SOURCE: "Tom Nashe and Jack Wilton: Personality as Structure in The Unfortunate Traveller," in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring, 1966, pp. 207-16.

In the following essay, Lanham analyzes The Unfortunate Traveller as a fictional autobiography expressing both the character of Jack Wilton and the psychology of Nashe himself

If The Unfortunate Traveller has, alone of the shorter Elizabethan fictions, stayed alive for a modern learned audience, it has done so at least partly because it presents so many problems of interpretation. It is commonly called a picaresque novel, but few critics have agreed on just what such an attribution means. It is usually thought to be a satire, but the target remains uncertain. To call it a random collection of jests and stylistic parodies does not seem to do justice to a commonly felt unity of mood and attitude that it shares with the rest...