Thomas Nashe was viewed by his contemporaries as one whose satirical writing was apt to get him into prison. Duncan-Jones examines some of Nashe's work and the controversy it caused.

Copyright Oxford University Press(England) May 1998

The only surviving visual image of Thomas Nashe, a clumsy woodcut in a satirical pamphlet on him called The Trimming of Thomas Nashe (1597), shows him as a convicted felon, with his feet apparently sunk in mud or dung, and his legs shackled together.¹ This image is of little or no value as a guide to Nashe's personal appearance, yet it may nevertheless indicate that he was correctly viewed by his contemporaries as one whose satirical writing was apt to get him into prison. Indeed, it is as a habitue of prisons that the author of the Trimming attacks him most mercilessly: `Thomas Nash sundrie and oftentimes hath been cast into manie prisons (by full authoritie) for his mis-behauiors, and hath polluted them all, so that there is not one prison in London, that is not infected with Nashes euill.'² Although he adroitly escaped imprisonment after the Isle of Dogs in 1598, by fleeing to Yarmouth, it seems that some years earlier he was not so quick on his feet.

It has long been understood that Christs Teares ouer Ierusalem (1593) got Nashe into some kind of trouble with the civic authorities in London, but its exact nature has not been clear. This trouble must have constituted a notorious and memorable landmark in his career, for in his only surviving letter, written to William Cotton in the late summer of 1596, Nashe referred to it as both severe and well known, describing the Lord Chamberlain's men, on the death of their old patron Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon, as being as `piteously persecuted by the L.Maior the aldermen' `as if they had writt another Christs tears'.³ It is evident that two paragraphs on fo. 83 r-v, beginning `London, thou art the seeded Garden of sinne, the Sea that sucks in all the scummy chanels of the Realme. The honestest in thee, (for the most) are eyther Lawyers or Vsurers',<sup>4</sup> caused particular offence, for they were rewritten in blander and more generalized terms for the second edition in 1594, opening instead: `London, thou art the welhead of the land, and therfore it behoveth thee to send foorth wholesome springs. Suffer not thy channels to ouerflow like full conduits.'⁵

However, this passage, quite near the end of a highly rhetorical and repetitive work, which is by no means easy to read, might never have provoked official disapproval had it not been explicitly drawn to the attention of the Lord Mayor by Gabriel Harvey, who also, according to Nashe, maliciously fed the Mayor with a fabricated account of slanderous words Nashe was alleged to have spoken, impossibly, in a tavern during the Christmas season of 1593/4, `when I was in the Ile of Wight then and a great while after'.<sup>6</sup> Building on the useful chronological work of C. G. Harlow,<sup>7</sup> Lorna Hutson has shown that McKerrow considerably understated and underestimated the difficulties which ensued for Nashe from what, according to McKerrow, was a conventional passage of admonition little different from `those familiar denunciations which have been the common stock of preachers and moralists from time immemorial'.⁸ Yet Nashe himself later referred to these troubles as `my most forsaken extremities'.<sup>9</sup> McKerrow's reluctance to consider them as such may have been symptomatic of his persistent tendency to flatten out and 'normalize' the more sensational features of Nashe's personality and life-record, no doubt in a well-meant attempt to make him seem a respectable writer whom his contemporaries acknowledged as such. McKerrow was especially anxious to rebut suggestions that Nashe was ever in prison except for debt. He dismissed the illustrated account of Nashe as subject to chained imprisonment, in The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, as `violent and unsavoury abuse' of no biographical value. He clearly felt that to have been imprisoned for seditious writing would stigmatize Nashe even for twentieth-century readers. This flattening-out tendency was shared by Harlow, who congratulated himself for making the picture of Nashe's difficulties during 1593/4 `less colourful'.<sup>10</sup> However, Dr Hutson cites a recognizance in the Repertory for the Court of Aldermen, dated 20 November 1593, showing that someone called Nashe was summoned to `appeare at the nexte sessions of Gaole delyverye of the Newgate to be houlden for the citty of London at the Justicehall in the oulde Bailey Readye to make answere to all such matters as shalbe obiected against him on her Majesties behalf .¹¹

With exemplary caution, Dr Hutson claims no more than that `It is possible . . . that this refers to Thomas Nashe, author of Christs Teares.' But a delightful letter among the Berkeley muniments, from Sir George Carey to his wife Elizabeth (see below), makes it clear not only that this is definitely so, but also that Nashe's subsequent gratitude to Sir George Carey, to which Hutson refers, was amply deserved. Carey's wife, Lady Elizabeth Carey, nee Spencer, was the dedicatee of Christs Teares, and her husband's letter offers startlingly vivid evidence of the vital importance, especially for a compulsively outspoken and satiric writer such as Nashe, of securing appropriately powerful and sympathetic patronage. Without the generous help and protection of the Careys, it now becomes apparent, Nashe's definitive silencing by the authorities in 1599 might have taken place as early as 1593, leaving The Unfortunate Traveller still unpublished. But for the Careys, therefore, he might even now be a forgotten writer, remembered for little more than his early association with Marlowe and possible involvement in the Marprelate controversy. Hutson's suggestion that Nashe's assumption of an apocalyptic voice (indeed, the voice of Christ himself) in his denunciation of legal and financial corruption in London brought him into serious trouble appears to be correct. It could potentially have led to his execution for sedition, like the supposed Martinist John Penry, executed in May 1593. Nashe was evidently in grave danger as well as in `great missery'. His flight to the Isle of Wight under the protection of the Careys can be seen as closely analogous to his skin-saving flight to Great Yarmouth in the autumn of 1597, after `The straunge turning of the Ile of Dogs from a commedie to a tragedie'.<sup>12</sup>  Though Harlow suggested that Nashe may have come under the physical protection of the Careys as early as October 1593,<sup>13</sup> it is now apparent that he cannot have travelled to the Isle of Wight until December, for what was probably the best Christmas of his life. Both his obsessively exacerbated rage against Gabriel Harvey (whom, in the first edition of Christs Teares, he had publicly forgiven, only to attack him with renewed venom in the second) and his extravagant adulation of the 'heroicall' Carey family are, in the light of Sir George Carey's letter, amply accounted for. Because of Harvey's malicious reporting of him to the civic authorities, he had possibly been at risk of being hanged for sedition, as John Penry had been in May of that year. In any case, prolonged close confinement in insanitary conditions often caused death without the need for penal intervention. Thanks to the wholehearted support and protection of the Careys, he was freed to live and write (though not without further brushes with authority) for a further seven years. In between the two editions of Christs Teares Harvey had, in effect, sent him to hell-a prison, probably Newgate. From this hell the Careys, conversely, rescued him, bearing him off to the social heaven-haven of Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, where the lavish hospitality of the isle's self-styled 'Governor' was renowned.<sup>14</sup> Indeed, Carey (who had technically been appointed only 'Captain', not `Governor') kept court there as if the island were his own little kingdom, independent of that larger island ruled over by his cousin Elizabeth Tudor. In 1593 Nashe had publicly implored Harvey for `reconciliation and pardon', paying apparently unironic tribute to his 'aboundant Schollership, courteous well gouerned behauiour, and ripe experienst iudgement'. But in 1594-and for the remaining years of his life-he gave Harvey no quarter, for he had 'welneare betrayed me to infamie eternall'. Harvey,who had deliberately informed on Nashe and sent him to foul imprisonment, must now expect equivalent punishments in the press: `Thrice more conuenient time I wil picke out to stretch him forth limbe by limbe on the racke, and a field as large as Achilles race to baite him to death, with darts according to the custome of bayting buls in Spaine.'

Nashe's sustained rage against Harvey has sometimes been thought the vacuous product of a mere paper-war. Sir George Carey's letter, below, shows that Harvey -- if indeed it was on his suggestion that the Lord Mayor personally examined the '83 leafe' of Christs Teares -- had gone out of his way to injure Nashe, and could have silenced for him for ever.

Autograph letter of Sir George Carey to his wife Elizabeth, nee Spencer, 13 November 1593

[Endorsed on outer front sheet, formerly folded:]

To the lady Carey on of the honorable ladies of the priuy chamber /

My sweete soule, whos life in thy presens Joyeth most of any, and by thy want wanteth what shold susteyne his beinge, or geeue cumfort to the opression of his discontent. / Receue the wishes of his desire, that thinketh all time to longe, that he tarieth from the. and accept the excuses unfayned / that forceth his delay, not in his powre to remedy. / my jorney to petwoorth was crossed by the erls former departure to London / wherby in greate speede I hastened to drayton / where I cast out my vew to see any thinge that contented me, but I wisht thy great eys parte=ners of my likinge / I cast not my thoughts to intende any thinge for walkes. / but my thoughts there intende to wishe thee to advise before I doe deuise / and when I am by ouertoyle and framinge platts. / weeried with the days trauell, the nights rest is no rest for that I rest not where I shoold be best pleased / the last weeke I spent to deuise delights, to content the delight of my chiefest delight, and cam not to the cowrt vntill Saterday, not meaninge that night to haue seen her majesty but the erle of essex acquayntinge me her with my being there, I was presently sent for to her majesty, who vsed me very kindly, and after sun_dry demaunds both of bes and yow with idell discourses of foren and whome causes., desmissed me from a weeresum kneelinge My cumminge interpreted to be for honoringe the 17 day, my good manors not permittinge me to deny it, when I fownde no means to escape the expectation and demaunde therof, made me yeeld to performe what I may, which shalbe with as small cost as I may. the multiplicity, of part my needfull, part my pleasinge buisnes, hath made an university in my brayns, and yet the retayninge of a Judges place in her majesty hands, hath prorogued for this terme, the pleadinge betwixt the epe Cyty and me, wherby neyther saynt talbons nor London shall haue the honor to rubbe my hors heeles but within few days after my limited time, of your Ladishipps lice[nce] I will take my flight where I will take my rest / The action that now possesseth most for the present, is euery gallants best employed witts, best to shew themselEs. at the cowrs in the filde / witty in theyr shilde deuises / and pleasinge in the choyse of theyr presents / Ostende is by on days advertisment to be besieged by anothers to be dismissed / the enemies force xxv thousande and the defendants not two thousande / Duke ernestus the emperors brother is cum_minge out of germany to be gouernor for the kinge of Spayne, and expected to be in flawnders by the last of this month with 4500 hors and 12000 foote so that sum exployts are vndoutedly to be expected / an attempt uppon ostende callays and bullen, the next springe, yf not before / particularitis of many comodyatragedicall court news I will differ till my cum_minge, and on million of times eche day, wishe my self with thy sweete self, / and beliue my absens cannot seeme so longe to thee, as thine doth to me / yet so to stay to dispache that I may leaue no cause shortly to returne, I hope yow will accumpt time well lent / nashe hath dedicated a booke vnto yow with promis of a better, will cotton will disburs vi or xx nobles in yowr rewarde to him and he shall not finde my purs shutt to relieue him out of prison there presently in great missery. malicied for writinge agaynst the londoners in the 83 leafe / [Endorsed on the back:]

to the lady Carey in all kindnes commend me, and tell her I will loue her by so muche the more she shall make muche and free yow from melancoly till my returne, to Bess deliuer my blessinge a[nd] from my self my loue entiere and vnshared to any. from drayton

The context of this letter can be explained briefly. Sir George Carey, who had been Captain and self-styled 'Governor' of the Isle of Wight since 1583, writes here to his wife Elizabeth, apologizing for his delay in returning to her on the island. He had come over to the mainland `for no other cause but a business in law',<sup>15</sup> at least according to his brother Robert, whom he was trying to block from the inheritance of an estate in Suffolk. We do not know what business he had with the Earl of Northumberland, whom he had evidently hoped to see at Petworth, in Sussex, en route, but the existence of a connection between the two men may be confirmed by the fact that Northumberland succeeded Carey as Captain of the Gentleman Pensioners in 1603. Because of the severe plague outbreak in London, the Michaelmas Law Term (2-25 November) had been transferred to St Alban's, and the queen held court at Windsor. Within a mile or two of St Alban's Carey learned that his brother Robert had already arrived there, and, rather than risk an embarrassing encounter, he turned back and made for Windsor (or nearby Drayton), leaving agents to conduct the case on his behalf. He had acquired a twenty-one-year lease of Drayton Manor from Sir Christopher Hatton in 1592,<sup>16</sup> and was clearly more anxious to sort out his affairs there than to dance attendance on his cousin the queen. As we now learn, considering sites for 'walkes', and 'framinge platts' (drawing up maps) for the enjoyment and improvement of his newly acquired Middlesex estate kept him fully occupied. However, the queen, alerted to Carey's arrival by the Earl of Essex, assumed that he had come over to participate in the Accession-Day tilt and other celebrations on 17 November, so he was compelled to do so, though he hoped to get away with making an appearance `with as small cost as I may'. Like many courtiers, he probably hoped that by displaying sufficient wit and ingenuity he could cut down on expenditure on clothes and jewels. However, participation was inevitably extremely expensive. We know that his younger brother Robert, who appeared as `the forsaken Knight that had vowed solitariness', spent more than 4400 on 'caparisons' and a gift for the queen.¹⁷ Compared with this, Lady Carey's 55 reward to Nashe for Christs Teares seems quite modest, though we do not know how much it cost, in addition, to bail him out of prison.

C. G. Harlow's suggestion that it was at Windsor that Carey first encountered Nashe¹⁸ can now be rejected, as can the suggestion that he went to the Isle of Wight as a tutor to the younger Carey lady. It appears that when Carey arrived at Windsor Nashe was already in prison, 'malicied for writinge agaynst the londoners in the 83 leafe' of Christs Teares. Nor was it ever very probable that Nashe would have been met with at court, in however obscure a lodging. The letter does not make it absolutely clear whether the Careys already knew Nashe personally. But the bare form of reference to him as 'nashe', rather than `one nashe', or `one called nashe', may suggest that they did. Carey expects his wife already to be familiar with the name, though of course that could be simply from reading his published work, such as the notorious Piers Pennilesse (1592). In the same year, in Strange Newes . . . , Nashe had boasted that 'I haue written in all sorts of humours priuately, I am perswaded, more than any yoong man of my age in England'.¹⁹ Perhaps, like Spenser, whose Muiopotmos (1590) was dedicated `To the right worthy and vertuous Ladie; the La: Carey', and indicates that she had already shown him favour, Nashe had some time ago singled out the Careys as promising patrons. He may indeed have presented them with a work or works in manuscript, as he claimed in the dedication of Christs Teares. But while Spenser had the special advantage of being able to claim kinship with Lady Carey, nee Spencer -- a connection which she herself seems to have acknowledged<sup>20</sup> -- Nashe's route to their favour is harder to reconstruct. But as a Cambridge man who was on familiar terms with the antiquaries Sir Robert Cotton and William Camden, he may have had other lines of access. Alternatively, the neat dropping of Spenser's name in the dedication of Christs Teares immediately before his allusion to his own previous writings may indicate that it was Spenser himself-one of the few contemporary writers for whom Nashe has nothing but praise-who introduced him to the Careys: `Fames eldest fauorite, maister Spenser, in all his writings hie praiseth you. To the eternizing of the heroycall familie of the Careys, my choisest studies haue I tasked.'²¹

Like Spenser's Stemmata Dudleiana, celebrating the ancestors of the Earl of Leicester, Nashe's writings on `the heroycall familie of the Careys' are not now to be met with. The word 'choisest' points to a work or works which remained in manuscript, and were intended for the family circle alone. It should not be doubted that such a work really did exist, or was in preparation, for the Careys were unusually attentive literary patrons, as well as unusually generous ones (`he shall not finde my purs shutt'), and evidently gave close and intelligent attention to works addressed to them. Nashe could not have got away with empty claims or promises. Indeed, Carey's 1593 letter to his wife of eighteen years seems to reflect some lively literary emulation, as if he is trying to keep his rhetorical end up among the poets and wits who were also addressing writings to her at this time. At several points he seems to be on the verge of turning his prose epistle into a verse one, as in the jingling phrase 'wishe thee to advise before I doe deuise', or the polyptoton on 'rest' which then rhymes on 'best', ' the nights rest is no rest for that I rest not where I shoold be best pleased'. The slightly confused conceit about his multiple commitments, which `hath made an university in my brayns', in its very elision of academic and legal disputation succeeds in reinforcing the impression of his excessive busyness/business. Carey also shows a Nashe-like relish for strongly physical and tactile images-'rubbe my hors heeles'-and for coined compound adjectives-'comodya-tragedicall'.

One verbal detail in the letter appears specifically to reflect Carey's literary reading. It is the slightly unusual application of 'malice' as a verb (cf. OED s.v. malice v, To seek or desire to injure), in the reference to Nashe as 'malicied for writinge agaynst the londoners'. The word may be picked up from line 257 of Spenser's Muiopotmos--dedicated, of course, to his wife `The cause why he this Flie so maliced'. This line initiates a sustained aetiological myth accounting for the spider Aragnoll's inherited envy of the beautiful and harmless butterfly Clarion. The metre of this key line, which requires the final 'e' to be sounded, may have led Carey to think of the word as 'malicy', rather than the more usual 'malice'.

The final list of `games in court' has been scribbled very hastily, and is hard to decipher. But it may contain another literary allusion. It was probably added for the benefit of 'Bess', the Careys' much-loved only child, then aged 17. The opening phrase of the first note appears to read 'alfonseo F", though it is rather blotted and confused. If this reading is correct, the allusion may be to `Fryer Alphonso, K. Philips Confessor', about whom Nashe tells a funny story in Pierce Pennilesse.²² McKerrow has no light to shed on this figure, but the tale of his 'moderation'-refusing all food at dinner, he carries away an apple, in case he should be hungry the next day-suggests that he was viewed as a comic character, a caricature embodiment of austere Spanish spirituality. Perhaps both Nashe and Carey had access to some jest-book featuring Philip II's anorexic confessor, who may have been particularly associated with `games in court'. Alternatively 'alfonseo F' may be the name or nickname of some court acquaintance of the Carey family, or even of the bearer of the letter, who is presumably the 'yow' whom Lady Carey is to free from melancholy. A strong candidate, in this case, would be Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger, who was employed as a court musician, on a generous salary of ,g26 a year, from 1592 (New Grove). He was later to be associated with Ben Jonson and others in the preparation of court masques. Born in Greenwich some time before 1578, he was close in age to the 17-year-old Bess, and would have been a good source of ideas or gossip about current `games in court'. A. L. Rowse has ensured that we are all familiar with the first Lord Hunsdon's close links with court musicians, and in particular his fathering a child by his mistress Emilia Lanier, nee Bassano. His son George Carey was also a generous patron of musicians, and conceivably Alfonso Ferrabosco was carried off to the Isle of Wight by him to contribute to the 1593/4 Christmas revels at Carisbrooke Castle.

Whatever the exact bearing of the 'alfonseo Ft' phrase, there seems little doubt that the `games in court' itemized at the end of Carey's letter must have some connection with the next printed work dedicated by Nashe to the Careys, The Terrors of the Night. Extraordinarily, it was entered in the Stationers' Register twice, on 30 June 1593 and again on 25 October 1594. McKerrow took absolutely literally Nashe's claim, in his dedication of it to the younger Elizabeth Carey, that it was written 'A long time since', and therefore placed it, despite its date of publication, in the first volume of Nashe's works, preceding Christs Teares, which opens the second volume. However, the description of the work on its two entries is subtly different. In 1593 it was alternatively titled 'a discourse of apparisions' but in 1594 it was called `an apparision of Dreames'. This may indicate that the work was, in fact, substantially revised and augmented during the summer of 1594, in the aftermath of Nashe's Christmas visit to Carisbrooke. For a different reason, this was suggested by Harlow, who pointed out that Nashe alludes to the fourth edition of Camden's Britannia, which appeared some time in the summer of 1594. In the light of the notes at the end of Sir George Carey's letter, it now seems likely that Nashe rewrote what had originally been a short discourse on ghosts and apparitions, prompted by his visit to Sir Robert Cotton in February 1593, turning it into a more playful and wide-ranging (though still brief) treatise on night-time visions and dreams and their interpretations. Rewriting may have been so extensive as to require a fresh entry in the Stationers' Register. Certainly after the debacle over Christs Teares Nashe must have been anxious not to implicate the Careys in any further publication that might cause trouble with the law. While the dream-based `games at court' reported by Sir George Carey to his daughter sound like the flirtatious romps of young unmarried courtiers, Nashe's treatise deals with more sombre themes, and with night visions only a few of which are erotic. He describes it aptly as `no golden dreame, but a leaden dreame, but a leaden dreame'.²³ Nevertheless, he offers entertaining anecdotes and throwaway references-`Those that will harken any more after Dreames, I referre them to Artemidorus, Synesius, Cardan'<sup>24</sup>which could be drawn on and developed by young Elizabeth Carey and her friends. It seems beyond coincidence that after Sir George Carey's 1593 report on `games in court' as consisting of 'dremes and interpretations of them', Nashe's next work was on that very subject. Perhaps he selected The Terrors of the Night, from a mass of unpublished, and perhaps unfinished, writings of the last two or three years, as apparently best matching Elizabeth Carey's current preoccupations.²⁵

The discovery of Sir George Carey's 1593 letter answers certain questions about Nashe's career, but leaves many others unresolved. It makes it apparent that it was as a fugitive from justice, not as a tutor to young Elizabeth Carey, that Nashe joined the Carey family on the Isle of Wight that Christmas. It accounts for the radical rewriting of the passage about Gabriel Harvey in the second edition of Christs Teares, as well as for Nashe's continued and exacerbated vendetta against him. It also suggests a reason why the next published work of Nashe's dedicated to one of the Careys, The Terrors of the Night, concerns dreams and their interpretation. However, some pressing questions remain. How much of a success was Nashe with the Careys when he spent Christmas with them? Why did he dedicate The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), written, as he pointedly indicates at the end of the first edition, the previous summer, to the young Earl of Southampton?²⁶ Did this work seem more suitable for Southampton than for any of the Carey family, or was Nashe's credit with the Careys already wearing thin? And why were both the date and the dedication to Southampton removed from the `corrected and augmented' second edition, in which Nashe seems to have had a hand, later in 1594?<sup>27</sup> Why did Nashe dedicate nothing further to the Careys-at least in printafter the autumn of 1594? No doubt he realized that they would not be interested in sponsoring his escalating hostilities against Gabriel Harvey. But possibly, also, he had discovered that there were some limits to the openness of the Carey family's purse to a writer who, though brilliant, had an irrepressible compulsion to defy civic authority. Christs Teares may have had a special appeal for them, in that doom-laden plague year of 1593, both because of its intense and theatrical religiosity, and because of the fierce `admonition to London'. Lady Carey was extremely pious, and her husband disliked the city authorities in London. But as Philip Schwyzer has pointed out, Nashe never wrote anything else in the least like it.²⁸ Nashe's 1596 letter to William Cotton, a protege of Sir George Carey and, as we now learn, someone who acted as some kind of steward for him,²⁹ was written soon after the death of the old Lord Hunsdon. Perhaps he hoped that Sir George Carey, the new Lord Hunsdon, was now in a position to favour him further. This witty, playful letter-much of which is devoted, to McKerrow's evident distaste, to scatological fancies prompted by Sir John Harington's recently published Metamorphosis of Ajax-may have been intended to remind the Carey circle of how amusingly he could write, as well as invoking that nearly fatal 1593 `terme . . . at St Albons' at the end of which they had rescued him. But if he hoped to be readmitted to their purse or their society, he probably hoped in vain. If he had received substantial support and protection in 1596-7 he would presumably not have needed to continue with the 'players'-relics of the late Lord Chamberlain's Men-and to work on the disastrous Isle of Dogs. Perhaps, like Prince Hal when he became King Henry, Sir George Carey on becoming Lord Hunsdon threw off, or steadfastly refused to readmit, some of the more anarchic and compromising hangers-on of his earlier, merrier days. The Isle of Wight had been a safely remote arena for entertaining such companions, but now, as Baron Hunsdon, and Captain of the Gentleman Pensioners, he was to live as Elizabeth's courtier. Whether or not Nashe actually ended his days in prison, as the author of the Trimming wished him to do, we now know that the image of him as shackled and punished was cruelly apt, for he had indeed spent time in prison `in great missery'.