Born at Lowestoft (?), 1567; baptized, Nov. 1567. Matric., St. John’s Coll., Camb., as Sizar, Oct. 1582; B.A., 1586. Settled in London, 1588; adopted literary career. Took active part in “Martin Mar-Prelate” controversy, under pseud. of “Pasquil.” Play, “The Terrors of the Night,” produced, 1593; “Summer’s Last Will and Testament,” privately performed, 1593; “The Isle of Dogs,” performed by the Lord Admiral’s Company, June 1597. In Fleet Prison, autumn of 1597. Died, 1601. Works: “The Anatomie of Absurditie,” 1589; “A Countercuffe given to Martin Junior” (under pseud.: “Pasquil”), 1589; “The Returne of the Renowned Cavalier Pasquil of England” (anon.), 1589; “Martin’s Month’s Minde” (under pseud.: “Marphoreus”), 1589; “The First Parte of Pasquil’s Apologie” (anon.), 1590; “A Wonderful … Astrologicall Prognostication” (under pseud.: “Thomas Scarlet”), 1591; “Pierce Pennilesse his Supplication to the Devill,” 1592 (another edn. same year); “Strange Newes of the Intercepting certaine Letters,” 1592; “Christ’s Teares over Jerusalem,” 1593; “The Terrors of the Night,” 1594; “The Unfortunate Traveller,” 1594; “The Tragedie of Dido” (with Marlowe), 1594; “Have with you to Saffron Walden,” 1596; “Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe,” 1599; “A Pleasant Comedie called Summer’s Last Will and Testament,” 1600. He translated: Evenkellius “Γυμνασιαρχον” 1648; and edited: Sir Philip Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella,” 1591. Collected Works: ed. by Grosart (6 vols.), 1883–85.

Personal

  A hundred unfortunate farewels, to fantasticall satirisme. In those vaines heretofore I misspent my spirit and prodigally conspired against good houres. Nothing is there now so much in my vowes as to be at peace with all men and make submissive amends where I have most displeased.

  As Eupolis of Athens used great liberty in taxing the vices of men: so doth Thomas Nash. Witness the brood of the Harveys! As Actæon was worried of his own hounds: so is Tom Nash of his Isle of Dogs. Dogs were the death of Euripides; but be not disconsolate, gallant young Juvenal! Linus, the son of Apollo died the same death. Yet God forbid that so brave a wit should so basely perish! Thine are but paper dogs, neither is thy banishment like Ovid’s eternally to converse with the barbarous Getæ. Therefore comfort thyself, sweet Tom! with Cicero’s glorious return to Rome; and with the Counsel Æneas gives to his seabeaten soldiers, Lib I, Æneid.

  Marlow, Greene, and Peele had got vnder the shades of a large vyne, laughing to see Nash (that was but newly come to their colledge) still haunted with the sharpe and satyricall spirit that followed him heere vpon earth: for Nash inueyed bitterly (as he had wont to do) against dry-fisted patrons, accusing them of his vntimely death, because if they had giuen his Muse that cherishment which shee most worthily deserued, hee had fed to his dying day on fat capons, burnt sack and suger, and not so desperately haue venturde his life, and shortned his dayes by keeping company with pickle-herrings.

  Nash, a fanciful satirist, who abused his talent, and conspired like a prodigal against good fortune.

  It is to be lamented that nothing whatever has been transmitted to enable us to know when exactly or where or under what circumstances he died, or where he found a grave. I was saddened in the knowledge that his father survived him until 1603 not to find him interred among his kin at Lowestoft. He had only reached his thirty-third year. It is to be feared that physically and every way life’s candle was lit at both ends and flamed consumingly. The tragedy may not have been so absolute as that of Greene’s death; but it must have been tragical enough.

General

  With thee I ioyne young Iuuenall, that byting Satyrist, that lastlie with mee together writ a Comedie. Sweete boy, might I aduise thee, be aduised, and get not many enemies by bitter words: inueigh against vaine men, for thou canst do it, no man better, no man so wel; thou hast a libertie to reprooue all, and none more; for one being spoken to, all are offended, none being blamed, no man is iniuried. Stop shallow water still running, it will rage, tread on a worme, and it will turne; then blame not schollers vexed with sharpe lines, if they reprooue thy too much libertie of reproofe.

  True English Aretine.

  And thou, into whose soule (if ever there were a Pithagorean Metempsuchosis) the raptures of that fierce and inconfineable Italian spirit were bounteously and boundlesly infused; thou sometime Secretary to Pierce Pennylesse, and Master of his Requests, ingenious and ingenuous, fluent, facetious, T. Nash, from whose abundant pen hony flowed to thy friends, and mortall Aconite to thy enemies; thou that madest the Doctor a flat dunce, and beatst him at two tall sundry weapons, Poetrie and Oratorie; sharpest Satyre, luculent Poet, elegant Orator, get leave for thy ghost to come from her abiding, and to dwell with me a while, till she hath carows’d to me in his owne wonted ful measures of wit, that my plump braynes may swell, and burst into bitter invectives against the Lieftenant of Limbo, if he cashiere Pierce Pennylesse with dead pay.

  Besides this boldness of their becoming gods, so far as to set limits to his mercies; there was not only one Martin Mar-Prelate, but other venomous books daily printed and dispersed; books that were so absurd and scurrilous, that the graver divines disdained them an answer. And yet these were grown into high esteem with the common people, till Tom Nash appeared against them all; who was a man of a sharp wit, and the master of a scoffing satirical merry pen, which he employed to discover the absurdities of those blind, malicious, senseless pamphlets, and sermons as senseless as they; Nash his answers being like his books, which bore these titles, “An Almond for a Parrot,” “A Fig for my Godson,” “Come crack me this Nut,” and the like; so that his merry wit made some sport, and such a discovery of their absurdities, as (which is strange) he put a greater stop to these malicious pamphlets than a much wiser man had been able.

  Noted and restless buffoon.

  His Works are various, both in Verse and Prose; tho’ all Biting, and Satirical,—By some he is call’d the English Aretine; By others, a Buffoon in Print.

  The most exquisite banterer of that age of genius.

  But, besides these peculiar and especial claims to the attention of all who are interested in whatever relates to Shakespeare and his productions, “Pierce Penniless” is a very singular, highly finished, and, in many respects, amusing picture of the manners of the times when it was written. Some of the descriptions of persons and habits of different grades of society have remarkable force, and obvious fidelity, and carry with them the conviction, that little is to be allowed even for the exaggerations of a poet. Nash was a young man who had mixed in most of the scenes he paints; and his style is unusually pure and free from those inflations and bombastic expressions, which, as we read, induce a doubt as to the truth and accuracy of the representations of which they form a part. His eloquence is natural and flowing; and although now and then we meet with what may be looked upon as a trifling affectation of scholastic learning, yet compared with many, if not most, of his scribbling contemporaries, he is very free from this defect: his writings are generally to be regarded as models of choice, nervous, and idiomatic English. If not the best, he was certainly one of the best prose authors of the period in which he flourished. As a vigorous, pungent, and bitterly satirical writer, it may be doubted whether he ever had his equal in our language.

  There never perhaps was poured forth such a rushing and roaring torrent of wit, ridicule, and invective, as in the rapid succession of pamphlets which he published in the course of the year 1589 against the Puritans and their famous champion (or rather knot of champions) taking the name of Martin Mar-Prelate; unless in those in which he began two years after to assail poor Gabriel Harvey, his persecution of and controversy with whom lasted a much longer time—till indeed the Archbishop of Canterbury (Whitgift), interfered in 1597 to restore the peace of the realm by an order that all Harvey’s and Nash’s books should be taken wherever they might be found, “and that none of the said books be ever printed hereafter.”

  His “Life of Jack Wilton” is well known to have originated one of the most long-lived fables in English literary biography. Altogether he was a most versatile proficient in literary composition; it was said of him that he “compiled a learned treatise in the praise of a red herring;” and in truth, with such a writer, the subject is of secondary importance; the style is the man.

  Has far better claims than Swift to be called the English Rabelais.

  Was famous no less for his acuteness, his knowledge, and his ready pen, than for his envious, spiteful, and abusive nature; personal polemics, the coarser the better, were the subjects he specially delighted in.

  Thomas Nash claims a place of no little importance in the history of English prose. His pamphlets, modelled upon those in vogue among Italian writers of the school of Aretine, display a trenchant wit and a directness in the use of language, which were rare in that age. He was a born satirist, hitting hard, abstaining from rhetorical parades of erudition, sketching a caricature with firm and broad touches, and coining pithy epigrams which stung like poisoned arrows. No writer before Nash, and few since his death, have used the English language as an instrument of pure invective with more complete mastery and originality of manner.

  Diffuseness and want of keeping to the point too frequently mar Nash’s work; but when he shakes himself free from them, and goes straight for his enemy or his subject, he is a singularly forcible writer. In his case more than in any of the others, the journalist born out of due time is perceptible. He had perhaps not much original message for the world. But he had eminently the trick both of damaging controversial argument made light to catch the popular taste, and of easy discussion or narrative. The chief defects of his work would probably have disappeared of themselves if he had had to write not pamphlets, but articles. He did, however, what he could; and he is worthy of a place in the history of literature if only for the sake of “Have with you to Saffron Walden”—the best example of its own kind to be found before the end of the seventeenth century, if not the beginning of the eighteenth.

  With all his fondness for merry authors, Nash can discern true poetry, and he adores it. If by chance, in the midst of an angry satirical disquisition, the word poetry comes to his pen, he is suddenly transformed, he smiles, he melts; nothing is left in him but human sympathies…. His vocabulary is very rich; he has always a variety of words at his disposal and uses often two or three the better to impress our minds with the idea in his own. He coins at need new words or fetches them from classical or foreign languages. He does not do this in an off-hand way, but on purpose and wilfully; he possessed much of that curious care for and delight in words which is one of the characteristics of the men of the Renaissance. To deal with words was in itself a pleasure for them; they liked to mould, to adopt, to combine, to invent them. Word painting delighted them; Nash has an extreme fondness for it, and satirical and comical as he is, he often astonishes us by the poetic gracefulness of his combinations of words. In this as in many other particulars he imitates, longe sequens, the master he seems to have admired above others, Rabelais, who, in the tempestuous rolls of his diverse waters, sometimes washes up on to the sand pearls fit to adorn the crown of any lyrical poet…. Had a particular literary hatred for mere empty bombast.

  Had there been no ink shed between Nash and Harvey, we should remember Harvey as he was, Nash as he was. Because they vilified each other, many have taken Gabriel Harvey for a ridiculous pedant upon the authority of Thomas Nash, and Thomas Nash for a railer, strong in personal attack, upon the authority of Gabriel Harvey—and of Nash himself in his writing against Harvey. Nash is the chief sufferer, because as an English Writer he had most to lose. He was a young man, with scholarship enough and wit abounding. His invectives against Harvey were in some degree half-playful exercises in pen-duel. They were for the amusement of the public after the manner of the “flytings” of the time of Dunbar and Kennedy, Skelton and Garnische. But they meant mischief, as those flytings did not. They were born of personal offence, and carried on with a real bitterness of feeling. If we could strike out of our literature all the tedious quarrel between Nash and Harvey, where the wit of the younger man and the rhetoric of the elder are much wasted upon matter trivial and low, how would the two stand? We should know Gabriel Harvey only as a respectable friend of some of the best writers of the day, who loved good literature without adding to it; as an affectionate brother who showed sense in discouragement of superstitious notions about earthquakes and conjunctions of the planets; and as chief advocate of an experiment in writing English hexameters, which has its own place and meaning in our literary history. We should have known Thomas Nash as a young wit and poet who cared for good literature and added to it; as one who wrote prose satire that looked mainly to the higher aims of life, a young Juvenal who struck heavily at the greater vices and more lightly at the follies of his age, without personal attack on any man, except so much as was incident to the general bad taste of the Marprelate controversy. All his other offence of that kind is against the Harveys.

  The redoubtable “English Aretine,” with the swagger of a bully in almost all his prose, yet leaving us but too few of the purest and saddest of lyrics.

  As a prose satirist he had neither equal nor second among his contemporaries.

  An early English example of the picaresque is Nash’s “Jack Wilton,” which, clumsy as it is, and naïvely childish to modern taste, does nevertheless explain De Foe on the one hand and the penny-dreadful on the other.

  Thomas Nash was himself perhaps intrinsically the most able, and certainly not the least typical, member of a whole class of Elizabethan men of letters. Nash had ideas of style which sometimes led him into involved pomposity, but which also supplied him with an effective, though blackguard, controversial manner. Nobody was a greater master of loud-mouthed bragging, of the fashion of telling an opponent over pages of repetition of the dreadful things you are going to do with him.