REBECA HELFER Wit and The Art of Memory in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller1 hen in Rome, the narrator of Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of W Jack Wilton escapes one of many near-death experiences. Having been falsely accused of rape and murder, Jack was “laid in prison, should have been hanged, was brought to the ladder, had made a ballad for [his] farewell in a readiness, called Wilton’s Wantonness, and yet, for all that, scaped dancing in a hempen circle.”2 Exactly how Nashe’s antic anti-hero averts this already memorialized martyrdom relates to the art of memory. As Jack recounts, “present at the execution was there a banished English Earl, who, hearing that a countryman of his was to suffer for such a notable murder, came to hear his confession,” and provides testimony that frees Jack from this fate (p. 340). “To the banished Earl I came to render thanks,” Jack continues, “when thus he examined and schooled me,” The Earl de- manded “what is the occasion of thy straying so far out of England to visit this strange nation?,” and asserted that “nought but lasciviousness is to be learned here” (p. 341). The English Earl then delivers a lecture on the perils of travel that Jack remembers well but would like to forget: “Some allege they travel to learn wit, but I am of this opinion: that, as it is not possible for any man to learn the art of memory, whereof Tully [and others] ...have written so many books, except he have a natural memory before, so it is not possible for any man to attain any great wit by travel except he have the grounds of it rooted in him before” (p. 343). The Earl implies that “wit” and by analogy the “art of memory” belong to naturally witty courtiers like himself who, by virtue of birth and breeding, can understand Cicero’s (aka, “Tully”) method of artificial memory: the use of places and images, usually 1. This essay is dedicated to I.A.M. and W.H.M., who have made me the most fortunate of travellers. 2. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. ed., J. B. Steane (London, 1972), pp. 339–40. 325 English Literary Renaissance, volume 47, number 3. © 2017 by English Literary Renaissance, Inc. All rights reserved. 0013-8312/2017/4703/0001$10.00 326 English Literary Renaissance symbolic books or buildings, that ancient orators would furnish with vivid images and then mentally traverse to remember long speeches, not unlike the lengthy speech that the Earl delivers on the history of unfortunate travellers, from Cain to Jack Wilton. Without natural wit, unwitting trav- elers (presumably like Jack) must learn by errors that lead to trials: “That wit which is thereby to be perfected or made staid is nothing but ‘the experi- ence of many evils’,” the Earl asserts, pointing to “Ulysses, the long travel- ler” as proof that even the witty suffer from wanderlust (p. 343). Asking Jack (rhetorically), “how doth [Italy] form our young master?,” the Earl answers that it teaches not the art of memory but “the art of atheism, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poisoning, the art of sodomitry,” the unsentimental education that “maketh a man an excellent courtier ...a fine close lecher, a glorious hypocrite” (p. 345). The Earl himself, having been forced “to implore the benevolence and charity of all the dukes of It- aly,” has learned all too well that “he must crouch, he must cog, lie and prate, that either in the Court or a foreign country will engender and come to preferment” (pp. 343, 346). Better to stay home, he warns, for “what is here but we may read in books, and a great deal more too, without stirring our feet out of a warm study?” (p. 343). But the Earl’s advice comes too late, and Jack wants to escape from him nearly as much as from the hangman. After all, Jack muses, what could be “worse than an upbraiding lesson after a breeching”? (p. 347). The English Earl sees Jack as an upstart courtier whose Grand Tour has gone terribly wrong, and rightly so: Jack euphemistically describes himself as “a certain kind of an appendix or page, belonging or appertaining in or unto the confines of the English Court” (p. 254). True in part, Jack serves as a soldier of fortune for Henry VIII (and others) abroad, and the better part of The Unfortunate Traveller recounts Jack’s travels with, service to, and impersonation of one of Henry VIII’s most famous courtiers: Henry How- ard, Earl of Surrey, the courtier-poet par excellence, best remembered for his translations of Petrarch’s sonnets and Vergil’s Aeneid, and for being Henry VIII’s last executed victim (p. 254). But Jack can only impersonate an ideal courtier, it seems, and as the Earl surmises, he lives just barely by his wits. However, other still more important ironies reflect upon the Earl himself, who represents a parody of urbane courtliness that recalls Castiglione’s The Courtier. The school-marmish Earl’s lesson repeats Roger Ascham’s stern warning in The Schoolmaster that those seeking an education should read The Courtier at home rather than venture off to Italy’s hotbed of sin. As well, the Earl’s assertion that travel teaches not the “art of memory” Rebeca Helfer 327 but rather “the art of whoring,” and so on, echoes a scene of instruction in Pietro Aretino’s satire of The Courtier, The Courtesan, in which a would-be courtier learns “how to blaspheme, to be a gambler, a frequenter of whores, a heretic, a flatterer ...malicious, ignorant and envious.”3 Nashe turns Are- tino into such a character in The Unfortunate Traveller: the “chief Inquisitor to the college of courtesans” (p. 309). Although clearly comic, The Unfortunate Traveller’s satire of The Courtier also needs to be taken seriously. Castiglione’s “poetics of eloquence ... profoundly affects humanist fiction in Tudor England,” Arthur Kinney asserts, but the impact of this poetics has not yet been fully recognized in Nashe’s case. More than skewering fictions of the ideal courtier, Nashe remakes it in his own image.4 This essay extends the work of Kinney and others on Nashe’s poetics, taking up the “Nashe problem” (in Jonathan Crewe’s phrase)—the question of how style relates to substance in Nashe’s famously witty writing, and the role of rhetoric therein—from the perspec- tive of wit and the art of memory.5 As Stephen Hilliard observes, “Nashe prided himself on his singular wit,” which Nashe represents in complex, multiple ways in The Unfortunate Traveller: as intelligence, perceptiveness, sanity, even the yoking together of seemingly incommensurate things (as in the Earl’s analogy between wit and the art of memory), and most impor- tantly, I further argue, as an art of concealing art that relates to the art of memory.6 The hide-and-seek quality of Nashe’s wit manifests in Jack’s in- 3. Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park, PA, 1996), pp. 106–07. 4. Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst, 1986), p. 131. Kinney contends that “Thomas Nashe’s works like those of his predeces- sors in humanist poetics take on a tone from Cicero that remains more or less constant,” but he argues for the influence of a different Cicero on Nashe’s satire than this essay: not the Cicero of On the Orator but rather the Cicero of invective (p. 304 and passim). 5. What Crewe calls the “Nashe problem” is part of his response to the charge (made most fa- mously by C.S. Lewis), that Nashe’s writing says nothing in dazzling ways; Jonathan V. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore, 1982), p. 1. Other im- portant studies of Nashe include The Age of Thomas Nashe, ed. Stephen Guy-Bray, et al (Farnham, 2013); Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading, ed. Naomi Conn Liebler (New York, 2007); Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge, Eng., 2004); Brown, Thomas Nashe (Farnham, 2011); Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Eng., 1997); Stephen S. Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe (Lincoln, 1986); Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford, 1989); Kinney, Humanist Poetics; Neil Rhodes, “Nashe, Rhetoric, and Satire,” Jacobean Poetry and Prose: Rhetoric, Representation, and the Popular Imagination, ed. Clive Bloom (London, 1988), pp.. 25–43; and Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Farnham, 2006). 6. Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe, p. 146. 328 English Literary Renaissance terlude with the nameless English Earl, who represents not only a fiction but a metafiction, an intertext who interrupts the text and demands our attention. The Earl’s analogy between wit and the art of memory misre- members their linked significance in The Courtier and its central model, Cicero’s On the Orator,whichmakestheEarl’smisprisionandtheEarl himself into an ironic reminder of their importance to The Unfortunate Traveller. The Earl himself along with other such courtiers reveal the key role that “wit” and the “art of memory” play in Jack’s memoir, which connect Castiglione’s Courtier and Cicero’s Orator to Nashe’s Page. The intertex- tual presence of The Courtier in The Unfortunate Traveller matters still more specifically: Castiglione’s memory of the Tudor court and ironic proph- ecy for the future Henry VIII finds an answer in Nashe’s would-be cour- tier and his king, in their twin memoir which doubles as an account of the period.