Thomas Nashe Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Peter Holbrook

Critical Essay by Peter Holbrook

SOURCE: "Nashe, Contradiction, and Interplay: The Example of Lenten Stuffe" in Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois Tragedy, Shakespeare, Associated University Press, Inc., 1994, pp. 40-56.

In the following excerpt from his study of literature and social stratification in Renaissance England, Holbrook analyzes the social symbolism of Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, with particular emphasis on themes of the outsider and the interplay between high and low social status.

Nashe, Contradiction, and Interplay: The Example of Lenten Stuffe

… The politics of the Nasheian text appear complex. I have suggested that Nashe's revision of a traditional Elizabethan rhetorical variety into a disorienting multiplicity or apparently undisciplined formlessness can be read contrarily: as potential radical undermining and scandalous mockery of those canons of decorum that underpin social and aesthetic order; as the conservative's bitter indictment, through grotesque mimicry, of a chaotic, repulsive contemporary scene. In either case the contrast is with...
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