Thomas Nashe facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Thomas Nashe
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Polemical woodcut deriding Nashe as jailbird. From Richard Lichfield's The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, Gentleman (1597)
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| Born | Baptised November 1567 Lowestoft, Suffolk, England |
| Died | c. 1601 (aged 33–34) |
| Occupation | Playwright, poet, satirist |
| Nationality | English |
| Alma mater | St John's College, Cambridge |
| Period | c. 1589–1599 |
| Notable works | Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592) |
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Thomas Nashe (baptised November 1567 – c. 1601; also Nash) was an Elizabethan playwright, poet, satirist and a significant pamphleteer. He is known for his novel The Unfortunate Traveller, his pamphlets including Pierce Penniless, and his numerous defences of the Church of England.
Life
Nashe was the son of the parson William Nashe and Janeth (née Witchingham). He was born and baptised in Lowestoft, on the coast of Suffolk, where his father, William Nashe, or Nayshe as it is recorded, was curate. Though his mother bore seven children, only two survived childhood: Israel (born in 1565) and Thomas.
The family moved to West Harling, near Thetford, in 1573 after Nashe's father was awarded the living there at the church of All Saints. Around 1581 Thomas went up to St John's College, Cambridge, as a sizar, gaining his bachelor's degree in 1586. From references in his own polemics and those of others, he does not seem to have proceeded Master of Arts there. Most of his biographers agree that he left his college about summer 1588, as his name appears on a list of students due to attend philosophy lectures in that year. His reasons for leaving are unclear; his father may have died the previous year, but Richard Lichfield maliciously reported that Nashe had fled possible expulsion for his role in Terminus et non-terminus, one of the raucous student theatricals popular at the time. Some years later, William Covell wrote in Polimanteia that Cambridge "has been unkind to the one [i.e., Nashe] to wean him before his time." Nashe himself said he could have become a fellow had he wished (in Have With You to Saffron-Walden).
He moved to London and began his literary career. The remaining decade of his life was dominated by two concerns: finding employment and participating in controversies, most famously with Richard and Gabriel Harvey. He arrived in London with his one exercise in euphuism, The Anatomy of Absurdity. His first appearance in print was his preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon, which offers a brief definition of art and overview of contemporary literature.
In 1590, he contributed a preface to an unlicensed edition of Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, but the edition was called in, and the authorised second edition removed Nashe's work.
Nashe was alive in 1599, when his last known work, Nashes Lenten Stuffe, was published, and dead by 1601, when he was memorialised in a Latin verse in Affaniae by Charles Fitzgeoffrey. It is not known where he died, or where he is buried.
Chronology of Nashe's works
- 1589 The Anatomy of Absurdity
- 1589 Preface to Greene's Menaphon
- 1590 An Almond for a Parrot
- 1591 Preface to Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella
- 1592 Pierce Penniless
- 1592 Summer's Last Will and Testament (play performed 1592, published 1600)
- 1592 Strange News
- 1593 Christ's Tears over Jerusalem
- 1594 Terrors of the Night
- 1594 The Unfortunate Traveller
- 1596 Have with You to Saffron-Walden
- 1597 Isle of Dogs (Lost)
- 1599 Nashe's Lenten Stuffe
See also
In Spanish: Thomas Nashe para niños
- Canons of Elizabethan poetry
