SOURCE: Hutson, Lorna. “Festivity and Productivity.” In Thomas Nashe in Context, pp. 72-99. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

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.

We have seen how the need to inculcate responsible social attitudes through literature produced a schematically pre-fabricated or compendious style of discourse which could not but frustrate a writer whose special talent was, as was Nashe's, for improvisation. Prompted by his dissatisfaction with the costive, rhetoric-laden style of academic writing, Nashe initially located the opportunity for a more spontaneous creativity in the position of a commercial writer such as Robert Greene, who could respond flexibly to the market and, as Nashe wrote in the preface to Menaphon, ‘hath liued all dayes of his life by...