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 written for Archbishop Whitgift, and helped in the composition of plays--though there is no passage in any extant play that can definitely be attributed to him. Whatever the scope and range of his private or lost works, his publications and persona are more limited and intense: Nashe was the most brilliant, explosive, and inventive prose writer of Elizabethan England. He loved prose, and wrote it with an energy and a verve that impressed, irked, and intimidated his contemporaries, from barbers to scholars to bureaucrats. Nashe's pamphlets have their putative subjects: the abuses of learning, the seven deadly sins, the fall of Jerusalem, a...