Thomas Nashe claimed in Strange News (1593) that he had "written in all sorts of humors privately ... more than any young man of my age in England." He left in manuscript an erotic poem dedicated to "Lord S," published late in his short life a show...

I. SPENSER'S BACK PAGES As one aspect of the capacious methodological program David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass christened "The New Boredom" (Kastan 18), (1) materialist case studies provide benchmarks against which literary scholars have learned to measure their investment in speculation...

Thomas Nashe (1567-1600) is famous for his bizarre prose style-full of neologisms and disjointed periods, and run together with all manner of 'high' and 'low' language-racy, eloquent, slangy, and wildly ironical. Much of this stylistic gallimaufry is part of a broader 'dislocatedness', the...

In this essay, Hibbard details what is known and what can be surmised of Nashe's efforts to make a living as a writer, suggesting that in Pierce Penilesse the author strove to capitalize on his status as a starving artist and not to produce a coherent satire. The critic concludes that the public response to Pierce Penilesse steered Nashe toward the kind of occasional writing that would characterize his career.

In this essay, Hutson provides the social and economic context for Nashe's writing. The critic finds in Nashe a transitional figure between new and old economies, comparing his work to that of Jonson, Herrick, and other contemporaries.

In this excerpt, McKerrow surveys the classical and contemporary works that most influenced Nashe's writing, particularly those of Pietro Aretino and François Rabelais. The critic argues that Nashe's borrowings often do not reflect a significant debt to earlier authors, suggesting that the author read widely but not deeply.