical foundation for the act of narration itself. Without it – that is, with victory and peace won – the narrative would come to an immediate end. As Jack admonishes himself, I must not place a volume in the precincts of a pamphlet: sleepe an houre or two, and dreame that Turney and Turwin is wonne, that the King is shipt againe into England, and that I am close at hard meate at Windsore or at Hampton Court. What, will you in your indifferent opinions allow me for my trauell no more signorie ouer the Pages than I had before?
27
Significantly, in order to keep the story going, war has to immediately follow war. Upon contracting the sweating sickness in England, Jack again resorts to the breath metaphor: the people contaminated by the disease are so struck by fever that they wish they were goats, since goats ‘take breath, not at the mouth or nose onely, but at the eares also’. 28 But breathing is, as we have already seen, a paradoxical impossibility to Jack, who has to escape to a new encampment: ‘Take breath how they would, I vowd to tarrie no longer among them. As at Turwin I was a demy souldier in iest, so now I became a Martialist in earnest’. 29 He quickly moves on to another opportunity: ‘That Warre thus blowen ouer, and the seuerall Bands dissolued, like a Crowe that still followes aloofe where there is carrion, I flew me ouer to Munster in Germanie’. 30 As the war ‘blows over’, the narrator ‘flies over’, drifting from place to place and topic to topic.
Nashe’s extended depiction of this massacre is, as McKerrow shows, reminiscent of the battle at Frankenhausen in 1525, 9 years before the events at Münster, in which the Anabaptists under Thomas Muntzer were defeated. Nashe thus conflates ‘Muntzer’ with ‘Münster’, which may as McKerrow comments be a deliberate move or a result of writing from memory. 31 Either way, it is tempting to see this collapsing of different historical levels as in line with the self-conscious narration of the text: the ostentatious planlessness of the work even submits the depicted events to a sort of chronological double exposure where different pasts intermingle. What is certain, at any rate, is that the events of war and their narration are consistently subjected to both parallelisms and deliberate contrasts. The description of the battle culminates in a mass where no single components are discernible: ‘so ordinarie at euerie foot-step was the imbrument of yron in bloud, that one could hardly discern heads from bullets, or clottred haire from mangled flesh hung with goare’. As if by reflex, this climactic scene of death in Jack’s narration is paralleled by the anticlimactic death of the narration itself: ‘This tale must at one time or other giue vp the ghost, and as good now as stay longer; I would gladly rid my handes of it cleanly, if I could tell how’. That the latter is capable of quick resurrection is proven in the very next sentence: ‘What is there more as touching this tragedie that you would be resolued of? say quickly, for now is my pen on foote againe’. 32 The grotesque details of the story – long recognized as a fundamental aspect of Nashe’s writing – are reflected also in the vagaries of the style. 33
By the publication of The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe’s career was recognizably – and certainly to himself – a ‘war’, and his rhetoric in this work and elsewhere suggests as much. But in other, later works war becomes a more manifest political context that still has a direct bearing on Nashe’s writing and his economic condition. Lenten Stuffe (1599), for example, has a subtext that concerns warfare, peace and political stability.
34
Obviously, the central object of praise in the text – the smoked herring produced in Great Yarmouth where Nashe had escaped over the scandal of his play The Isle of Dogs in 1598 – stands for economic prosperity. At this time and for centuries onward, herring fishing constituted a vast source of wealth for Great Yarmouth. This wealth also spells peace, Nashe emphasizes, for The redde herring is a legate of peace, and so abhorrent from vnnatural bloudshed that if, in any hewing or slashing, or trials of life & death, there were that hang-man embowelling is, his pursuiuants or balies returne non est inventus, out of one bailiwick he is fled, neuer to be fastened on there more.
35
In other words, the herring shies away from any place where ‘bloudshed’ happens, so much that even law servants searching for it are forced to give up and acknowledge that it cannot be found within their jurisdiction (‘non est inventus’). 36 Not only is the herring in Lenten Stuffe a ‘legate of peace’; however, the elaborate and paradoxical praise of it is also tied to Nashe’s condition as an author. Even if Nashe does not say so explicitly in this passage, running away from the law was precisely what he himself had done prior to writing Lenten Stuffe; in fact, the impetus of the entire pamphlet is found in ‘the straunge turning of the Ile of Dogs frō a commedie to a tragedie two summers past’ which forced Nashe into ‘exile and irkesome discontented abandonment’. 37 If readers in Nashe’s time made any connection between fleeing herring and fleeing author, they would in all likelihood have appreciated the irony in describing Nashe as a legate of peace.
However, peace and war do not only serve as general, abstract contexts for Lenten Stuffe. There are allusions that anchor Nashe’s text squarely in the time when it was written. Exactly at this point, in 1598 and 1599, the English campaign in Ireland was at its most heated and potentially disastrous stage. 38 Most notably, in August 1598, a royal army under Henry Bagenal suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of the Yellow Ford against Irish forces under Hugh O’Donnell and Hugh O’Neill. 39 It is little surprising therefore that Ireland shows up in various places in Lenten Stuffe – for example, in Nashe’s elaborate parody of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: ‘By the sea side on the other side stoode Heroes tower, such an other tower as one of our Irish castles, that is not so wide as a belfree, and a Cobler cannot iert out his elbowes in’. 40 The casual style of the reference and the use of the possessive pronoun are interesting in themselves – as if Ireland at this time was a context that readers would recognize more or less by reflex.
The allusions are not limited to stray references, however. Towards the end of Lenten Stuffe, there is a fable about ‘A faulconer bringing ouer certaine hawkes out of Ireland’, which can be read as an allegorical allusion to English control over the Irish territory. 41 One of the falcons dives for a fish and is swallowed by a shark, which provokes a demonstration of solidarity among all the birds of the land, who declare war due to ‘that trespasse of bloud & death committed against a peere of their bloud royal’. 42 In fact, they quickly organize themselves into an army, with the sparrow-hawk as field marshal, the peacocks as heralds, the cocks as trumpeters and the cranes as pikemen, ‘euery one according to that place by nature hee was most apt for’. The fish respond by ‘elect[ing] a king amongst them that might deraine them to battaile’, and of course, their choice fall upon the herring, who is after all not a predator and is well known for the abundance it generates. 43 All well that ends well, then, but it should be remembered that Nashe’s fable of peace was created against a backdrop of war and instability that gives the narrative a distinct ring of wish-fulfilment.
If the Irish campaign was too well known to need much comment in late 1598, the whole question of war, peace and prosperity is, again, tied to Nashe’s own situation. In the first pages of Lenten Stuffe, Nashe includes a fictitious dialogue with a ‘Brauamente segnior’ who is evidently a soldier of fortune going off to war. The man complains that his lack of money prevents him from being Nashe’s patron. However, he promises that ‘after my returne from Ireland I doubt not but my fortunes will be of some growth to requite you’.
44
Money thus becomes the foundation for Nashe’s own position as an author, as well and peace and national unity.
45
As the imaginary soldier says to Nashe, In the meane time my sword is at your commaund; and, before God, money so scatteringly runnes heere and there vpon vtensilia, furnitures, ancients, and other necessary preparations, (and, which is a double charge, looke how much Tobacco wee carry with vs to expell cold, the like quantitie of Staues-aker wee must prouide vs of to kill lice in that rugged countrey of rebels,) that I say vnto you, in the word of a martialist, wee cannot doo as wee would.
46
War, then, is a waste of money and goods that only the herring – and Nashe’s praise of it – can resolve. It is instructive from the point of Nashe’s career to compare the implications of warfare here to those expressed in the poem that concluded Strange Newes 6 or 7 years earlier. If Strange Newes, written at the height of the Harvey-Nashe quarrel, suggests that peace is impossible without war, peace has now become the foundation for the author’s (and the nation’s) prosperity. At the same time, peace has clearly not been attained, for the wealth that the patron provides is notably absent: the soldier-patron is off to a ‘rugged countrey of rebels’ and spends his money elsewhere. What remains for the author is to drift around the margin, outside the metropolitan centre of literary production, but even this movement is depicted in vaguely martial terms. At one point, Nashe celebrates the fishing fleet of Yarmouth and compares it with ‘the nauy of K. Edgar; who is chronicled & registred with three thousand ships of warre to haue scoured the narrow seas, and sailed round about England euery Summer’. 47 Yet Nashe’s own activity as an author implies charting the circumference of England in similar ways: as he says, ‘I had a crotchet in my head, here to haue giuen the raines to my pen, and run astray thorowout all the coast townes of England’. 48 Strikingly, his own movements almost replicate those of King Edgar’s ‘ships of warre’. Given that Lenten Stuffe is, as Henry Turner suggests, ‘self-involved and driven by perceived personal injury’, the figure of war does not seem possible for Nashe to abandon. 49 Rather, war preserves its double status of context and self-referential metaphor throughout his career.
In other words, warfare becomes a sounding-board for Nashe in his authorial project, but we are also reminded of the literal presence of war as a reality that shaped the conditions of Nashe’s world – because ‘captains and soldiers’ attended the theatres, because of the shortage of pensions that soldiers received and because of the Irish war that loomed across the horizon. As I have suggested, all of these factors went into the creation of his texts and endowed his literary career with a degree of specificity that phrases like ‘paper-war’ cannot capture. War in Nashe exists simultaneously, and interrelatedly, on the political, intellectual and aesthetic levels. It feeds into his literary self-projection but also constitutes a crucial dimension of the social world in which his texts were produced.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
