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Thomas Nashe and Early Modern Protest Literature

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Thomas Nashe and Early Modern Protest Literature THOMAS NASHE AND EARLY MODERN PROTEST LITERATURE A dissertation submitted by Kristen Abbott Bennett In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English TUFTS UNIVERSITY May 2013 © 2013, Kristen Abbott Bennett Advisor: Professor Judith Haber ii ABSTRACT Thomas Nashe’s innovative style, comedy, and contributions to topical Elizabethan satire have historically distracted readers from recognizing his serious subtexts of sociopolitical protest. This dissertation argues that Nashe’s renowned polyvocality disguises these subtexts by enacting a social and intertextual extension of rhetorical invention that is best expressed as “conversation.” Only by re-situating Nashe’s work amidst its classical, late medieval, and contemporary conversational networks may we grasp his paradoxically conservative attitude toward radicalizing English literature and society. Drawing on these contexts, each chapter demonstrates how Nashe’s works protest the inequities arising from a crisis of English identity and rhetoric for which he holds the Crown partially responsible. Chapter One, “In the Authours Absence”: Rhetorical Usurpations of Authority by Richard Jones and Thomas Nashe,” analyzes shared practices which help both printers and writers authorize their literary products and, occasionally, rhetorically hijack others’. The second chapter, “At the Crossroads: Classical and Vernacular English Protest Literature in Pierce Penilesse,” examines Nashe’s discursive translations of classical, late medieval, and contemporary rhetorical gestures that protest a crisis of English rhetoric and identity. The third chapter, “Red Herrings and the ‘Stench of Fish’: Subverting Praise in Lenten Stuffe,” upends critical assumptions that Nashe’s encomium of the red herring and town of Yarmouth is sincere by revealing a revisionary English chronicle history in conversation with Erasmus’ “A Fish Diet” that protests a long history of Crown inequity. Chapter Four, ‘“Cupid’s golden hook’: Discord and Protest among Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Versions of ‘Hero and Leander,’” offers the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay among Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” Nashe’s adaptation of the lovers’ story in Lenten Stuffe, and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. In conversation, these works convey a central theme of rupture, specifically the disjunction of classically inspired amity. Situating Nashe’s literary contributions in their conversational networks clarifies his pivotal role in the emergence of early modern English literature while illuminating some of the ways conversation functions as a compositional methodology in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As tempted as I am to invoke inexpressibility, throw my hands to the sky, and cry “thank you all for your help,” I’m well aware that such a gesture does not fulfill the promise of “acknowledgment.” Nor does a page suffice to thank my colleagues at Tufts, especially my Sligo comrades, or my mentors and friends at UMASS-Boston who have been ongoing sources of support since I completed my Master’s degree in 2008, including Cheryl Nixon, Scott Maisano, Neal Bruss, and Elizabeth Fay. But I shall do my best within the allotted space. I am very much obliged to Christopher Barbour at Tufts University’s Tisch Library, Sean Casey at the Boston Public Library Rare Books Room, and the librarians at the Cambridge MS Room, the Bodleian Library, and the British Library for their assistance with my research. This dissertation has also benefitted greatly from the feedback I have received after presenting still-nascent chapter bits at the 2009 Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies Graduate Conference, the 2010 Cambridge University International Chronicles Society Symposium, the 2010 Renaissance Society of America meeting, the December 2012 Shakespearean Studies Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, and the 2012 and 2013 Shakespeare Association of America meetings. At these gatherings, I was the happy recipient of many source suggestions and revision notes from Arthur F. Kinney, Juliana Dresvina, Paul Marquis, William C. Carroll, James Siemon, Diana Henderson, and Robert Darcy. Special thanks to Jonathan V. Crewe for reading Chapters Three and Four; his insightful comments continue to be helpful as I move forward. The foregoing is but a very short list; please forgive any omissions. I am exceptionally grateful to my brilliant dissertation committee. Judith Haber’s generous feedback, always incisive and timely, helped keep my project on track from its inception. Red herrings will never be the same for either of us. My coursework with Kevin Dunn and John Fyler also played a large role in my work’s evolution and their critical feedback has been invaluable. John Tobin’s role as an “outside” reader is misleading; it was he who piqued my interest in Nashe and shared his extensive knowledge (and excellent cold remedies) throughout the writing process. If I have sometimes been “too bold,” it is no one’s fault but my own. This dissertation also owes much to the input of my good friend and most benevolent reader, Gerard H. Cox. Gerry not only read and commented on many, many drafts but helped the process along by forwarding me delicious recipes and boxes of books, and above all encouraging me to “endeavor to persevere.” Thinking about how grateful I am to my husband, Jason, my family, and my friends for putting up with a constant stream of early modern conversation, as well as a few splashes of ill-temper when the writing wasn’t flowing as I would have it, brings me back to inexpressibility. My apologies for sometimes frightening you and the cats, JB; I could not have accomplished this project without you, Zo, and Alex. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction “Fishing before the nette”: Nashe’s Conversational Networks 1 Chapter One “In the Authours Absence”: Rhetorical Usurpations of Authority by Richard Jones and Thomas Nashe 19 Chapter Two At the Crossroads: Intersections of Classical and Vernacular English Protest Literature in Pierce Penilesse 57 Chapter Three Red Herrings and “the Stench of Fish”: Subverting Praise in Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe 89 Chapter Four “Cupid’s golden hook”: Discord and Protest among Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Versions of “Hero and Leander” 119 Afterword Nashe’s Fortunes Founded 156 Bibliography 161 INTRODUCTION “FISHING BEFORE THE NETTE”: NASHE’S CONVERSATIONAL NETWORKS Be of good cheere, my weary Readers, for I haue espied land, as Diogenes said to his weary Schollers when he had read to a waste leafe. Fishermen, I hope, wil not finde fault with me for fishing before the nette, or making all fish that comes to the net in this history – Thomas Nashe, Lenten Stuffe (III.223)1 In fact, the whole thing boils down to this (whether it is a matter of art of observation or experience): knowing the areas where you must hunt for, and track down, what you are trying to find. Once you have surrounded the entire place with the nets of your thought, at least if practical experience has sharpened your skill, nothing will escape you, and everything that is in the subject matter will run up to you and fall into your hands. – Cicero, On the Ideal Orator (2.Pr.147) Thomas Nashe’s comic notoriety continues to obscure his networks of serious sociopolitical protest.2 We are stuck, seemingly, with C.S. Lewis’ 1954 description of Nashe’s phrasing as a “clown’s red nose,” and his observation that Nashe is “the perfect literary showman [but] he tells no story, expresses no thought, maintains no attitude” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century 411- 416).3 H. Marshall McLuhan’s 1943 comment remains operative: “Nashe has never been considered on his own terms, and today he is praised for reasons which would have baffled and annoyed him” (Classical Trivium 4).4 For McLuhan, considering Nashe on his own terms requires situating him in the context of his conservative classical education.5 McLuhan fulfills his subtitle’s promise to establish The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time.Yet he also acknowledges the impossibility of surveying Nashe’s work “without Abbott Bennett 2 acquiring a vivid sense of its largely unexplored character” (252). Before embarking on our expedition, I suggest we abandon images of Nashe as a scraggly, gap-toothed hack, and re-imagine him as a serious critic of Elizabethan society and politics. This dissertation argues that Nashe’s renowned “polyphonic” style enacts a social and intertextual extension of rhetorical invention that is best expressed as “conversation.”6 My study contends that, to consider Nashe on his own terms, we must re-situate his work amidst its larger classical and contemporary conversational networks. By engaging Nashe’s works with their many interlocutors, previously occluded subtexts of protest become clear; at stake is a crisis of English identity and rhetoric that emerges from the inequities arising from sixteenth-century print culture, the sectarianism arising from the Humanist v. Ramist debate, and the arbitrariness of Crown politics.7 This dissertation casts a large net over a representative selection of Nashe’s writing in order to both demonstrate and study his discursive conversational exchanges.8 My approach to “conversation” in Nashe’s works has been largely informed by his intertextual conflations of ancient and contemporary sources; I borrow “network” from his classically-inspired fishing metaphors in Lenten Stuffe (III.223). Each chapter evaluates Nashe “on
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