History consists of action; and how unimportant beside this is the question of writing or not writing, how wholly immaterial, beside the fact of doing and making, is the word that describes them.1
Nor is the definition [of material culture] limited only to matter in the solid state. Fountains are liquid examples, as are lily ponds, and material that is partly gas includes hot air balloons and neon signs … Even language is part of material culture, a prime example of it in its gaseous state. Words, after all, are air masses shaped by the speech apparatus according to culturally acquired rules.2
ON 4 August 1589, a group of radical puritans arrived in Warrington in Lancashire; hidden in their cart were a dismantled printing press, three cases of type, twelve reams of paper, and a supply of ink. They had just completed a six-day journey from Wolston, near Coventry, and were on their way to a new safe house, where they would print the latest in a sequence of spectacularly inflammatory pamphlets designed to shake the foundations of the established church. But as the radicals unloaded their equipment, a case fell on the ground and some type dropped out. The onlookers did not recognize the curious bits of metal and stood ‘marvayling what they shold be’. One of the printers, John Hodgkins, thinking on his feet, ‘answered they were shott’, and was apparently believed. But news of the incident got about and ten days later the insurgents were tracked down to a rented house just outside Manchester. They were taken to London, possibly tortured, and prosecuted for their part in creating the print sensation that was ‘Martin Marprelate’, who had transformed the terms of engagement by turning theological debate into knockabout comedy. ‘For jesting is lawful by circumstances, even in the greatest matters.’3
Hodgkins’s improvised cover story—the disguising of print as shot—is superbly apt to the nature of the violent pamphlet war in which he was engaged. (The printer had apparently spent time working as a ‘saltpeterman’, a maker of gunpowder; one commentator judged that this made him ‘a good printer for such saltpeter and gunnepowder workes’).4 For Martin, laying down a syllogism against the ‘petty antichrists, petty popes, proud prelates’ was like initiating a bout in a wrestling match, and was best prefaced with a snarl: ‘Then have at you’. He delighted in threats of violence, as when he bluntly told the Dean of Salisbury that he would ‘shortly … have twenty fists about [his] ears’, or (elsewhere) argued him into a noose: ‘Thus you see brother Bridges, M. Marprelate … hath proved you to have deserved a caudle of hempseed, and a plaster of neckweed, as well as some of your brethren the papists.’5 Martin’s threats were returned with interest by those writers who were employed by the authorities to answer him in his own vein. The anonymous Papp with a Hatchet (1589)—the title of which promises baby food with a lethal cutting-edge—is typical in its fantasies of retribution: ‘O here were a notable full point, to leaue Martin in the hangmans apron; Nay, he would be glad to scape with hanging, weele first haue him lasht through the Realme with cordes, that when he comes to the gallowes, he may be bleeding newe.’6 Such lurid imaginings were rendered the more desperate by the fact that nobody knew who or where ‘Martin’ was—there was no body to lash and hang.7 The anti-Martinists compensated for this by forcing a body on their adversary, bringing him ‘attired like an Ape on the stage’, so that he could be ‘wormd and launced [and] … made a Maygame’.8 Or they treated Martin’s books as his body. In the anonymous Return of the Renowned Caualiero Pasquill (1589), Pasquill reports that he has just received a new pamphlet, ‘olde Martins Protestation in Octauo … I see by the volume, hee languisheth euery day more and more, the pride of his flesh is so much falne, that you may tell euery bone in hys body now’ (I 100). The Protestation (1589), Martin’s last gasp, had been partly typeset by amateurs, and the impending collapse of the Martinist enterprise can be read in the book’s dishevelled lines of print and in a welter of turned or missing letters. In a period when it was the fate of banned books to be burned by the common hangman, Pasquill’s equation between the book and the body made sense.
Thomas Nashe cut his teeth on the Marprelate Controversy, to which he contributed at least one pamphlet. His writings are full of echoes of Martin’s style, with its unpredictable interplay between the spoken and the written, its mock-politeness and blatant sarcasm, and its running celebration of its own wit and playfulness, as contrasted with the leaden dullness of the enemy. The extent of Nashe’s Marprelate-envy is suggested by the name he gave to one of his earliest literary personae, Pierce Penilesse, which borrows Martin’s alliteration and his self-conscious plainness (albeit with reference to the rustics of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, rather than to Luther). As one pamphlet war (the Marprelate Controversy) turned into another (his long-running feud with the Cambridge scholar and civil lawyer Gabriel Harvey), Nashe’s name became a byword for textual violence. A Cambridge student comedy, The Returne from Parnassus, written around the time of his death in 1601, calls him ‘a great schole-boy giuing the world a bloudy nose’ and (more flatteringly) says that he ‘carryed the deadly Stockado in his pen’ (a ‘stoccado’ was a stab with a pointed weapon).9 Charles Fitzgeffrey, in a Latin elegy for Nashe published in the same year, wrote that Death had to steal ‘the lad’s armed tongue and his terrible pen, those twin thunderbolts’ before she could attack; otherwise ‘Death herself would have feared to die’.10 Michael Drayton allows Nashe, ‘although he but a proser were’, a place in the catalogue of poets he included in a verse epistle to Henry Reynolds. ‘Sharply Satirick was he’, judges Drayton, adding that ‘Those words shall hardly be set downe with inke;/Shall scorch and blast, so as his could, where he,/Would inflict vengeance’.11 Sir William Vaughan, in a medical treatise, recalled how ‘Thomas Nash a scurrilous Pamphleter in Q. Elizabeths dayes, vsed to drinke Aqua vitae with Gun-powder to inspire his malicious spirit with rayling matter … Which inflaming Potion wrought so eagerly vppon his Braine, that hee would often beate himselfe about the noddle, and scratch the Walls round about him, vntill hee met with some extrauagant furious Termes.’12 Vaughan was only slightly misreporting Nashe’s own boast: ‘I haue tearmes (if I be vext) laid in steepe in Aquafortis, & Gunpowder, that shall rattle through the Skyes, and make an Earthquake in a Pesants eares’ (I 195), while Drayton recalls the terms of Nashe’s praise of the ‘scourge of Princes’, Pietro Aretino, whose ‘pen was sharp pointed lyke a poinyard; no leafe he wrote on but was lyke a burning glasse to set on fire all his readers’ (II 264).13 More charmingly, Nashe compared his ‘sweetly sour and pleasantly sharp’ style to the sting of a bee, ‘a creature not so bigge as a Wart with thorough hairs on an old wiues chin, yet he is priuiledged, in so much as he is free of Honny lane, to bestir him with his sting as ordinarily as a Sergeant with his mace’ (II 185).
All of these comments testify to the overwhelming physicality of Nashe’s style. Nashe bites (the pun on ‘gnash’ was current in his lifetime).14 His satirical vein is like a sword-thrust, a punch on the nose, a bee-sting; his words are steeped in gunpowder, or inspired by drinking it, as well as by fits of head-banging and wall-scratching. Not coincidentally, his writing has an extraordinary power to evoke the world and the body (‘a creature not so bigge as a Wart with thorough hairs on an old wiues chin’). While it is common (in the manner of my first epigraph) to oppose words and deeds and to think of language as a disembodied system that floats above the world of ‘brute objects’, Nashe’s writings invite us to reflect on the extent to which words are deeds and texts are things.
This makes Nashe a useful writer to think with at a moment when early modern studies, and humanities research more generally, is awash with physicality and materiality, with objects of all kinds. The current fascination with material culture has drawn our attention to items of clothing and changes in fashion; to domestic interiors and home furnishings; to the ‘face-furniture’ of hairstyles and beards; to new technologies and their consequences; and to practices of shopping, collection, and display (among many other subjects). Such studies have opened up a new interdisciplinary space, a ground upon which historians, art historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, literary critics, and museum curators meet. But they have also provoked resistance from literary scholars who complain that the ‘thing’ is an under-theorized distraction from the core business of textual and historical interpretation. Jonathan Gil Harris worries that the new materialism is merely a new antiquarianism, delivering fetishized, static objects which convey the illusion of touching the past without the need for interpretation. He urges us to recognize that matter is always in motion and that it is only in its mobility, mutability, and transience that it becomes meaningful.15 For Douglas Bruster, the new materialism is a distraction from the older Marxist tradition ‘of materialist criticism concerned with the momentous transition to the modern, proto-capitalist world’. Subjects such as ‘class struggle, hegemony, or ideology’ are having to make way for ‘objects in the world: clothing, crockery, sugar’. The ‘critical fetishism’ of this turn risks ‘replacing large with small and the intangible with what is capable of being touched or held’.16 Having said that, Bruster goes on to suggest that we should start ‘taking sixteenth- and seventeenth-century materialist thought seriously’ by attending to figurations and theorizations of materiality in the works of just such writers as Nashe.17
This chapter aims to follow up that suggestion and to explore the nature of the ‘stuff’ purveyed by the author of Nashes Lenten Stuffe.18 But as we begin that investigation, it is worth pausing to reconsider the critiques of Bruster, Gil Harris, and their ilk in the light of arguments elaborated by the anthropologist Daniel Miller in his recent book Stuff. For their interventions might well be understood as part of what Miller calls ‘a larger denigration of material culture in our own society, where materialism itself is viewed as superficial’.19 If such things as clothing, appearance, style, and shopping are understood as affairs of the surface, then those who study them might also be tainted with superficiality—hence (until recently) the ‘extremely low status’ of material culture studies within the discipline of anthropology.20 As Miller argues, one of the culprits here is the Western intellectual’s embrace of a ‘depth ontology’, which has it that ‘being—what we truly are—is located deep inside ourselves and is in direct opposition to the surface. A clothes shopper is shallow because a philosopher or a saint—and here we might also include ‘a literary/cultural theorist’—‘is deep’.21 A second factor that stokes anxiety about the study of material culture is what Miller calls ‘the humility of things’, their surprising capacity ‘to fade out of focus and remain peripheral to our vision, and yet determinant of our behaviour and identity’.22 In his analysis, objects furnish defining frames for our behaviour, and to draw attention to them is to provoke an indefinable sense of embarrassment. None of this is to deny that objects require theorization; the process of ‘thinking through things’ poses numerous conceptual challenges. But recent anthropological work suggests that this process needs also to be material (engaged with the distinctive properties of objects) and visceral.23
One way to begin an investigation into Nashe and materiality is to ask what his writing does to conventional ideas of textual substance—where the meat of a text is the res or thing, the content, which is articulated by means of the words (verba). One of the most celebrated and debated critical assessments of Nashe’s works is C. S. Lewis’s claim that
though Nashe’s pamphlets are commercial literature, they come very close to being, in another way, ‘pure’ literature: literature which is, as nearly as possible, without a subject. In a certain sense of the verb ‘say’, if asked what Nashe ‘says’, we should have to reply, Nothing. He tells no story, expresses no thought, maintains no attitude. Even his angers seem to be part of his technique rather than real passions. In his exhilarating whirlwind of words we find not thought nor passion but simply images: images of ludicrous and sometimes frightful incoherence boiling up from a dark void.24
There is much that one might take issue with here—the idea that there exists something called ‘pure’ literature, which is without content; the idea that Nashe says nothing (which he might have thought strange, given his clearly enunciated views about hypocritical puritans, miserly patrons, and the children of East Anglian ropemakers). Nonetheless, Lewis’s statement testifies to the inescapable suspicion that Nashe’s writing inverts the usual relationship between content and style, res and verba. Where the classical rhetorical tradition insists on the primacy of res, and criticizes those who pursue style at the expense of substance, Nashe perversely forces our attention to his ‘vaine’, a vaine which he insists is utterly original, ‘of my owne begetting, and cals no man father in England but my selfe’ (I 319). Instead of ‘a subject’, we are presented with an ‘exhilarating whirlwind of words’. Or, to follow the classical tropes, instead of a soul, Nashe gives us a body; instead of a body, he gives us clothing.25
But these dichotomies are never simple. When Daniel Miller explores the interlacing of people’s identities with their clothing, he reverses the familiar polarities of surface and depth, suggesting that identity is made on the outside, in the interaction between our bodies and objects. Such an interaction is anticipated in the classical rhetorician’s understanding of style. Although style and substance, verba and res, could be separated in theory, in practice they were inextricable; the process by which a soul found its body or a body its clothes was imperceptible. Nor was the surface a matter of trifling ornament. The tropes and schemes of rhetoric provided the res with its armour and its weapons. The word ‘ornament’ derives from the Latin ‘ornare’, meaning ‘to fit out, equip, adorn’, often with a militaristic aim.26 Nashe’s invectives, with their ‘tearmes … laid in steepe in Aquafortis, & Gunpowder’, their ‘whole artillerie store of eloquence’, flex stylistic muscle (I 195, 321). At one delightful moment in his paper-war with Harvey, Nashe magnanimously declares that his enemy ‘hath some good words, but he cannot writhe them and tosse them to and fro nimbly, or so bring them about, that hee maye make one streight thrust at his enemies face’ (I 282). Here it is a complex interaction of style and meaning (the point or pointedness of an utterance) that makes polemic deadly (or not).
More generally, throughout his writings, Nashe enjoys confounding the traditional opposition between surface and depth. Amid the hellfire sermonizing of Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), he tells the ‘Gorgeous Ladies of the Court’ that ‘it is not the wearing of any costly burnisht apparraile that shall be obiected vnto you for sinne, but the pryde of your harts, which (like the Moath) lyes closely shrouded amongst the thrids of that apparaile. Nothing els is garish apparaile, but Prydes vlcer broken forth’ (II 138). The internal sin (pride) is not hidden beneath the externals (clothing), but lurks in their very warp and weft, which in the second sentence turns out itself to be nothing more than the pus-laden bodily extrusion of sin. This is part of a broader Nashean habit of eliding the physical and the spiritual in ways which seem at once bizarrely grotesque and symptomatic of an episteme in which body, mind, and soul were acknowledged to be complexly entangled.27
Registering the force of superficies, Nashe is obsessed with the physical, with bodies and clothes as ever-proliferating and often absurdly incoherent assemblages. Nashe’s Jack Wilton, turning his back on his early escapades in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), announces himself as ‘no common squire, no vndertrodden torch-bearer’, launching into an account of his fashionable garb:
I had my feather in my cap as big as a flag in the fore-top; my French dublet gelte [castrated] in the bellie as though (like a pig readie to be spitted) all my guts had bin pluckt out; a paire of side paned [striped] hose that hung downe like two scales filled with Holland cheeses; my longe stock [stocking] that sate close to my docke [buttocks], and smoothered [concealed] not a scab or a leacherous hairie sinew on the calfe of my legge; my rapier pendant like a round sticke fastned in the tacklings for skippers the better to climbe by; my cape cloake of blacke cloth, ouer-spreading my backe like a thorne-backe [a ray or skate], or an Elephants eare, that hanges on his shoulders like a countrie huswiues banskin [barm-skin, leather apron], which she thirles hir spindle on … (II 227)
What is striking about this blazon is the manic scatter-fire of similes and the repeated recourse to the pointedly homely, downmarket, or bizarre in the choice of vehicles. So we get spitted pigs, Holland cheeses, ships’ tackle, elephants’ ears (presumably seen in woodcuts, such as those in Gesner’s Historia Animalium, rather than first-hand), and peasant aprons. It is impossible to put Wilton together from the incommensurable variousness of his comparisons. His description echoes and exacerbates the early modern tendency to see clothing as a complex composite, made up of numerous detachable elements, while the lowly randomness of his object-world looks like a reaction against the Euphuistic style that dominated the prose of the previous generation.28 Nashe had already travestied the ‘old vayne of similitudes’ explicitly in the ‘scuruy Prologue’ he provided for his proto-masque of 1592, Summers Last Will and Testament (III 234). Wilton eschews laborious classical clichés and far-fetched details of natural history, instead turning his prose into a chaotic inventory of the everyday.29
However homely the simile, the act of comparison still implies a certain imaginative lavishness. But some of Nashe’s most memorable descriptive passages are those in which he is able to collapse the terms of a simile, so that elements of clothing or appearance are not merely like other things in the world, they are those other things. This is the case with allegorical personifications such as Greediness and his wife Dame Niggardize in Pierce Penilesse (1592), the latter dressed ‘in a sedge rug kirtle, that had beene a mat time out of minde, a course hempen raile [cloak] about her shoulders, borrowed of the one end of a hop-bag, an apron made of Almanackes out of date (such as stand vpon Screens, or on the backside of a dore in a Chandlers shop), and an old wiues pudding pan on her head, thrumd [ornamented] with the parings of her nailes’ (I 167). Something similar happens in The Unfortunate Traveller’s description of the anabaptist leader John Leiden and his army of ‘base handicrafts, as coblers and curiers and tinkers’, issuing forth to battle during the siege of Munster. ‘Perchance here and there you might see a fellow that had a canker-eaten scull on his head, which serued him and his ancestors for a chamber pot two hundred yeeres, and another that had bent a couple of yron dripping pans armour-wise, to fence his backe and his belly’ (II 232–3). Nashe is sharply attentive to creative recycling—the use of old almanacs to line fire-screens and chandlers’ shop doors, the turning of skulls into chamber-pots before they are commandeered again as helmets.30 Necessity is the mother of invention, for the miser and the anabaptist, but also for the writer.
When Nashe turns explicitly to figure writing we find ourselves in the same world of desperate patchwork. In The Unfortunate Traveller, Jack Wilton stops off at Wittenberg to hear university orations that are ‘all by patch & by peecemeale stolne out of Tully’; these ‘stale galymafries’ pass for learning in ‘many vniuersities at this daie’. ‘If of a number of shreds of [Cicero’s] sentences [a speaker] can shape an oration, from all the world he carries it awaie, although in truth it be no more than a fooles coat of many colours’ (II 246). Nor are these shreds obtained at first-hand. Glancing at one of the most popular Ciceronian cribs, Wilton comments that ‘I pitie Nizolius that had nothing to do but picke thrids ends out of an olde ouerworne garment’ (II 251). Christs Teares levels comparable charges at contemporary preachers, who abound in excerpts from scripture, ‘but … so vgly daubed, plaistred, and patcht on, so peeuishly speckt & applyde, as if a Botcher (with a number of Satten and Veluette shreddes) should cloute and mend Leather-doublets & Cloth-breeches’ (II 123–4). In Strange Newes (1593), Nashe picks on an individual preacher, Gabriel Harvey’s brother Richard, charging him with recycling his Cambridge sermons in a printed book, the 1590 Theologicall Discourse of the Lambe of God and his Enemies. This Nashe describes as ‘turning an olde coate (like a Broker)’—a broker being a pawnbroker advancing loans on clothing and household stuff—‘and selling it for a new’ (II 271).31 Meanwhile, Harvey’s practice in dragging out a pamphlet to the length of Foure Letters, when he had initially published only the first two, requires a ‘sowterly Metaphor’, a metaphor fit for a cobbler: ‘first contriuing his confutation in a short Pamplet of six leaues, like a paire of summer pumps, afterward (winter growing on) [he] clapt a paire of double soales on it like a good husband [i.e. a thrifty man], added eight sheets more, and prickt those sheets or soales, as full of the hob-nayles of reprehension as they could sticke’ (II 263).32 If texts are clothes, they are usually not new clothes, but clothes broken, clouted, patched, and resold.33
The irony of all of these descriptions will not be lost on readers of Nashe, whose books are, without exception, patchwork and piecemeal outfits. Large sections of his first work, The Anatomie of Absurditie (1589), and of his later bestseller, Pierce Penilesse, are directly translated from Latin sources. The tonal unevenness of The Unfortunate Traveller, its cut-and-pasted character, is a key source of its difficulty and its fascination. And his last acknowledged production, Lenten Stuffe (1599), is a crazy mixture of mock-chronicle, economic position paper, aetiological fable, and political allegory.34 The cobbled-together nature of Nashe’s writing is partly an inevitable result of his inhabiting a notebook culture. He was able to spot Richard Harvey’s recyclings because he found excerpts from The Lambe of God in ‘a booke of sermons that my Tutor at Cambridge made me gather euery Sunday’ and in Lenten Stuffe he complained that his writing was hampered by his enforced exile from the capital: ‘of my note-books and all books else here in the countrey I am bereaued, whereby I might enamell and hatch ouer this deuice more artificially and masterly … had I my topickes by me … I might haps marshall my termes in better aray’ (III 175–6).35 But Nashe’s botching-up of texts is also a deliberate literary artifice. As in his depictions of clothing, so in his textile texts he was repeatedly drawn to the dialectic of poverty and recycling. Although he frequently gives voice to an exalted sense of the possibilities of literary creativity, he continually returns to its fundamental mouldiness—the sense that there is nothing new under the sun, just a lot of more-or-less creative citation. Nashe is the equivalent in the literary sphere of his close contemporary, the inventor Hugh Plat, who found in the famines of the 1590s the inspiration for innumerable ‘remedies’, many of them based on the ingenious recycling of waste-products.36 Plat had, appropriately enough, begun his career in print by publishing books of sentences and aphorisms gathered from Seneca, Petrarch, and the Church Fathers.37
Nashe’s interest in lowly things, substances that are clinging by their fingernails to their objecthood, is, needless to say, intimately connected with his personal lack of that prince among worldly substances, money. For all the ‘negative capability’, the restless innovation and shiftiness of stance that has been identified in Nashe, there are several constants in his writing, and one is that his writing presents itself as the solution to dire material need.38 Although he denied that he could be identified with Pierce Penilesse, an impoverished wit forced to plead with Satan for ‘delicious gold’ (I 165), a slip of the pen suggests their proximity.39 A year later, in Christs Teares, Nashe attributed the ‘fantasticall Satirisme’ of his skirmishes with Marprelate and Harvey to his need for cash: ‘into some spleanatiue vaines of wantonnesse heeretofore haue I foolishlie relapsed, to supply my priuate wants’ (II 12–13). The Unfortunate Traveller’s Jack Wilton begins life as the embodiment of the cony-catcher or con man; during his subsequent journeys across Europe he dangles from the purse-strings of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, ‘a right noble Lord, liberalitie it selfe (if in this yron age there were any such creature as liberalitie left on the earth)’ (II 242). And the emphasis on literary poverty continues into Lenten Stuffe, in which Nashe describes how, fleeing the London authorities in 1597, he was not just parted from his notebooks, but also ‘sequestered … from the woonted meanes of my maintenance’ and forced to become one of the ‘Frier mendicants of our profession’—the Elizabethan equivalent of a pre-Reformation beggar-monk (III 154, 156). From such unpromising beginnings, Nashe’s works propose a strong equivalence between copia—the literary fecundity explored by Erasmus in his educational textbook De duplici copia verborum ac rerum—and money. Even if writing cannot make you rich, an abundance of words offers a respite from penury and starvation. At one unobtrusive moment in The Unfortunate Traveller the Spanish ambassador is welcomed to Rome with a feast, ‘where if a poet should spend all his life time in describing a banket, he could not feast his auditors halfe so wel with wordes, as [the Pope] doth his guest with iunkets’ (II 317).40 The comedy of the zeugma barely registers, since this writer regularly entertains the possibility that one might live on words alone.
Predicated on poverty, Nashe’s writing feeds on the fantasy that text itself can overcome poverty—not just through its eventual marketability (the fact that it can be turned into pamphlets and sold), but in the very moment of its creation. He is drawn to liars and egregious confabulators, illicit parodists of the arts of rhetoric who use words to create something from nothing. Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy devotes itself to rebutting the charge that poets are liars, but for all that he reverences Sidney, Nashe can blithely denounce a ‘libell of leasings’ by Martin Marprelate by calling it ‘poetica licentia’ or poetic licence (III 347). He attacks Gabriel Harvey for having ‘in one booke of tenne sheets of paper, … published aboue two hundred lies’, but then goes on to confess that it is not lying per se that is the problem: ‘Had they been wittie lies, or merry lies, they would neuer haue greev’d mee: but palpable lies, damned lies, lies as big as one of the Guardes chynes of beefe, who can abide?’ (I 269). Even this objection to especially mountainous mendacities would not last. Jack Wilton draws his energy from extempore lies (he brags about the ease with which he coined an ‘impregnable excuse to be gone’ when he tired of duping a gull, unlike a victim who could only splutter ‘lies which he had not yet stampt’) and the celebrity-studded narrative of his unfortunate travels is one long shaggy-dog story (II 224–5). Nashes Lenten Stuffe is an enormous, exorbitant lie, a red herring of a text in praise of the red herring and of the Utopia of Great Yarmouth. Even as he concludes it, the author knows that this book will be condemned as ‘playing with a shettlecocke, or tossing empty bladders in the air’ (III 225).
‘Empty bladders’—the phrase crystallizes Nashe’s paradoxical immaterial materiality, his world of base ‘stuff’ that does not quite qualify for objecthood because it is too lowly, swollen, and (for all its entertainment-value) ultimately hollow. The res that does not quite qualify as res— be it Harvey or herring—is his stock-in-trade. In this he resembles that early modern merchant of strange substances, the antiquary. To enter an antiquary’s shop is (according to Pierce Penilesse) to be confronted with ‘a thousand iymiams and toyes’, the value of which is pure fantasy: ‘They will blow their nose in a box, and say it is the spittle that Diogenes spet in ones face.’ The antiquary is capable of getting money for old rope, quite literally: ‘I know one sold an olde rope with foure knots on it for foure pound, in that he gaue out, it was the length and bredth of Christs Tomb.’ Elsewhere, Nashe tells Harvey that he ought not to be ashamed to be called the son of a ropemaker: ‘Had I a Ropemaker to my father, & somebody had cast it in my teeth, I would foorthewith haue writ in praise of Ropemakers, & prou’d it by sound sillogistry to be one of the 7. liberal sciences’ (I 270). Logic and rhetoric are bellows to inflate any subject, any substance, however lowly. ‘Euery man can say Bee to a Battledore, and write in prayse of Vertue and the seuen Liberall Sciences, thresh corne out of the full sheaues and fetch water out of the Thames; but out of drie stubble to make an after haruest, and a plentifull croppe without sowing, and wring iuice out of a flint, thats Pierce a Gods name, and the right tricke of a workman’ (III 152). To make an inflated discourse out of the thinnest materials is the archetypal Nashean challenge.
This holds true for whole texts and for the extraordinary words that go to make up those texts. Early in his career, Nashe had the temerity to attack Gabriel Harvey for his ‘inkehornisme’, his tendency to coin or propagate extravagantly unlikely new and strained words and phrases. The list that Nashe compiles is a feast of inflated terms and phrases, many of which proved surprisingly durable; among them are ‘conscious mind’, ‘canicular tales’, ‘deceitful perfidy’, ‘notorietie’, ‘negotiation’, ‘effectuate’, ‘this Aretinish mountain of huge exaggerations’, ‘addicted to Theory’—and, strikingly, ‘materiallitie’ (I 316).41 But the assault on Harvey is somewhat blunted when Nashe concludes it by complaining that ‘euerie third line hath some of this ouer-rackt absonisme’—where ‘absonisme’ is itself plainly a neologism. Here again, this author would come to abandon any scruples he may have had early on, developing a style which was probably more innovative per square yard of patched text than Shakespeare. A search on the online Oxford English Dictionary—admittedly a flawed instrument, since its early modern entries are badly in need of updating—currently yields more than seven hundred words (or senses) for which Nashe furnishes the earliest citation.42
The list is full of rich coinages, many of which are distilled essence of Nashe. Christs Teares condemns those who turn atheists because ‘they cannot grosslie palpabrize or feele God with their bodily fingers’ (II 115). Here ‘palpabrize’ is a prickly mouthful of a word that catches the desire of a doubting Thomas to feel before he believes, testing everything on the touchstone of the body.43 From the same work comes ‘multifarious’ (‘The Scripture thou madest a too-to compounde Cabalisticall substaunce of, by canonizing such a multifarious Genealogie of Comments’ [II 80]), a neologism invaluable for a writer who thrives on the evocation of plenitude.44 When, in his preface to Greene’s Menaphon (1589), Nashe complains of writers who ‘busie themselues with the indeavours of Art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck verse if they should haue neede’ (III 315), the freshly-minted ‘Latinize’ furnishes a word to track the increasing speed of inter-linguistic traffic. Nashe’s innovations also enrich the vocabulary of insult (‘denunciate’, ‘ninnyhammer’, ‘noddyship’, ‘pish’, and ‘rampalion’), and of sex (‘bona-roba’, ‘dildo’, and ‘ingle’).45
Yet, while some of these coinages are characterful, the principle at work in most of them is very basic: the bigger the better. Nashe seems to have believed that any word could be improved by adding an extra syllable, usually ‘-ize’; so as well as ‘Latinize’ and ‘palpabrize’ we get ‘beruffianize’, ‘chameleonize’, ‘Christianize’, ‘documentize’, ‘encomionize’, ‘infamize’, ‘myrmidonize’, ‘oblivionize’, and ‘oraculize’, ‘phlebotomize’, and ‘superficialize’. Inevitably, in this world of linguistic hyperactivity, some -izes harden into -isms; hence ‘Chaucerism’, ‘Italianism’, ‘pedantism’, and ‘thrasonism’. In the letter prefacing the second edition of Christs Teares, Nashe explicitly defends his inflationary neologisms, answering ‘reprehenders that complain of my boystrous compound wordes, and ending my Italionate coyned verbes all in Ize’ by asserting that ‘no winde that blowes strong but is boystrous, no speech or wordes of any power or force to confute and perswade but must bee swelling and boystrous’ (II 66–7). The claim here is that large words are especially forceful, as if the extra breath that is required to enunciate them were itself a source of energy, blowing down all before it.46
But this defensive passage also casts the value of a long word in economic terms, when Nashe moves on to defend compound words—such terms as ‘Saboth-ceased’, ‘dust-died’, ‘prayer-prospering’, ‘fome-painted’, and ‘mingle-colourd’ (to choose a paragraph [II 66–7] more or less at random). In creating such compounds, he imitates rich men ‘who, hauing gathered store of white single money together, conuert a number of those small little scutes into great peeces of gold, such as double Pistols and Portugues’ (II 184).47 English abounds in ‘the single money of monosillables, which are the only scandall of it’. So whenever Nashe had several such words to rub together, he took them to the ‘compounders … and exchanged them foure into one, and others into more, according to the Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian’. Asserting the virtue of ‘carrying much in a small roome’ (II 184), Nashe fashions himself as the linguistic equivalent of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, a player in the big league, the international financial/lexical marketplace. At the same time, by claiming that his compounds are a form of legitimate exchange, he defers the obvious charge that his way with language represents a form of illicit coining.48
Nonetheless, just as ‘double Pistols and Portegues’ can always be converted back into paltry ‘halfe-pence, three-farthings, and two-pences’, so there is frequently a sense that Nashe’s ‘swelling and boystrous’ words are ripe for deflation. It is Nashe who bequeaths us ‘impecunious’ (when he accuses Harvey of being ‘a poore impecunious creature’ [III 90]), an orotund Latinate coinage the richness of which is entirely at odds with its meaning (‘having no money, penniless; in want of money’).49 In this case, the gold coin turns out to be very little when translated into plain English. ‘Protractive’ (from the same page of Haue with You to Saffron-walden [1596]) is a word that has been stretched on the rack until its sound echoes its sense (‘prolonging; extended, lengthy’). But where a straightforward English equivalent exists, extension looks like over-extension, and it is no surprise that the OED’s second citation of the word should come from Shakespeare’s Agamemnon, rationalizing his failure to conquer Troy with much bombast in Troilus and Cressida.50 Other Nashean novelties such as ‘bubbly’ and ‘balderdash’—brought together in Lenten Stuffe as he describes how the sands of the Norfolk coast first separated themselves from the sea, decreeing that they would no more ‘haue their heads washt with his bubbly spume or Barbers balderdash’ (III 160)—are revealing in their very frothiness, a momentary boisterousness that gives them only a tenuous claim on substantiality.51 The OED does not trouble to record a fleeting coinage such as ‘Gogmagognes’, meaning ‘greatness’ (‘great personages … from their high estate and not their high statures propogate the eleuaute titles of their Gogmagognes’ [III 186]). Like ‘protractive’, ‘Gogmagognes’ expands on expansiveness, but only by reference to the giants conquered by the Ancient Britons, whose claims to a more-than-mythical existence were tenuous indeed. Pricked by the sword of reason, they would deflate like ‘an emptie bladder’, following Spenser’s puffed-up giant Orgoglio.52
Nashe’s words, then, are among the insubstantial substances with which his universe is replete. He would, I suspect, have been delighted with my second epigraph, in which the materiality of words is found in their gaseousness, in which they sit alongside hot air balloons (objects that are swollen and susceptible to puncturing, but which can take you on extraordinary journeys) and neon signs (objects which turn a gas into the physical words and images that feed the modern commercial marketplace). In his own writings, the windy emptiness of language is registered mainly through an insistent rendering of the physicality of ink and paper. Empty writing prompts immediate thoughts of recycling; thus, Nashe complains that it would have been tolerable had Harvey mauled him in a vendible book, ‘but for Chandlers merchandize to be so massacred, for sheets that serue for nothing but to wrappe the excrements of huswiuerie in, Proh Deum, what a spite is it’ (I 300). Reading Richard Harvey’s Lambe of God, Nashe reports, ‘I could not refrayne, but bequeath it to the Priuie, leafe by leafe as I read it, it was so vgly, dorbellicall, and lamish’ (I 198). The Unfortunate Traveller begins with detailed instructions as to how it may be recycled in drying and kindling tobacco, or in stopping mustard pots, or for ‘anie vse about meat & drinke’, or for printers’ napkins—whatever they may have been (II 207). Even Nashe’s most elaborate tributes to the power of literature cleave close to lowly material. The best he can say for Aretino is that ‘if out of so base a thing as ink there may be extracted a spirit, he writ with nought but the spirit of ink, and his style was the spirituality of arts and nothing else’ (II 264). Or, to put it another way (praising Surrey): ‘The alcumie of his eloquence, out of the incomprehensible drossie matter of cloudes and aire, distilled no more quintescence than would make his Geraldine compleat faire’ (II 270). The ‘base’ and ‘drossie’ never escape from view. In this, as in much else, Nashe’s example was formative for Ben Jonson. The Alchemist, in particular, plays out the energies of his prose in its portrayal of an imposture which makes dreams of gold the foil for an enchanted engagement with dross.
‘Stuff’ is, after all, a word for matter which doesn’t matter, which is precisely Nashe’s matter. (Or it is shorthand for ‘stuffing’, filling which matters because it is matter, rather than because it is any particular kind of matter.) While much work on early modern material culture has focused on luxury goods and elite consumerism, Nashe creates the feel of the real through his engagement with the failures and the also-rans of the physical realm.53 His love of the insalubrious is legible in the way that his writing career is dogged by fish—from Robert Greene’s ‘fatall banquet of pickle herring’, at which he was allegedly present, to his final magnificent banquet of red herring in Lenten Stuffe (I 287–8). The latter text offers a playfully repulsive figuration of Homer as a model (‘Homer by Galatæon was pictured vomiting in a bason … and the rest of the succeeding Poets after him greedily lapping vp what he disgorged’ [III 155]), but this presumably covers up the true (and blasphemous) model for Nashe’s playful conjurings of something out of nothing, Christ’s multiplication of the loaves and fishes. The buried subtext bespeaks Nashe’s desire to confect a text that could be simultaneously disgusting and miraculous. More fishy business occurs when, in The Terrors of the Night (1594), Nashe wonders why he wanders on to the subject of Iceland: ‘A poyson light on it, how come I to digresse to such a dull, Lenten, Northren Clyme, where there is nothing but stock-fish, whetstones, and cods-heads?’ But then he acknowledges that his ‘Discourse of Apparitions’ is one long digression, a dreamy form of mobile stasis akin to angling: ‘in a leaden standish I stand fishing all day, but haue none of Saint Peters lucke to bring a fish to the hooke that carries anie siluer in the mouth’ (I 360–1). ‘Fishing in a leaden standish’, or inkstand, brilliantly encapsulates the impecunious writer’s lot. But perhaps the most revealing of Nashe’s fishes surfaces in Pierce Penilesse, when he points out that poets, unlike preachers and other retailers of mouldy, second-hand wares, are required to be original. ‘Newe Herrings, new, wee must crye, euery time wee make our selues publique, or else we shall bee christened with a hundred newe tytles of Idiotisme’ (I 192). Here, in the prose-poetry of the street cry, Nashe finds a voice for his defence of poetry. And it smells of fish.
Black, Joseph L., ed. The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Bruster, Douglas. ‘The New Materialism in Early Modern Studies’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 191–206.
Halasz, Alexandra. The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Harris, Jonathan Gil. Untimely Matter in the Age of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
Hutson, Lorna. Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Miller, Daniel. Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
Nashe, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow and F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).
Rhodes, Neil. Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
Turner, Henry S. ‘Nashe’s Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599)’, English Literary History, 68 (2001): 529–61.