Thomas Nashe was an Elizabethan playwright, poet, satirist and a significant pamphleteer.
25 Facts About Thomas Nashe
2.
Thomas Nashe is known for his novel The Unfortunate Traveller, his pamphlets including Pierce Penniless, and his numerous defences of the Church of England.
3.
Thomas Nashe was born and baptised in Lowestoft, on the coast of Suffolk, where his father, William Nashe, or Nayshe as it is recorded, was curate.
4.
The family moved to West Harling, near Thetford, in 1573 after Thomas Nashe's father was awarded the living there at the church of All Saints.
5.
Around 1581 Thomas Nashe went up to St John's College, Cambridge, as a sizar, gaining his bachelor's degree in 1586.
6.
Thomas Nashe moved to London and began his literary career.
7.
Thomas Nashe arrived in London with his one exercise in euphuism, The Anatomy of Absurdity.
8.
Thomas Nashe is featured in Thomas Dekker's News from Hell, and is referred to in the anonymous Parnassus plays, which provide this eulogy:.
9.
Thomas Nashe was drawn into the Martin Marprelate controversy on the side of the bishops.
10.
Thomas Nashe attempted to apologise in the preface to Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem, but the appearance of Pierce's Supererogation shortly after offended Thomas Nashe anew.
11.
Thomas Nashe replied with Have with You to Saffron-Walden, with a possibly sardonic dedication to Richard Lichfield, a barber of Cambridge.
12.
Gary Taylor believes that Thomas Nashe was the principal author of the first act.
13.
Thomas Nashe subsequently promoted the play in his pamphlet Pierce Penniless.
14.
In 1593 Thomas Nashe published Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem, a pamphlet dedicated to Lady Elizabeth Carey.
15.
In 1597 Thomas Nashe co-wrote the play The Isle of Dogs with Ben Jonson.
16.
Jonson was jailed; Thomas Nashe's house was raided and his papers seized but he had already escaped to the country.
17.
Thomas Nashe remained for some time in Great Yarmouth before returning to London.
18.
The satire can be mocking and bitingly sharp, and at times Thomas Nashe's style seems to relish its own obscurity.
19.
At some time in the early 1590s Thomas Nashe produced an erotic poem, The Choise of Valentines that begins with a sonnet to "Lord S".
20.
Thomas Nashe had tried to pre-empt criticism by placing it in the tradition of classical erotica: "Yet Ovid's wanton muse did not offend".
21.
In 1594, Thomas Nashe wrote a book titled The Terrors of the Night; Or A Discourse of Apparitions, which sceptically considers dreams, nightmares, and apparitions, which Thomas Nashe considers born of superstition, melancholy or imagination.
22.
Thomas Nashe says, "A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy which the day hath left undigested, or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imagination".
23.
Correspondence can be seen between the rationalism expressed in Act 5 of Shakespeare's play Midsummer Night's Dream and the ideas expressed in The Terrors of the Night; for example when Theseus in the play describes "the poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling" and Thomas Nashe describes the constant "wheeling and rolling on of our braines".
24.
Thomas Nashe is credited with the erotic poem The Choise of Valentines and his name appears on the title page of Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, though there is uncertainty as to what Nashe's contribution was.
25.
Some editions of this play, still extant in the 18th century but now unfortunately lost, contained memorial verses on Marlowe by Thomas Nashe, who was his friend.