Thomas Nashe and Literary Performance

Thomas Nashe is typically regarded as an urban author and a University wit, but his writings are inflected and shaped by regional travel, 'non-literary', non-elite works, and oral culture. The essays in this collection address Nashe's use of the past, his engagement with the Elizabethan present, and his textual legacy. As an instigator of debate and a defender of tradition, a man of letters and a popular hack, a writer of erotica and a spokesman for bishops, an urbane metropolitan and a celebrant of local custom, the various textual performances of Nashe elicit and continue to provoke a range of contradictory reactions. Nashe's often incongruous authorial characteristics suggest that, as a 'King of Pages', he not only courted controversy but also deliberately cultivated a variety of public personae, acquiring a reputation more slippery than the herrings he celebrated in print. This book questions early modern conceptions of authorship and textual transmission through assessing Nashe's self-representation, authorial legacy, and literary celebrity: it traverses the mercurial way in which Nashe characterized himself as a messenger in print; addresses news and Nashe's denunciations of uncritical news-reading; examines Nashe's engagement in the Marprelate controversy and its resonances into the seventeenth century; assesses his ghostly influence on later writers and discusses the conscious materiality of Nashe's writing and its consumption. Collectively, the essays in this book illustrate how Nashe not only excelled at textual performance, but that his personae also became a contested site as readers actively participated and engaged in the reception of Nashe's image.