Thomas Nashe

Thomas Nashe (baptised 1567 in Lowestoft, died c. 1601) was an English Elizabethan writer whose work spanned plays, poetry, satire and pamphlets. He mattered for the sharpness and wordplay he brought to English prose, and for writing one of the earliest English novels of wandering adventure.

The son of a clergyman, he spent his childhood in Norfolk, where his family settled when he was young. He studied at Cambridge and took his bachelor's degree in 1586, but he seems never to have completed a master's. Around 1588 he left the university and went to London to earn a living by writing. There he became friends with Robert Greene and other Cambridge-educated writers, including Christopher Marlowe, who chose to live by the pen rather than by teaching or the Church.

His early years in London were full of quarrels. He wrote pamphlets under the name Pasquill defending the Church of England against the Puritans who published as Martin Marprelate, and later he fought a long public feud with the brothers Gabriel and Richard Harvey. That dispute produced Pierce Penniless in 1592, his greatest success: a prose satire full of coined words and Latin tags that was reprinted quickly. His style could be brilliant and at times deliberately obscure, turning criticism into a display of wit.

He also worked in the theatre and in fiction. He wrote The Isle of Dogs with Ben Jonson, whose staging caused an uproar that led to the closure of the theatres and forced Nashe to flee to Great Yarmouth; the play has been lost. In 1594 he published The Unfortunate Traveller, the story of a rogue who wanders through Europe in the service of a nobleman, with scenes of brutality typical of the period. His legacy lies mainly in his literature: his satirical prose and his novel anticipated forms that later writers would develop.