Thomas Nashe

Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), English novelist, satirist, and dramatist, born in Lowestoft, and educated at the University of Cambridge. He was considered a great wit and brilliant personality of his time.

Nashe was employed by the Church of England to answer the attacks made on it by a Puritan writer, or group of writers, known as Martin Marprelate (see Marprelate Controversy). Under the pen name of Pasquil, Nashe responded with satiric pamphlets, which may have included An Almond for a Parrat (1590). He also took part in a violent literary controversy against the poet Gabriel Harvey and his brother Richard Harvey, who had been extremely critical of the writings of Nashe and his friend Robert Greene. This feud came to an end by an order of the Church in 1599. Nashe's prose satire Pierce Penilesse, His Supplication to the Divell (1592) is in part an attack on the Harveys, and also on Nashe's opponents in the Marprelate controversy; it also protests against the public's neglect of worthy writers. Important among Nashe's other writings are the pamphlet Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), in which he satirizes the vices of the London of his time, and the satiric masque Summers Last Will and Testament (1600).

Nashe's best-known work, the novel The Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton (1594), greatly influenced English literature. It is the earliest example of picaresque fiction in English, predating the realistic adventure novels of Daniel Defoe and Tobias Smollett.