CHAPTER VI.

THOMAS NASH; THE PICARESQUE AND REALISTIC NOVEL.

I.

"There is nothing beside the goodnesse of God, that preserves health so

much as honest mirth, especially mirth used at dinner and supper, and

mirth toward bed.... Therefore, considering this matter, that mirth is

so necessary a thing for man, I published this booke ... to make men

merrie.... Wherefore I doe advertise every man in avoiding pensivenesse,

or too much study or melancholic, to be merrie with honesty in God and

for God, whom I humbly beseech to send us the mirth of heaven.

Amen."[245] Such was the advice attributed to a man whose opinion should

carry weight, for he had been a "doctor of physicke" and had published

with great success a "Breviary of helth" which was a household book in

his time.

The pensive Sir Philip Sidney was, as we have seen, of a very different

turn of mind. He did not live to read the above wise counsels, but he

had had the opinion of his friend Languet on this subject, and that had

been of no avail. His propensity to overthinking is apparent in many

places in his writings, especially in his "Arcadia," where he made so

little use of the comical elements he had himself introduced into it.

The main incident in his book, the assignation given by Zelmane to both

Basilius and Gynecia and the "mistakes of a night" which follow, would

have been from any other pen, only too comical. It is, in fact, the

character it bears in Shirley's drama, and it has the same in the many

modern plays founded on similar mistakes, plays which serve to improve,

according to Andrew Borde's prescription, if not the morals, at least

the health of the "Palais Royal" audiences of to-day. With Sidney, the

comic is a vulgar style; he very rarely risks any jests, a portrait of

a cowardly peasant, or of an injured husband.[246] One of his best

attempts in this style is a character in his masque of the "Lady of

May," the pedant Rombus, who gives quotations which are always wrong and

like Rabelais' scholar, who belongs to "the alme, inclyte and celebrate

academy, which is vocitated Lutetia," is careful to make use of nothing

but quasi-Latin words. In order to relate how he has been unmercifully

whipped by shepherds he declares: "Yet hath not the pulchritude of my

vertues protected me from the contaminating hands of these Plebeians;

for comming, _solummodo_ to have parted their sanguinolent fray, they

yeelded me no more reverence, than if I had beene some _pecorius

asinus_."[247] But that is an easy way to amuse, and, even at that

epoch, not very new. Rabelais had made a better use of it before Sidney,

and after him, without mentioning Shakespeare, Cyrano de Bergerac

furnished more laughable specimens. No phrase of Rombus equals the order

given by the Pedant to his son when sending him to Venice to engage in

commerce: "Since thou hast never desired to drink of the pool

engendered by the hoof of the feathered horse,[248] and as the lyric

harmony of the learned murderer of Python has never inflated thy speech,

try if in merchandise Mercury will lend thee his Caduceus. So may the

turbulent AEolus be as affable to thee as to the peaceful nests of

halcyons. In short, Charlot, thou must go." Sidney kept entirely to

these ineffectual attempts, and had no desire to go further in his

examination of the ridiculous side of ordinary men.

This study was undertaken by several of his contemporaries. One of the

peculiarities of this first awakening of the novel in England, is that

it was nearly complete and produced, if not standard masterpieces, at

least curious examples of nearly all the different kinds of novel with

which later writers have made us familiar. We have seen already how Lyly

depicted courtly life, and tried to use the novel as a vehicle for wise

and philosophical advice; how Greene, Lodge and Sidney busied themselves

with romantic tales; how Greene tried to describe the realities of life

in some of his autobiographical stories. There was something more to do

in this line, and the Elizabethan drama offers innumerable examples of

it; but it is not so well known that in the time of Shakespeare, there

were in circulation, besides romantic and chivalrous tales, regular

realistic novels, the main object of which was to paint to the life

ordinary men and characters. These are the least known, but not the

least remarkable of the attempts made by Shakespeare's contemporaries in

the direction of the novel as we understand it.

Works of this kind took for the most part the shape to which has been

applied the name of _picaresque_. This was, like the pastoral, imported

into England from abroad: in the sixteenth century it shone with

particular brilliance in Spain. The incessant wars of that vast empire

on whose frontiers the sun never set, had favoured the multiplication of

adventurers, to-day great lords, to-morrow beggars; one day dangerous,

another day contemptible or ridiculous. "Such people there are living

and flourishing in the world, Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us

have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and

very successful too, mere quacks and fools: and it was to combat and

expose such as those, no doubt that _Laughter_ was made." So wrote in

our time William Thackeray,[249] who seems to have considered that the

age of the _picaro_ had not yet passed away, and that the novelist might

still with advantage turn his attention to him. However that may be the

great time for the rascal, the rogue, the knave, for all those persons

of no particular class whom adventures had left poor and by no means

peaceable, for the _picaro_ in all his varieties, was the sixteenth

century. A whole literature was devoted to describing the fortunes of

these strange persons; Spain gave it its name of _picaresque_ and

spread it abroad but did not altogether invent it. The rogue, who plays

tricks which deserve a hanging, had already filled and enlivened tales

in several languages. Master Reynard, in that romance of the Middle Ages

of which he is the hero, is something like a _picaro_. Another of them

is Til Eulenspiegel, whose adventures related in German furnished, in

1515, the subject of a very popular book;[250] even Panurge could at

need be placed in this great family. Only, with Master Reynard we live

in the world of animals and the romance is allegorical; with Til

Eulenspiegel we find no truth, no probability, merely tricks for tricks'

sake, and how coarse they are! With Panurge, we are distracted from the

_picaro_ by all the philosophic and fantastic digressions of an

extensive tale in which he is not the principal hero. But with the

Spaniards, with Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzman d'Alfarache[251] and the

rest, the _picaro_ holds a place in literature which is peculiarly his

own. Faithless, shameless, if not joyless, the plaything of fortune, by

turn valet, gentleman, beggar, courtier, thief, we follow him into all

societies. From hovel to palace he goes first, opens the doors and shows

us the characters. There is no plot more simple or flexible, none that

lends itself better to the study of manners, of abuses, of social

eccentricities. The only defect is that, in order to abandon himself

with necessary good will to the caprices of Fate, and in order to be

able to penetrate everywhere, the hero has necessarily little conscience

and still less heart; hence the barrenness of the greater part of the

picaresque romances and the weak _role_, entirely incidental, reserved

in these works for sentiment.

The success of these Spanish romances was immediate and lasting

throughout Europe. "Lazarillo" and "Guzman" were translated into several

languages, and were greatly appreciated here and abroad. "What! sir,"

says the Burgundian lord in "Francion,"[252] "is it thus that you

cruelly deprive me of the narration of your more amusing adventures? Do

you not know that these commonplace actions are infinitely entertaining,

and that we take delight in listening even to those of scoundrels and

rascals like Guzman d'Alfarache and Lazarillo de Tormes?" "Guzman" had

in France several illustrious translators; the ponderous author of "La

Pucelle" and famous academician, Chapelain, was one of them; another was

Le Sage who, before penning this translation, had revived and doubled

the popularity of the picaresque novel in publishing his "Gil

Blas."[253] In Germany, Grimmelshausen, following the same models, wrote

in the seventeenth century his "Simplicissimus." In England "Guzman" was

several times translated; "Lazarillo" was continually reprinted during

two centuries, and original romances of this kind were published here,

among others, by Thomas Nash, in the sixteenth, by Richard Head in the

seventeenth, by Defoe and Smollett, in the eighteenth century. The

initiative of Nash and his group was all the more important and

meritorious because before them the comic element was greatly wanting in

the English prose romance; amusing stories in the manner of the French

had found translators sometimes, but not imitators; the authors of

Arcadias were especially concerned in depicting noble sentiments, and

the gift of observation possessed by the English people ran the risk of

being for a long time exercised nowhere but on the stage, or in metrical

tales, or in moral essays.

II.

Thomas Nash made one of that group of young men, full of spirit, fire

and imagination, who shone during the first part of Shakespeare's

career, who fancied they could live by their pen, and who died

prematurely and miserably. Nash was about thirty-three years old when he

died in 1600; Marlowe was twenty-nine, Peele thirty, Greene thirty-two.

Nash was born at Lowestoft in 1567:[254] "The head towne in that iland

is Leystofe, in which, bee it knowne to all men, I was borne; though my

father sprung from the Nashes of Herefordshire;" a family that could

"vaunt longer petigrees than patrimonies." He studied at Cambridge, in

St. John's College, "in which house once I tooke up my inne for seven

yere together lacking a quarter, and yet love it still, for it is and

ever was, the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all that university."[255]

"Saint Johns in Cambridge," says he at another place, "at that time was

an universitie within it selfe ... having, as I have hearde grave men of

credite report, more candles light in it everie winter morning before

foure of the clocke than the foure of clocke bell gave stroakes."[256]

Like Greene and Sidney, he imbibed early a passionate taste for

literature; he learnt the classical languages and foreign ones too, at

least French and Italian, and enjoyed much miscellaneous reading; old

English literature, Mandeville, Chaucer, Gower, Skelton, were not

forgotten. Following then the usual course, he seems to have travelled

on the continent, to have visited Italy and Germany,[257] and to have

come home, also according to custom, to rush into literature: by which

word was then habitually understood fame, poverty, quarrels,

imprisonment, and an early death. Not one of these items was wanting in

Nash's career. A prolific and easy writer, he tried his hand at all

kinds of work, composing them rapidly and with visible pleasure, always

ready to laugh at the follies of others, sometimes at his own, not

melancholy like Sidney, nor downcast like Greene. He very rarely alludes

to his miseries without a smile, though he could not help regretting the

better things he might have done if Fortune had not been so adverse,

"had I a ful-sayld gale of prosperity." But "my state is so tost and

weather-beaten, that it hath nowe no anchor-holde left to cleave

unto."[258] Having said thus much, he immediately resumes his cheerful

countenance and in the best of spirits and in perfect good humour goes

on describing the great city of Yarmouth, the metropolis of the Red

Herring.

With this turn of mind and an inexhaustible fund of wit, satire, and

gaiety, he published numerous pamphlets, threw himself impetuously into

the Martin Marprelate controversy (in which another novelist, Lyly, was

also taking part); sustained a rude warfare against Gabriel Harvey;[259]

wrote a dissertation on social manners: the "Anatomie of absurditie,"

1589; a disquisition with an autobiographical turn, which may be

compared with those Greene has left; "Pierce Penilesse his supplication

to the Divell," 1592 (it had great success, and was even translated into

French, "maimedly translated," says Nash,[260] probably with great

truth); a novel "The unfortunate traveller or the life of Jack Wilton,"

1594, which has most undeservedly remained until now the least known of

his works; a drama, "The Isle of dogs," 1597, which is lost, and for

which the author was sent to prison; a curious and amusing discourse "in

praise of the red herring," 1599; and many other books, pamphlets, and

works of all kinds.[261]

Constantly entangled in quarrels, in such a way sometimes that the

authorities had to interfere--for example, in his war with Gabriel

Harvey, when the destruction of the books of both was ordered--he

preserved to the last his good humour and his taste for people and

authors who knew what it was to laugh. Curiously enough, he combined

this taste with an intense fondness for pure literature and for lyrical

poetry. Rabelais is among his masters, and so is Aretino, "one of the

wittiest knaves that ever God made." Tarleton the jester is among his

friends, and so is Kemp, the Dogberry of Shakespeare's "Much Ado," the

Peter of "Romeo and Juliet," the famous dancer who performed a morris

dance from London to Norwich. And at the same time he bestows with

unbounded enthusiasm heartfelt praises upon Spenser, "heavenly

Spenser"; upon "immortal" Sidney, whose "Astrophel and Stella" he

himself published in 1591; and upon Marlowe, as the author of the

exquisite Hero and Leander poem, "Leander and Hero of whome divine

Musaeus sung and a diviner muse then him, Kit Marlow."[262]

With all his fondness for merry authors, Nash can discern true poetry,

and he adores it. If by chance, in the midst of an angry satirical

disquisition, the word poetry comes to his pen, he is suddenly

transformed, he smiles, he melts; nothing is left in him but human

sympathies. "Nor is poetry an art where of there is no use in a man's

whole life but to describe discontented thoughts and youthfull desires,

for there is no study but it dooth illustrate and beautifie.... To them

that demaund what fruites the poets of our time bring forth, or wherein

they are able to approve themselves necessarie to the state, thus I

answere: first and formost, they have cleansed our language from

barbarisme, and made the vulgar sort, here in London, which is the

fountaine whose rivers flowe round about England, to aspire to a richer

puritie of speach than is communicated with the comminalty of any nation

under heaven."[263] When a man like Nash could write in such a strain,

with a passion for vernacular literature scarcely equalled at any time,

there was obviously growing among that "vulgar sort, here in London," a

public for any great man that might appear, a public for William

Shakespeare himself, who was just then beginning to reach celebrity.

Nash does not doubt that it is possible for English to become a

classical language, however rude the garb it first bore. According to

Nash, Surrey was "a prince in content because a poet without peere.

Destinie never defames her selfe but when she lets an excellent poet

die: if there bee any sparke of Adams paradized perfection yet emberd vp

in the breasts of mortall men, certainely God hath bestowed that his

perfectest image on poets." Differing from Francis Bacon and a few of

the grave dignitaries of literature, he has faith in that group of

artists in the first rank of whom he placed heavenly Spenser, who can

well bear comparison with any author of France, Italy, or Spain.

"Neither is he the only swallow of our summer."[264]

This fondness for pure literature, for musical verse and lyrical poetry,

explains how, satirist as he was, Nash had numerous friends whose

feelings towards him were nothing short of tenderness. "Sweet boy,"

"Sweet Tom," are not usual expressions towards a satirist; they are,

however, applied to Nash both by Greene and by Francis Meres, because

there was in Nash's mind something besides the customary rancour of born

satirists, "The man," said Shakespeare,

"The man that has no music in himself

Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;

The motions of his spirit are as dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus;

Let no such man be trusted."[265]

A very different sort of a man was Nash; his friends found that he could

be "mov'd with concord of sweet sounds," and that he could be trusted.

As he survived Sidney at a time when a few years meant much for English

literature, he could form a far more favourable judgment of the drama

than the well-known one in the "Apologie." The ridiculous performances

noticed by Sidney had not disappeared, but they were not the only ones

to be seen on the stage; dramas of the highest order were being played;

actors rendered them with becoming dignity, and, curiously enough to our

ideas, Nash adds as a special praise that women were excluded from among

their number: "Our players are not as the players beyond sea, a sort of

squirting baudie comedians, that have whores and common curtezans to

play womens parts, and forbeare no immodest speech or unchast action

that may procure laughter; but our sceane is more stately furnisht than

ever it was in the time of Roscius, our representations honorable and

full of gallant resolution, not consisting like theirs of a Pantaloun, a

whore and a Zanie, but of emperours, kings and princes whose true

tragedies, _Sophocleo cothurno_ they do vaunt."[266] In the next

century, women were allowed to replace on the English stage the

newly-shaven young fellows who used to play Juliet and Titania; we are

happy to say that so indecent a practice was due to foreign influence.

We have Prynne's authority for believing that the first women who had

the audacity to appear before a London audience were French. This

happened in 1629 at the Blackfriars theatre. It is true that not long

after, to make up, as it were, for lost time, plays were performed in

England in which all the parts were taken by women; it is not known

whether on that occasion they were French.[267]

Another very important characteristic in Nash is the high ideal he has

shaped for himself of the art of writing, not only in verse, but in

plain prose. At a time when English prose was scarcely acknowledged to

be capable of artistic treatment, and when rules, regulations and

theories had, as is generally believed, very little hold upon writers,

it is interesting to notice that such an author as Nash, with his

stirring style and unbridled pen, with his prison and tavern life,

understood that words had a literary value of their own. They were not

to be taken at random, but chosen with care. His theory may on some

points be disputed, but it is certainly interesting to note that he had

a theory at all. First, he desires that a man shall write in his own

vein and not copy others, especially those who by their vogue and

peculiarities, such as Lyly or Greene, were easiest of reach and the

most tempting to imitate. He strongly defends himself from having ever

done anything of this sort; on the contrary, more than once appeals were

made to him to give judgment in literary matters:

"Is my style like Greenes, or my jeasts like Tarletons?

"Do I talke of any counterfeit birds, or hearbes or stones?... This I

will proudly boast ... that the vaine which I have ... is of my own

begetting and cals no man father in England but myselfe, neither

Euphues, nor Tarlton, nor Greene.

"Not Tarlton nor Greene but have beene contented to let my simple

judgment overrule them in some matters of wit. Euphues I read when I was

a little ape in Cambridge, and I then thought it was _ipse ille_: it may

be excellent still for ought I know, but I lookt not on it this ten

yeare: but to imitate it I abhorre."[268]

His vocabulary is very rich; he has always a variety of words at his

disposal and uses often two or three the better to impress our minds

with the idea in his own. He coins at need new words or fetches them

from classical or foreign languages. He does not do this in an off-hand

way, but on purpose and wilfully; he possessed much of that curious care

for and delight in words which is one of the characteristics of the men

of the Renaissance. To deal with words was in itself a pleasure for

them; they liked to mould, to adopt, to combine, to invent them. Word

painting delighted them; Nash has an extreme fondness for it, and

satirical and comical as he is, he often astonishes us by the poetic

gracefulness of his combinations of words. In this as in many other

particulars he imitates, _longe sequens_, the master he seems to have

admired above others, Rabelais, who, in the tempestuous roll of his

diverse waters, sometimes washes up on to the sand pearls fit to adorn

the crown of any lyrical poet. Fishes appear in Nash's otherwise

unpoetical prose as "the sea's finny freeholders;" the inhabitants of a

port town do not sow corn, "their whole harvest is by sea;" they plough

"the glassy fieldes of Thetis." He has an instinctive hatred for

abstract terms; he wants expressive words, words that shine, that

breathe, that live. Instead of saying that Henry III. _granted_ a

charter and certain privileges in a particular year of his _reign_, he

will write that "he _cheard up their blouds_ with two charters more, and

in Anno 1262 and forty-five of his _courte keeping_, he permitted them

to wall in their towne."[269] The pleasure of replacing stale,

commonplace expressions by rare, picturesque, live ones, and in lieu of

a plain sentence to give an allegorical substitute, has so much

attraction for Nash, that clear-sighted as he is, he cannot always avoid

the ordinary defects of this particular style, defects which he has in

common with many of his contemporaries, not excluding Shakespeare

himself, namely, obscurity and sometimes bad taste.

Another of Nash's tendencies, which he has most decidedly in common with

Rabelais, consists in the use of a number of expressions in the same

sentence for the same idea. Of course one carefully chosen word would

be enough; such a man as Merimee, to take an example at the other

extremity of the line, picks out the one term he wants, puts it in its

place; word and place fit exactly; there is nothing to add or desire.

Not so Rabelais; not so either his admirer Nash; the newly-awakened

curiosities of the Renaissance were too young as yet, too fresh and

strong upon them, to be easily kept down by rule and reflection.

Literature too was young then, and young things are endowed with eyes

that stare and admire more easily than old ones. When entering their

word-shop, writers of the sixteenth century were fain to take this word,

and this other too, and yet that one more; and when on the threshold,

about to go, they would turn and take two or three again. There are

pages in Rabelais and pages in Nash where most of the important words

are supplemented and fortified with a number of others placed there at

our disposal as alternatives or substitutes, for the pleasure of our

ears and eyes, in case we might like them better. Nash has to express

this very simple idea: Look at Yarmouth, what a fine town it is! Well,

it owes all it is to the red herring. This he formulates in the

following manner with quite a Rabelaisian mixture of native and half

Latin words and iterations for most terms of importance: "Doe but

convert, said hee, the slenderest twinckling reflexe of your eye-sight

to this flinty ringe that engirtes it, these towred walles, port-cullizd

gates, and gorgeous architectures that condecorate and adorne it, and

then perponder of the red herringes priority and prevalence, who is the

onely inexhaustible mine that hath raised and begot all this, and,

minutely, to riper maturity, fosters and cherisheth it."[270]

Some critics of his time abused Nash for the liberties he took with the

vocabulary, especially for his foreign and compound words. He was ready

with this half-serious, half-jocose answer: "To the second rancke of

reprehenders, that complain of my boystrous compound wordes, and ending

my Italionate coyned verbes all in _ize_," such as "tympanize;

tirannize," says he elsewhere; "thus I replie: That no winde that blowes

strong but is boystrous; no speech or wordes of any power or force to

confute or perswade, but must be swelling and boystrous. For the

compounding of my wordes, therein I imitate rich men, who having

gathered store of white single money together, convert a number of those

small little scutes into great peeces of gold, such as double Pistoles

and Portugues. Our English tongue of all languages, most swarmeth with

the single money of monosillables, which are the onely scandall of it.

Bookes written in them and no other seeme like shopkeepers' bookes, that

containe nothing else save halfe-pence, three-farthings, and two-pences.

Therefore what did me I, but having a huge heape of those worth lesse

shreds of small English in my _pia maters_ purse, to make the royaller

shew with them to men's eye, had them to the compounders immediately,

and exchanged them foure into one, and others into more, according to

the Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian."[271]

Nash had a particular literary hatred for mere empty bombast. His love

for high-sounding words with a meaning was not greater than his aversion

for big sounds without one. Even his friend Marlowe does not escape his

censure for having trespassed in this particular beyond the limits of

good taste. Nash wonders "how eloquent our gowned age is growen of

late," and he has nothing but contempt for those "vainglorious

tragoedians who contend not so seriously to excel in action, as to

embowell the clowdes in a speach of comparison; thinking themselves more

than initiated in poets immortalitie, if they but once get Boreas by the

beard and the heavenlie bull by the deaw-lap."[272]

His ideas regarding the art of novel writing are very liberal, and he

accepts as belonging to literature many specimens we should sternly

reject. The one point to remember, however, is that he does not accept

them all; he draws the line somewhere, and in that age when the novel

was in its infancy, there was merit in doing even no more than this. He

is very hard upon the old mediaeval romances, which it is true he seems

to have known only through the abridged and degenerate texts circulated

in his time, for the amusement of idle readers. He readily endorses the

moral views of Ascham about them, adding however, what is more

interesting for us, some literary criticism: "What els I pray you, doe

these bable booke-mungers endevor but to repaire the ruinous wals of

Venus court, to restore to the worlde that forgotten legendary licence

of lying, to imitate a fresh the fantasticall dreames of those exiled

Abbie-lubbers [_i.e._, the monks] from whose idle pens proceeded those

worne out impressions of the feigned no where acts of Arthur of the

rounde table, Arthur of litle Brittaine, Sir Tristram, Hewon of

Burdeaux, the Squire of low degree, the four sons of Amon, with

infinite others.... Who is it that reding Bevis of Hampton, can forbeare

laughing, if he marke what scambling shyft he makes to end his verses a

like? I will propound three or foure payre by the way for the readers

recreation:

The porter said: By my snout,

It was Sir Bevis that I let out."[273]

Every reader will agree with Nash, I suppose, in condemning this as

balderdash.

Endowed thus with artistic theories of his own, with an intense love of

literature, with an inborn gaiety and faculty of observation, Nash added

to the collection of novels of the Shakespearean era, not another Bevis

of Hampton, but his "Jack Wilton,"[274] the best specimen of the

picaresque tale in English literature anterior to Defoe. His romance,

written in the form of memoirs, according to the usual rule of the

picaresque, is dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, under whose

patronage Shakespeare had already placed his "Venus and Adonis." It has

the defect of all the romances of the time, in England as elsewhere: it

is incoherent and badly put together. But it contains excellent

fragments, two or three capital portraits of individuals which show

careful observation, and a few solidly constructed scenes like the

vengeance of Cutwolfe which allow us to foresee that one day the

dramatic power of the English genius, worn out doubtless by a too long

career on the stage, instead of dying altogether, will be revived in

the novel.

Nash, after the manner employed by More in his "Utopia," by Greene in

his "Ciceronis amor," and in our age, with a splendour of fame to which

several generations have already borne testimony, by Sir Walter Scott,

introduces historical personages in his fiction. The page Jack Wilton,

the hero of the tale, a little superior by his rank to the ordinary

_picaro_ has, like Gil Blas, little money in his pocket and a few odds

and ends of Latin in his head; he distributes in his conversation the

trite quotations that have remained by him, skilfully enough to persuade

the vulgar that he does not belong to their tribe. "Tendit ad sidera

virtus--Paulo majora canamus--Secundum formam statuti," &c., and from

time to time, when he is greatly elated and wishes to show himself in

all his magnificence, he adopts the elegances and similes proper to the

euphuistic style: "The sparrow for his lecherie liveth but a yeere,"

&c.[275]

Wilton is present first with the royal court of England at the siege of

Tournay, under Henry VIII. What my credit was at this court "a number of

my creditors that I coosned can testifie." He lives on the resources of

his wits, playing tricks worthy a whipping if not a hanging on

respectable persons of limited capacity. His most notable victim is the

purveyor of drink or victualler to the camp, a tun-bellied coward, proud

of his pretended noble descent, a Falstaff grown old, whose wit has been

blunted, who has ended by marrying Mistress Quickly, and has himself

become tavern keeper in partnership with her. In old days he drank on

credit: now the good fellows tipple at his expense. Such is the end of

all the Falstaffs and all the Scapins. "This great Lorde, this worthie

Lord," relates the wicked page, "thought no scorne, Lord have mercy upon

us, to have his great velvet breeches larded with the droppings of this

dainty liquor," that is, the cider that he sold; "and yet he was an olde

servitor, a cavelier of an ancient house, as it might appeare by the

armes of his ancestrie, drawen very amiably in chalk, on the in side of

his tent doore."[276]

The scene between the fat, ruddy host, open-mouthed, blear-eyed, and the

frolicking slender page, who delights in his tricks and covers his

victim with jesting compliments, is extremely well described. Wilton

finds his man "counting his barrels, and setting the price in chalke on

the head of everie one of them." He addresses him his "duty verie

devoutly," and tells him he has matters of some secrecy to impart to him

for which a private audience is necessary:

"With me, young Wilton? quoth he, marie and shalt. Bring us a pint of

syder of a fresh tap into the 'Three Cups'[277] here; wash the pot!

"So into a backe roome he lead mee, where after hee had spit on his

finger, and picked off two or three moats of his olde moth eaten velvet

cap, ... he badde me declare my minde, and there upon he dranke to me on

the same."

Jack is careful not to touch at once on the matter in his head: he knows

his man and attacks him first by that vanity of a noble descent which he

possesses in common with Falstaff. Jack has always borne him affection,

"partly for the high discent and linage from whence he sprung, and

partly for the tender care and provident respect he had of poore

soldiers ... he vouchsafed in his own person to be a victualer to the

campe: a rare example of magnificence and courtesie; and diligently

provided, that without farre travel, every man might have for his money

syder and cheese his bellyfull. Nor did he sell his cheese by the way

onely, or his syder by the great, but abast himselfe with his owne hands

to take a shoomakers knife: a homely instrument for such a high

personage to touch, and cut it out equally like a true justiciarie in

little penny-worthes that it would doo a man good for to looke upon. So

likewise of his syder, the pore man might have his moderate draught of

it (as there is moderation in all things) as well for his doit or his

dandiprat as the rich man for his halfe souse or his denier ..."

Jack goes on irrepressible, overflowing; it is his best moment; he does

not want the sport to end too quickly: "Why, you are everie childs

felow: any man that comes under the name of a souldier and a good

fellowe, you will sitte and beare companie to the last pot, yea, and you

take in as good part the homely phrase of: 'Mine host heeres to you,' as

if one saluted you by all the titles of your baronie. These

considerations, I saie, which the world suffers to slip by in the

channell of carelesnes, have moved me in ardent zeale of your welfare,

to forewarne you of some dangers that have beset you and your barrels.

"At the name of dangers hee start up, and bounst with his fist on the

boord so hard, that his tapster overhearing him cried: 'Anon! anon!

sir,' and entering with a bow askt him what he wanted.

"Hee was readie to have stricken his tapster for interrupting him in

attention of this his so much desired relation, but for feare of

displeasing me he moderated his furie, and onely sending him for the

other fresh pint, wild him looke to the barre, and come when he is cald

with a devilles name.

"Well, at his earnest importunitie, after I had moistned my lips, to

make my lie run glib to his journies end, forward I went as followeth

..." And the good apostle stops again; the cider and his own words have

moved him; he is a little fuddled, so is mine host; they both fall to

weeping. The innkeeper is ready to believe anything, and at this moment,

which is the right one the page at length determines to inform him that

in an assembly where he was present, he heard mine host, the purveyor of

the camp, accused of connivance with the enemy, by giving information to

the besieged through letters hidden in his empty barrels. High treason

is suspected! How are these dangerous rumours to be dissipated? There is

only one way of doing it, that is in becoming popular in the army, very

popular; he must make himself beloved by all; he must distribute cider

freely and for a time suppress in his shop the unbecoming custom of

paying.

The victualler follows this advice, but soon the trick is discovered;

the page is roundly whipped, but being to the core a true picaroon,

Wilton does not for all that feel his spirit in any way lessened: "Here

let me triumph a while, and ruminate a line or two on the excellence of

my wit!" This is all the sorrow and repentance the whip extracts from

him.

Shakespeare, two years later, fused the two characters into one, caused

the wit of the page to enter the brain of the fat man, and the blending,

animated by his genius, produced the inimitable customer of the "Boar's

Head" tavern.

After various adventures, Wilton returns to London, and struts about in

fine clothes, whose originality he describes with an amusing rush of

language: "I had my feather in my cap as big as a flag in the fore-top;

... my cape cloake of blacke cloth, over-spreading my backe like a

thornbacke or an elephantes eares, ... and in consummation of my

curiositie my hands without gloves, all a mode French." The sense of the

picturesque, the careful observation of the effect of a pose, of a fold

of a garment, were, before Nash, entirely unknown to English novel

writers, and it was not until the eighteenth century, until the time of

Defoe, Fielding, and, above all, Sterne, that the author of "Jack

Wilton" was excelled in this special talent.

Soon the page takes up the course of his adventures again, and travels

anew on the continent. He visits Venice, Florence, Rome, refraining with

a care for which he is to be thanked from trite descriptions. What's the

good of describing the monuments of Rome? he says; everybody knows them:

"he that hath but once drunke with a traveller, talkes of them." Sir

Thomas More contemplating his "Utopia," John of Leyden dragged to the

scaffold, the Earl of Surrey jousting for the fair Geraldine "against

all commers," Francis I., conqueror at Marignan, Erasmus, Aretino, "one

of the wittiest knaves that ever God made," and other personages of the

Renaissance, figure in the narrative. Faithful to the picaresque plot,

Nash conducts his reader into all societies, from the tavern to the

palace, from the haunt of robbers to the papal court, and makes his hero

no better than he should be. At Marignan, Wilton occupies himself

especially in discovering quickly who is likely to be the strongest, in

order to attach himself ardently to the winner. At Venice he runs away

with an Italian lady, deserts his master, the Earl of Surrey, and passes

himself off as the Earl.

All this is too much at length for honest Nash, and feeling not less

displeased than ourselves with the wicked actions of his hero, he

himself interposes at times, not without disadvantage to his plot, and,

in spite of the improbability of placing such remarks in Wilton's mouth,

introduces his own opinions on the persons and incidents of the romance.

This is an effect of the impetuosity of his temperament, blameable

undoubtedly from an artistic point of view. We shall be indulgent to him

if we remember that no author of the time was entirely master of himself

and faithful to his plot. Even Shakespeare rarely resists like

temptation, and when a poetic image comes into his mind, little matters

it to him what character is on the stage; he makes of him a dreamer, a

poet, and lends to him the exquisite language of his own emotion. Let

us remember how the murderers hired to assassinate Edward's children

describe the scene of the murder. They saw "the gentle babes ...

girdling one another

Within their alabaster innocent arms:

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,

And, in their summer beauty, kiss'd each other."

A very improbable remark, it will be admitted, on the part of the

murderers. But, then, it is Shakespeare who talks aloud, forgetting that

he is supposed not to be there.

Nash, with like heedlessness, often interposes in his own person, and

takes the words out of his page's mouth; and his bold, characteristic

and concise opinions are very curious in the history of manners and

literature. For example, when he describes the war of the Anabaptists

and the execution of John of Leyden, he sums up thus in a short pithy

sentence the current opinion of his day among literary people and men of

the world, on the already formidable sect of the Puritans: "Heare what

it is to be Anabaptists, to bee puritans, to be villaines: you may be

counted illuminate botchers for a while, but your end wil be: Good

people pray for me."

His open admiration of the charity of the Catholics at Rome reveals in

him great independence of mind and much courage: "Yet this I must say to

the shame of us Protestants, if good workes may merit heaven they doo

them, we talke of them. Whether superstition or no makes them

unprofitable servants, that let pulpets decide: but there, you shall

have the bravest Ladies in gownes of beaten gold, washing pilgrimes and

poore souldiours feete, and dooing nothing they and their wayting mayds

all the yeare long, but making shirts and bandes for them against they

come by in distresse."

At Wittenberg, Wilton sees "Acolastus" performed, an old play that was

as popular in England as on the continent,[278] and Nash's severe

criticism on the actors shows how well the difference between good

comedians and common players was understood in London. Nash shared

Shakespeare's opinion of the actors who "out-heroded Herod," and he

would have been of Moliere's way of thinking about the performances at

the Hotel de Bourgogne: "One as if he had beene playning a clay floore,

stampingly troade the stage so harde with his feete, that I thought

verily he had resolved to doe the carpenter that sette it uppe some

utter shame. Another floung his armes lyke cudgelles at a peare tree,

insomuch as it was mightily dreaded that hee woulde strike the candles

that hung above theyr heades out of their sockets, and leave them all

darke." This severe criticism may serve to reassure us about the way in

which the great English dramas were interpreted at that period.[279] And

indeed they deserved that some trouble should be taken with them, for

in London it was the time of "Romeo and Juliet," of "Midsummer Night's

Dream," of "Richard III."

In fact, Nash does not only possess the merit of knowing how to observe

the ridiculous side of human nature, and of portraying in a full light

picturesque figures now worthy of Teniers and now of Callot; some fat

and greasy, others lean and lank; he possesses a thing very rare with

the picaresque school, the faculty of being moved. He seems to have

foreseen the immense field of study which was to be opened later to the

novelist. A distant ancestor of Fielding, as Lyly and Sidney appear to

us to be distant ancestors of Richardson, he understands that a picture

of active life, reproducing only, in the Spanish fashion, scenes of

comedy, is incomplete and departs from reality. The greatest jesters,

the most arrogant, the most venturesome have their days of anguish; no

brow has ever remained unfurrowed from the cradle to the grave, and no

one has been able to live an impassive spectator and not feel his heart

sometimes beat the quicker, nor bow his head in sorrow. Nash caught a

glimpse of this, and therefore mingled serious scenes with his pictures

of comedy, in order that his romance might the more closely resemble

life. Sometimes they are love scenes as when the Earl of Surrey

describes to us his awakening passion for Geraldine, and how he met her

at Hampton Court: "Oh thrice emperiall Hampton Court, Cupids inchaunted

castle, the place where I first sawe _the perfect omnipotence of the

Almightie expressed in mortalitie_!" Sometimes they are tragic scenes

full of blood and tortures. It is true that Nash then falls into

melodrama and conducts his Wilton to a sort of Tour de Nesles where the

Countess Juliana, the Pope's mistress, gives herself up to excesses, by

the side of which those of Margaret of Burgundy are but child's play.

Murders, rapes, and scenes of robbery multiply under cover of the plague

that rages at Rome, and the horrors resulting from the pestilence are

described with a vigour that reminds us of Defoe, without however

equalling him. Carts containing the dead go up and down the streets, and

lugubrious cries resound: "Have you anie dead to burie? Have you anie

dead to burie?" The carts "had manie times of one house their whole

loading."

Wilton is accused of murders committed in his house; the rope almost

about his neck, he is saved by an English earl, in exile, who seems to

have been imbued with Ascham's teaching, and who reproaches him for

travelling, especially in Italy, where morals are so corrupt and where

immorality is so dangerous. "Take care," said the earl, "if thou doest

but lend halfe a looke to a Romans or Italians wife, thy porredge shall

bee prepared for thee, and cost thee nothing but thy life." The earl,

who proves to be a rather pedantic nobleman, passes in review all

nations, and proves that they are not worth the trouble of going to see.

Wilton, whose personal experience does not justify such unfavourable

prognostications, especially now that he is out of danger, is wearied by

this talk, and, pretending important business, gives his chattering

benefactor the slip. He is soon punished; he is captured by the Jews of

Rome; his adventures become more and more mysterious and alarming, and

more and more does melodrama invade the story.

Sometimes, however, in the midst of these abominations, Nash's tone

rises; his language becomes eloquent and his emotion infectious; he

shudders himself, horror penetrates him and seizes us; the jests of the

picaroon are very far from our mind, the drama is then as terrible as

with the most passionate romanticists of our century in their best

moments.

Few stories of our day are better contrived to give the sense of the

horrible than the story of the vengeance of Cutwolfe related by himself

just as he is going to be tortured. After a prolonged search, Cutwolfe

at last finds his enemy, Esdras of Granada, alone, in his shirt, and far

from all help. The unfortunate man implores Cutwolfe, whose brother he

had killed, to make it impossible for him to do any more harm, to

mutilate him, but to spare his life. His enemy replies: "Though I knewe

God would never have mercie on mee except I had mercie on thee, yet of

thee no mercie would I have.... I tell thee, I would not have undertooke

so much toyle to gaine heaven, as I have done in pursuing thee for

revenge. Divine revenge, of which, as one of the joies above, there is

no fulnes or satietie. Looke how my feete are blistered with following

thee from place to place. I have riven my throat with overstraining it

to curse thee. I have ground my teeth to powder with grating and

grinding them together for anger, when anie hath nam'd thee. My tongue

with vaine threates is bolne, and waxen too big for my mouth....

Entreate not, a miracle maye not reprive thee."

The scene is prolonged. Esdras continues to beg for his life; he will

become the slave, the chattel of his enemy. An idea comes into the mind

of the latter: Sell thy soul to the devil, and I will pardon thee.

Esdras immediately utters horrible blasphemies.

"My joints trembled and quakt," continues Cutwolfe, "with attending

them, my haire stood upright, and my hart was turned wholly to fire....

The veyne in his left hand that is derived from his heart with no faint

blow he pierst, and with the bloud that flowd from it, writ a ful

obligation of his soule to the divell: yea more earnestly he praied unto

God never to forgive his soule than manie Christians doo to save theyr

soules. These fearfull ceremonies brought to an end, I bad him ope his

mouth and gape wide. He did so: as what wil not slaves doo for feare?

Therwith made I no more adoo, but shot him ful into the throat with my

pistol: no more spake he after; so did I shoote him that hee might never

speak after, or repent him. His body being dead lookd as black as a

toad."[280]

This conversation and the sight of Cutwolfe's horrible punishment,

recall Jack Wilton to himself. He regrets his irregular life, but not to

the point of refunding the money stolen from the Countess Juliana; rich

as Gil Bias, he can now, like him, take rank among peaceable and settled

folk; he marries his Venetian lady, and returns to the king of England's

army, occupied in giving a grand reception to Francis I. at the Field of

the Cloth of Gold. There ends the most complete career furnished in

England, before Defoe, by a character of fiction.

The primary if not only result of the publication of "Jack Wilton" was,

so far as the author himself was concerned, to place him in new

difficulties. His well-known satirical vein, his constant use and abuse

of allusions, which often render him obscure, were so well known that it

was considered improbable that he had been writing this time with a

merely artistic aim. He had been careful to state in his dedication that

readers would merely find in his book "some reasonable conveyance of

historie and varietie of mirth," and that he was attempting a kind of

writing new to him; it was to no purpose. Readers were on the look-out

for allusions; they took his historical heroes for living people but

thinly disguised, and lined Nash's story with another of their own

invention. The author, who well knew the dangers of such

interpretations, never ceased to protest that, in this work at least,

there was no place for them. When once the public is started upon such a

track, it is no easy matter to make them turn round. Nash had recourse

to his usual revenge, that is, to laugh at his interpreters. "I am

informed," he wrote, shortly after his "Wilton" was printed, "there be

certaine busie wits abrode that seeke to anagrammatize the name of

Wittenberge to one of the Universities of England; that scorn to be

counted honest, plaine meaning men, like their neighbours, for not so

much as out of mutton and potage, but they will construe a meaning of

kings and princes. Let one but name bread, but they will interpret it to

be the town of Bredan in the Low countreyes; if of beere he talkes, then

straight he mockes the countie Beroune in France; if of foule weather or

a shower of raine, he hath relation to some that shall raigne

next."[281]

His remonstrances seem to have had very indifferent success, and Nash,

to our great loss, did not again attempt novel writing. But the vein was

in him, and it constantly reappears in the variety of pamphlets he has

left behind him. Fine scenes of comedy, good portraits of ridiculous

characters to be met in every-day life, amusing anecdotes, nearly all

the elements of a sound comic novel are scattered through his writings.

The familiar portraits of the upstart, of the false politician, of the

inventor of new sects, portraits at which many observers of human nature

in the time of Shakespeare tried their hand, are to be seen in the

gallery Nash painted in his "Pierce Penilesse."[282] Conformably to the

fitness of things, Nash described himself under the name of Pierce,[283]

as Sidney had given his high moral tone, his melancholy and loving soul

to the shepherd Philisides, as Greene had told his own miseries under

the name of poor Roberto. Here is Nash's portrait of the upstart who has

travelled abroad and has brought back from his journey nothing more

valuable than scorn for his own country: "Hee will bee humorous forsooth

and have a broode of fashions by himselfe. Somtimes, because Love

commonly wears the liverie of wit, hee will be an _Inamorato poeta_, and

sonnet a whole quire of paper in praise of Ladie Manibetter, his

yeolowfac'd mistres.... All _Italionato_ is his talke, and his spade

peake [_i.e._, his beard] is as sharpe as if he had been a pioner before

the walls of Roan. Hee will dispise the barbarisme of his owne countrey,

and tell a whole legend of lyes of his travayles unto Constantinople. If

he be challenged to fight ... hee objects that it is not the custome of

the Spaniard or the Germaine to looke backe to everie dog that barks.

You shall see a dapper Jacke that hath beene but once at Deepe, wring

his face round about, as a man would stirre up a mustard pot and talke

English through the teeth, like Jaques Scabdhams, or Monsieur Mingo de

Moustrapo; when, poore slave, he hath but dipt his bread in wylde boares

greace and come home againe, or been bitten by the shinnes by a wolfe;

and saith he hath adventured uppon barricadoes of Gurney or Guingan, and

fought with the yong Guise hand to hand."

Like Ben Jonson, Nash met on his way some Politick Would-Bes that

"thinke to be counted rare politicians and statesmen, by beeing

solitarie: as who should say, I am a wise man,"[284]--"and when I ope my

lips," would have added Shakespeare, "let no dog bark!" He has met

inventors of sects, and has heard of pre-Darwinian "mathematicians" who

doubt the fact that there were no men before Adam and are inclined to

think there are no devils at all. Nash strongly condemns these

inventors and mathematicians, drawing at the same time a curious picture

of the state of confusion in religious matters which was then so

conspicuous in England: "They will set their self love to study to

invent new sects of singularitie, thinking to live when they are dead,

by having their sect called after their names: as Donatists of Donatus,

Arrian[s] of Arrius, and a number more of new faith founders, that have

made England the exchange of innovations and almost as much confusion of

religion in everie quarter, as there was of tongues at the building of

the Tower of Babel ...

"Hence atheists triumph and rejoyce and talke as prophanely of the Bible

as of Bevis of Hampton. I heare say there are mathematicians abroad that

will proove men before Adam; and they are harboured in high places, who

will maintayne to the death that there are no divells."[285]

Scenes of light comedy abound in Nash; they are especially numerous in

his "Lenten Stuff,"[286] a queer little book, his last work, and one

which he seems to have written _con amore_. Never was he in better

humour than when, the year before his death, he betook himself to

singing "the praise of the red herring," Monsieur Herring, Solyman

Herring, Sacrapant Herring, Red Herring of Red Herring hall, Pater

Patriae, as he is fond of calling him, inventing on each page a new title

for his hero. There is no event in ancient or modern history where he

does not discover that "Caesarean Charlemaine Herring" has had a part to

play; no person of however mean or exalted rank who has not had to deal

with "Gentleman Jacke Herring." The fishes made him their king, and the

Pope made him a saint. The first time he appeared at the Pope's court

was a great event in Christendom. An English sailor had sold him for

three hundred ducats to the purveyor of the papal kitchen, and

"delivered him the king of fishes, teaching hym to geremumble it, sauce

it, and dresse it, and so sent him away a glad man. All the Pope's

cookes in their white sleeves and linnen aprons met him middle way to

entertaine and receyve the king of fishes, and together by the eares

they went, who shoulde first handle him or touch him. But the clarke of

the kitchin appeased that strife, and would admit none but him selfe to

have the scorching and carbonadoing of it, and he kissed his hands

thrice, and made as many _humblessos_ before he woulde finger it; and,

such obeysances performed, he drest it as he was enjoyned, kneeling on

his knes, and mumbling twenty _Ave Maryes_ to hymselfe, in the

sacrifizing of it on the coales, that his diligent service in the

broyling and combustion of it, both to his kingship and to his

fatherhood might not seeme unmeritorious."[287]

However careful Thomas Nash had been to act according to the views

attributed to Dr. Andrew Borde concerning the cultivation of mirth as a

preservative of health, he reached what this authority calls "the mirth

of heaven," with much more rapidity than might have been expected. His

mirth diet was obviously adulterated and mingled with wrath and sorrow.

He had been born in 1567, and we read about him in a comedy performed

at Cambridge in 1601, these verses which are friendly if not very

poetical:

[Illustration: "TOM NASH HIS GHOST."]

"Let all his faultes sleepe with his mournfull chest,

And there for ever with his ashes rest,

His style was wittie, though it had some gall,

Some things he might have mended, so may all,

Yet this I say, that for a mother witt,

Few men have ever seen the like of it."[288]

The manner in which his friend Dekker represents him, shortly after,

reaching the Elysian fields, leaves little doubt that his life was

shortened not only by his angry passions, but by sheer want: "Marlow,

Greene and Peele had got under the shades of a large vyne, laughing to

see Nash, that was but newly come to their colledge, still haunted with

the sharpe and satyricall spirit that followed him heere upon earthe:

for Nash inveyed bitterly, as he had wont to do against dryfisted

patrons, accusing them of his untimely death, because if they had given

his Muse that cherishment which she most worthily deserved, hee had fed

to his dying day on fat capons, burnt sack and sugar, and not so

desperately have venturde his life and shortned his dayes by keeping

company with pickle herrings."[289]

III.

Some of Shakespeare's contemporaries attempted to give their readers

"the like" of Nash's wit, and tried their hand either at the picaresque

novel or at the reproduction of scenes taken from ordinary life, of

which Greene also had left some examples. The comic school was far from

equalling the fecundity of its romantic rival; it existed however, and

though absolutely forgotten now, it helped to keep up and improve the

natural gift of observation which belonged to the English race.

One of the most extraordinary ventures ever attempted in the picaresque

style was made by Henry Chettle, another member of the group to which

Greene, Nash, and the others belonged. He was, like Nash himself, a

personal friend of Greene, and published after his death his

"Groats-worth of wit," 1592, for which, as we have seen, he had to offer

in his next pamphlet explanations and apologies, among others, to

Shakespeare. Chettle seems to have followed the literary career usual in

his time; he composed many dramas alone[290] or in collaboration; he was

perpetually borrowing money from the notorious Henslowe, and he was

occasionally lodged in Her Majesty's prisons. In 1595 he published his

"Piers Plainnes seaven yeres prentiship,"[291] in which we find, mingled

together, Sidney's Arcady, Greene's romantic heroes, and the customary

incidents of picaresque novels. The scene is laid in Tempe; there are

Menalcas and Corydons; there are sheep who are poetically invited by

their keeper to eat their grass:

"Sport on faire flocke at pleasure

Nip Vestaes flouring treasure."

There is too Piers Plain, now a shepherd but formerly nothing short of a

picaro, who has seen much and has followed many trades, and served many

masters. His companions asked for his story, and he very willingly

agreed to tell them what he had been, "and what the world is," no mean

subject to be sure, and no wonder that he "cravde pardon to sit because

the taske was long, which they willingly graunted." Piers, according to

the picaresque traditions, had been the servant of many masters; he

tells his experience of them in the first person, following also in this

the rules of the picaresque tale. He first introduces us to a swaggering

and cowardly courtier, and plays his part in intrigues and conspiracies.

Then he describes the "vertuous and famous virgin AEliana," Queen of

Crete, who delighted in hunting, and went to the woods "Diana-like." To

be "Diana-like," she dressed as follows:

"On her head she wore a coronet of orientall pearle; on it a chaplet of

variable flowers perfuming the ayre with their divers odors, thence

carelessly descended her amber coloured hair ... Her buskins were richly

wrought like the Delphins spangled cabazines; her quiver was of

unicornes horne, her darts of yvorie; in one hand she helde a boare

speare, the other guided her Barbary jennet, proud by nature, but nowe

more proude in that he carried natures fairest worke, the Easterne

worlds chiefe wonder." In a somewhat similar style Zucchero painted the

Queen, not of Crete, but of England, and when dressed in this fashion,

Her Majesty too, was supposed to be represented "Diana-like."

Of the misrule in Crete, and of the dangers AEliana runs from the

incestuous passions of her uncle, and of her escape through the

providential intervention of Prince AEmilius, we shall say nothing; nor

of the "frolicke common-wealth" established in Thrace, feeling as we do

some sympathy with Corydon, who interrupts the speaker, saying: "Reach

hither thy bottle that we may drinke round; I am sure thou must needes

be dry with talking when I am so a thirst with hearing." Piers passes

from the court to the shop of a dealer in old clothes and an usurer. He

leads a very miserable life, and we have sordid descriptions of scenes

in low life with which Chettle was better acquainted than with the loves

of AEmilius and AEliana. Princes and princesses come in again; there are

revolutions, awful dangers and marvellous deliverances. All ends

happily, and Piers and his hearers agree to meet "at theyr ploughman's

holidaye. Where what happened, if Piers Plainnes please, shall per

adventure be published." This "adventure" never took place. The

incoherent mixture of the picaresque, romantic, and Arcadian tale

resulted in such an unpalatable compound that even novel-readers of

Shakespeare's time objected to a narration of this kind, and did not

trouble Chettle with a demand for its continuation.

His reputation therefore rests mainly on his dramas. One of his most

frequent associates in writing them, and one of the most prolific and

gifted, Thomas Dekker, was also something of a novelist. He has left,

besides a great quantity of plays, a number of pamphlets written very

much in Nash's vein,[292] in which there is some excellent realism,

together with the most amusing and whimsical fancies.[293] His

biography is a mere repetition of his friend's life, and the words:

Henslowe, drama, penury, pamphlets, prison, quarrels, put together, will

give a sufficient idea of the sort of existence led by him as well as by

so many of his associates.[294] He wrote some of his plays alone, many

others with numberless collaborators, such as Chettle, Drayton, Wilson,

Ben Jonson (with whom he afterwards had a violent quarrel), Haughton,

Day, Munday, Hathaway, Middleton, Webster, Heywood, Wentworth Smith,

Massinger, Ford, Rowley, and even others, for the dramatic faculty was

then so very common that any one, so to say, was good enough to act as a

collaborator in writing plays.

He had many traits in common with Nash: the same excellent faculty of

observation, the same gaiety and _entrain_, with powers of his own to

associate it with the most exquisite tenderness and pathos; the same

love for literature and for the poets, for Chaucer, for Spenser, whose

arrival in the Elysian fields he describes in a way to tempt the pencil

of a painter: "Grave Spenser was no sooner entred into this chappell of

Apollo, but these elder fathers of the divine furie gave him a lawrer

and sung his welcome; Chaucer call'd him his sonne and plac'd him at his

right hand. All of them, at a signe given by the whole quire of the

Muses that brought him thither, closing up their lippes in silence, and

turning all their eares for attention to heare him sing out the rest of

Fayrie Queenes prayses."[295]

But a marked difference between Dekker and Nash resulted from the fact

that Dekker had not only a love of poetry, but a poetical faculty of a

high order. He went far beyond the picturesqueness of Nash's

word-painting, and reached in his prose as well as in his verse true

lyrical emotion and pathos; he had, said Lamb, "poetry enough for

anything;"[296] and while Nash's gaiety, true and hearty as it is,

takes often and naturally a bitter satirical turn, Dekker's gaiety

though sometimes bitter, more usually takes a pretty, graceful, and

fanciful turn. "Come, strew apace, strew, strew: in good troth tis a

pitty that these flowers must be trodden under feete as they are like to

be anon ...

[Illustration: "DEKKER HIS DREAM."]

"Pitty? come foole, fling them about lustily; flowers never dye a

sweeter death than when they are smoother'd to death in a Lovers bosome,

or else pave the high wayes over which these pretty, simpering, setting

things call'd brides must trippe."[297]

Intimate literary ties, however, existed between Nash and Dekker; many

passages in the one remind us of similar things in the other, the result

sometimes of actual imitation, sometimes of involuntary reminiscences.

Dekker was well aware of the family likeness between the two, so much so

that we see him once calling Nash's ghost to his assistance, as one from

whom he might most naturally gain help: "And thou into whose soule ...

the raptures of that fierie and inconfinable Italian spirit were

bounteously and boundlesly infused; thou sometimes secretary to Pierce

Pennylesse and master of his requests, ingenious, ingenuous, fluent,

facetious T. Nash, from whose aboundant pen hony flow'd to thy friends,

and mortall aconite to thy enemies; thou that madest the doctor a flat

dunce[298] ... sharpest satyre, luculent poet, elegant orator, get leave

for thy ghost to come from her abiding and to dwell with me

awhile."[299]

Nash's ghost was most certainly hovering about Dekker when he was

writing the pamphlet from which this apostrophe is taken; it taught him

how to disrobe for our amusement the heroes of antique legends of their

dignified looks and dresses, and place their haloed selves in the open

daylight of the street below our window. With all his admiration for

Marlowe's performance Nash had told, in very ludicrous fashion indeed,

the story of Hero and Leander, associating in a manner unwarranted by

ancient historians their fate with the vicissitudes of Great Yarmouth

and the red herring. In the same way Dekker makes choice of that

exquisite tale of Orpheus which reads so pathetically in the prose of

King Alfred, and he tells it thus:

"Assist mee therefore, thou genius of that ventrous but zealous musicion

of Thrace, Euridice's husband, who being besotted on his wife, of whiche

sin none but ... should be guiltie, went alive with his fiddle at's

backe, to see if he could bail her out of that adamantine prison. The

fees he was to pay for her were jigs and countrey-daunces: he paid them;

the forfeits if he put on yellow stockings and lookt back upon her, was

her everlasting lying there, without bayle or mayne-prize. The loving

coxcomb could not choose but look backe, and so lost her: perhaps hee

did it because he would be rid of her. The morall of which is, that if a

man leave his owne busines and have an eie to his wives dooings, sheele

give him the slip though she runne to the divell for her labour."[300]

Dekker did not write novels properly so called, but his prose works

abound with scenes that seem detached from novels, and that were so well

fitted for that kind of writing that we find them again in the works of

professional novelists of his or of a later time. His "Wonderfull yeare

1603," from which Defoe seems to have taken several hints, abounds in

scenes of this sort.[301] It is a book "wherein is shewed the picture

of London lying sicke of the plague. At the ende of all, like a mery

epilogue to a dull play sundry tales are cut out in sundry fashions of

purpose to shorten the lives of long winters nights that lye watching in

the darke for us." Some of these tales are extremely well told, for

Dekker is more successful in describing the humours than the terrors of

the plague. In one of them we find another copy of the fat hostler so

well described already by Nash and, as it seems, inspired by a

reminiscence of the picture in "Jack Wilton." Dekker's man is not

thinner, cleaner, nor braver than Nash's victualler. He is a country

innkeeper: "a goodly fat burger he was, with a belly arching out like a

beere-barrell, which made his legges, that were thicke and short like

two piles driven under London bridge.... In some corners of [his nose]

there were blewish holes that shone like shelles of mother of pearle ...

other were richly garnisht with rubies, chrisolites, and carbunckles,

which glistered so oriently, that the Hamburgers offered I know not how

many dollars for his companie in an East-Indian voyage, to have stoode a

nightes in the poope of their Admirall, onely to save the charge of

candles.

"In conclusion he was an host to be ledde before an Emperour, and though

he were one of the greatest men in all the shire, his bignes made him

not proude, but he humbled himself to speake the base language of a

tapster, and uppon the Londoners first arrival, cried: 'Welcome! a cloth

for this gentleman!' The linnen was spread and furnisht presently with

a new cake and a can, the roome voided, and the guest left, like a

French Lord, attended by no bodie."[302]

This new-comer, freshly arrived from London was flying on account of the

plague; but it so happened that he had himself already contracted the

disease; he was scarcely seated before it grew upon him and he fell

dead. Great was the terror in the inn. The host, the maids, all the

inmates ran from the corpse and left the house; the terror spread in the

borough; no one would even walk near the place.

"At last a tinker came sounding through the towne, mine hosts being the

auncient watring place where he did use to cast anchor. You must

understand he was none of those base rascally tinkers that with a bandog

and a drab at their tayles and a picke staffe at their necks will take a

purse sooner then stop a kettle. No this was a devout tinker, he did

honor God Pan; a musicall tinker, that upon his kettle-drum could play

any countrey-dance you cald for, and upon Holly-dayes had earned money

by it, when no fidler could be heard of. Hee was onely feared when he

stalkt through some towns where bees were, for he strucke so sweetely on

the bottome of his copper instrument that he would emptie whole hives

and leade the swarmes after him, only by the sound."

These two beings, the host and tinker, depicted as vividly by Dekker as

Callot would have drawn them, meet in the open air, and the former

offers the tinker a crown if he undertakes to bury the dead man. The

tinker haggles for better payment and they agree for ten shillings.

"The whole parish had warning of this presently ... therefore ten

shillings were leveyed out of hand, put into a rag, which was tyed to

the ende of a long pole and delivered, in sight of all the parish, who

stood aloofe stopping their noses, by the head boroughs owne selfe in

proper person." Nothing dismayed by this awful array, the tinker sits at

table, drinks deep, takes the corpse on his back and carries it to a

field. Before committing it to the earth he carefully searches its

pockets and empties them; he then makes a parcel of the clothes "and

carrying that at the end of his staffe on his shoulder, with the purse

of seven pounds in his hand, backe againe comes he through the towne,

crying aloud: 'Have you any more Londoners to bury; Hey downe a downe

dery; Have you any more Londoners to bury?' The Hobbinolls running away

from him as if he had beene the dead citizens ghost, and he marching

away from them in all the hast he could, with that song still in his

mouth."

Another sort of writing congenial to Dekker's temperament, and which

novelists of a later date continued to cultivate after him, are those

series of counsels or praises in which, with due seriousness, the thing

is recommended or praised which ought to be avoided. An example of this

kind of satirical composition is the famous "Quinze joyes de mariage,"

in which the pleasant humours of a young wife are described in such a

way as to deter even a Panurge from marrying. Another example is the

"Grobianus"[303] Latin poem of the German F. Dedekind, which enjoyed an

immense reputation throughout Europe in the sixteenth century; it

contains ironical advice to a gallant with regard to his behaviour so

that in any given circumstances he may be as objectionable and improper

as possible.

Dekker translated both works into English, but with many alterations, so

numerous indeed, especially in the last, that his book may be considered

almost original.[304] He called it "The Guls Horne-booke," or alphabet.

He gives in it a lively description of the humours of gallants in the

time of Shakespeare, of the places they used to frequent, and the

company they liked to meet. Grobianism differs from the picaresque tale

by the absence of a story connecting the various scenes, but it

resembles it in the opportunity it affords for describing a variety of

characters, humours, and places. In the same way as we follow the picaro

in the houses of his several masters, we here follow the gallant from

his rooms to his ordinary, and from St. Paul's to the play. We climb

with him to the top of the cathedral, we show our new garments in the

walks, meet courtiers, soldiers and poets at dinner, stroll at night in

the dark streets of the city and fall in with the watch. Here, again,

Dekker paints from life scenes with which he was familiar, and we have

but to follow his footsteps to become acquainted with the haunts of the

Bohemians of his time, and of the great men too, of Jonson and

Shakespeare themselves.

The scene at the theatre is the most original and lively of all. The

serio-comic advice to the gallant how he "should behave himself in a

playhouse"[305] is a perfect picture of what was daily taking place, be

the play Shakespeare's "Hamlet" or Dekker's "Patient Grissil."[306] Of

course the gallant must sit on the stage and "on the very rushes," which

in the theatre, and also in palaces and houses, continued as in the

Middle Ages to serve for carpets;[307] he will not care for the

disapprobation of the groundlings, but must plant himself valiantly,

"beating downe the mewes and hisses of opposed rascality.

"For do but cast up a reckoning; what large commings-in are pursd up by

sitting on the stage? First a conspicuous eminence is gotten; by which

meanes, the best and most essencial parts of a gallant (good cloathes, a

proportionable legge, white hand, the Persian lock, and a tollerable

beard), are perfectly revealed."

Of course you must choose with the greatest care your time to come in.

"Present not your selfe on the stage especially at a new play until the

quaking Prologue hath, by rubbing, got [colour] into his cheekes and is

ready to give the trumpets their cue that hees upon point to enter; for

then it is time, as though you were one of the properties, or that you

dropt out of ye hangings, to creepe from behind the arras, with your

tripos or three-footed stoole in one hand and a teston (_i.e._, six

pence) mounted betweene a forefinger and a thumbe in the other; for if

you should bestow your person upon the vulgar when the belly of the

house is but halfe full, your apparell is quite eaten up, the fashion

lost ..."[308]

When the play is well begun, there is also a special behaviour to

observe: "It shall crowne you with rich commendation to laugh alowd in

the middest of the most serious and saddest scene of the terriblest

tragedy; and to let that clapper your tongue, be tost so high that all

the house may ring of it: your lords use it; your knights are apes to

the lords, and do so too ... be thou a beagle to them all.... [At]

first, all the eyes in the galleries will leave walking after the

players and onely follow you; the simplest dolt in the house snatches up

your name, and when he meetes you in the streetes, ... heele cry: 'hees

such a gallant.' ... Secondly you publish your temperance to the world,

in that you seeme not to resort thither to taste vaine pleasures with a

hungrie appetite; but only as a gentleman to spend a foolish houre or

two, because you can doe nothing else; thirdly you mightily dis relish

the audience and disgrace the author." Perhaps the next time he will be

wise enough to offer you a dedication sonnet "onely to stop your mouth."

The getting away must not be less carefully performed than the getting

in. If you owe the author a particular grudge, mind you leave just in

the middle of his play: "bee it Pastoral or Comedy, Morall or Tragedie,

you rise with a screwd and discontented face from your stoole to be

gone: no matter whether the scenes be good or no; the better they are,

the worse you distast them. And being on your feet, sneake not away like

a coward; but salute all your gentle acquaintance, that are spred either

on the rushes or on stooles about you; and draw what troope you can from

the stage after you. The mimicks are beholden to you for allowing them

elbow roome; their poet cries perhaps, 'A pox go with you'; but care not

for that; there is no musick without frets."

But the rain outside may deprive you of the benefits of this carefully

laid plan. In that case, and this is the last piece of advice, here is

what you must do: "If either the company or indisposition of the weather

binde you to sit it out, my counsell is then that you turne plain ape:

take up a rush, and tickle the earnest eares of your fellow gallants to

make other fooles fall a laughing; mewe at passionate speeches; blare

at merrie; find fault with the musicke; whew at the children's action,

whistle at the songs."

Dekker knew only too well such gallants as those he describes, and if

his picture of a theatre in Shakespeare's time seems now somewhat

exaggerated, if we cannot conceive "Hamlet" or "Romeo" performed while

gallants on the stage tickle each other's ears with rushes picked from

the stage boards, let us remember as a confirmation of his accuracy that

such customs were prevalent, not only in England, but in Europe. In

France especially, even in the time of the Grand Roi, when Moliere and

Corneille were shining in all their glory, we have Moliere's

corroborating evidence that these customs had not been abolished.

Moliere was annoyed by the same malpractices as Shakespeare, only he did

not, like Shakespeare, who never complained of anything or anybody, keep

his displeasure to himself. He recurs in more than one of his plays to

the indecent behaviour of marquesses sitting on the stage, and there is

scarcely one of the particulars mentioned by Dekker which does not find

place in Moliere's angry pictures of ill-bred gallants:

"The actors began; every one kept silence; when ... a man with large

rolls entered abruptly crying out: 'Hulloa, there, a seat directly!' and

disturbing the audience with his uproar, interrupted the play in its

finest passage....

"Whilst I was shrugging my shoulders, the actors attempted to continue

their parts. But the man made a fresh disturbance in seating himself,

and again crossing the stage with long strides, although he might have

been quite comfortable at the wings, he planted his chair full in front,

and, defying the audience with his broad back, hid the actors from

three-fourths of the pit.

"A murmur arose, at which any one else would have felt ashamed; but he,

firm and resolute, took no notice of it, and would have remained just as

he had placed himself if, to my misfortune, he had not cast his eyes on

me....

"He began asking me a hundred frivolous questions, raising his voice

higher than the actors. Every one was cursing him; and in order to check

him, I said, 'I should like to listen to the play.'

"'Hast thou not seen it, marquis? Oh! on my soul I think it very funny,

and I am no fool in those matters. I know the canons of perfection and

Corneille reads me all that he writes.'

"Thereupon he gave me a summary of the piece informing me, scene after

scene, of what was about to happen; and when we came to any lines which

he knew by heart, he recited them aloud before the actor could say them.

It was in vain for me to resist; he continued his recitations, and

towards the end rose a good while before the rest. For those fashionable

fellows, in order to behave gallantly, especially avoid to listen to the

conclusion."[309]

Grobianism and the picaresque novel, long survived both Nash and Dekker.

English, Spanish, and French rogues, invented or imitated, swarmed in

the English literature of the seventeenth century, without, however, in

any case reaching the level attained by "Jack Wilton." Both kinds of

writing had to wait for the time of Swift and Defoe to reach their

highest point. Defoe has left the best examples of the picaresque tale

extant in English literature, and Swift revived Grobianism with

unparalleled excellence in his "Directions to Servants" and his

"Complete Collection of genteel and ingenious conversation, according to

the most polite mode and method now used at court and in the best

companies of England."[310]

As for the "Quinze joyes," turned also into English by Dekker, its

popularity was equally great in England; a new and different translation

was published in the seventeenth century and had several editions. It

was prefaced with a note "to the Reader," in which the satirical aims of

the author in this study of woman's foibles is accentuated by a tone of

pretended praise, savouring of Grobianism and anticipating the sort of

ridicule which was to be relished by Pope and the critics of Queen

Anne's time. "This treatise ... will at least shake, if not totally

explode, that common opinion, viz., that women are the worst piece of

the Hexameron creation.... This is the composition of some amorous

person, who, animated with the same spirit and affection as I am, hath

undertaken, and judged it his duty too, to satisfie you, and he hopes so

far as to work upon you a persuasion that the modesty, bashfulness,

debonairete and civility, together with all qualifications that adorn

and beautifie the soul, are as exemplarily eminent in women of this age

as ever they were in any of the former; and instruct you to set a value

on their actions as the best creatures in the worst of times, whose

vertue must needs shine with the greater lustre, being subject to the

vain assaults and ineffectual temptations of men grown old, like the

times, in wickednes, malice and revenge."[311]

[Illustration: CAPRICORNUS.]

FOOTNOTES:

[245] "The first and best part of Scoggins Iests ... being a

preservative against melancholy, gathered by Andrew Boord," London,

1626, 8vo. Many of the jests, tricks, and pranks recounted here are to

be found in other collections of such anecdotes, English as well as

foreign. For example, the coarse story explaining "how the French king

had Scogin into his house of office, and shewed him the King of

England's picture" appears in Rabelais, where however the two kings play

exactly opposite parts. Andrew Borde died in 1549.

[246] One of the few passages which would raise a laugh even to-day is

the rapturous speech with which good Basilius greets the morning after

his "mistakes of a night": "Should fancy of marriage keep me from this

paradise? or opinion of I know not what promise bind me from paying the

right duties to nature and affection? O who would have thought there

could have been such difference betwixt women? Be jealous no more O

Gynecia, but yield to the preheminence of more excellent gifts," &c.

(bk. iv. p. 410). See also the ridiculous fight between Clinias and

Dametas pp. 276 _et seq._; and a story told in verse, bk. iii. p. 390.

Moliere built his "Ecole des maris" upon a similar plot.

[247] "Arcadia," ed. of 1633, p. 619.

[248] That is to drink of the fountain of Hippocrene, to write verse.

"Puis donc que tu n'as jamais voulu t'abreuver aux marais fils de

l'ongle du cheval emplume et que la lyrique harmonie du savant meurtrier

de Python n'a jamais enfle ta parole, essaye si dans la marchandise

Mercure te pretera son Caducee. Ainsi le turbulent Eole te soit aussi

affable qu'aux pacifiques nids des alcyons. Enfin, Charlot, il faut

partir" ("Pedant joue," 1654).

[249] "Vanity Fair," chap. viii.

[250] Many of his adventures are made up of old anecdotes which were

current in Europe during the Middle Ages, and which the success of

Eulenspiegel again put into circulation. The very coarse anecdote

connected with the death of Til (chap. xcii.) is the subject of

Chaucer's Sompnoures tale. The story in chapter lxxx. of the innkeeper

who asks payment for the smell of his dishes, and who is paid with a

tinkling of coins, is also very old, and was afterwards made use of by

Rabelais. "Til" was very popular in France and in England. It was

translated in both countries; in the latter one, under the title: "Here

beginneth a merye Jest of a man that was called Howleglas," London,

Copland, [1528?], 4to.

[251] "Guzman de Alfarache," by Mateo Aleman appeared in 1598 or 1599.

The first edition of "Lazarillo de Tormes" was published a few years

before the middle of the sixteenth century. All efforts to ascertain its

authorship have proved fruitless. See Alfred Morel Fatio "Lazarille de

Tormes," Paris, 1886, Introduction. As to the antiquity of some of the

adventures in "Lazarillo," see _Athenaeum_, Dec. 29, 1888, p. 883.

[252] "Histoire comique de Francion," par M. de Moulinet (_i.e._,

Charles Sorel), Paris, 1622 (?), 8vo. It was translated into English "by

a person of honour," probably Robert Loveday: "The comical history of

Francion," London, 1655, fol.

[253] "Le Gueux ou la vie de Guzman d'Alfarache, image de la vie

humaine," translated by J. Chapelain, Lyon, 1630. Le Sage published his

"Gil Blas" in 1715, and his translation of "Guzman" in 1732. "Guzman"

was several times translated into English, once by J. Mabbe: "The Rogue,

or the Life of Guzman de Alfarache," London, 1623, fol.

[254] He was baptized in November of that year. The discovery is due to

Dr. Grosart. Memorial Introduction to the "Works" of Nash, vol. i. p.

xii.

[255] "The Complete Works of Thomas Nashe ... for the first time

collected," ed. Grosart, London, 1883-4, 6 vol. 4to; "Nashe's lenten

stuffe," 1599, vol. v. p. 277; "Have with you to Saffron Walden," vol.

ii. p. 256; "Lenten Stuffe," v. p. 241.

[256] Nash's letter "to the Gentlemen Students," prefacing his friend

Greene's "Menaphon," 1589.

[257] This has been doubted, for the statement was considered mainly to

rest upon the dedication of "An almond for a parrat," and Nash's

authorship of this work is no longer accepted (Grosart, i. p. 4). But as

good evidence, at least, for Nash's probable travels, is derived from

his "Jack Wilton," in which more than one statement comes, to all

appearance, from an actual eye-witness.

[258] "Lenten Stuffe," "Works," vol. v. p. 204. The first time he

appeared in print was when he prefaced with the above-mentioned letter

Greene's "Menaphon" in 1589.

[259] In his "Quip for an upstart courtier," 1592, Greene had spoken

irreverently of Harvey's low extraction. Harvey heaped abuse upon

Greene, being rather encouraged than stopped by the death of his

opponent. In the same year, Nash, with great courage, rushed to the

rescue of his friend and of his memory; when this was done he continued

the war on his own account with great success, till the authorities

interfered and stopped both combatants.

[260] "My Piers Penilesse ... being above two yeres since maimedly

translated into the French tongue." "Have with you to Saffron Walden,"

"Works," vol. iii. p. 47.

[261] His principal writings are distributed as follows in Dr. Grosart's

edition:--I. "Anatomie of Absurditie," 1589; various Martin Marprelate

tractates. II. "Pierce Penilesse," 1592; "Strange newes," 1593, and

other writings against Harvey. III. "Have with you to Saffron Walden,"

1596 (against Harvey); "The terrors of the night or a discourse of

apparitions," 1594, in which Nash on many points anticipates Defoe. IV.

"Christ's tears over Jerusalem," 1593, a long pious discourse. V. "The

unfortunate traveller," 1594; "Lenten Stuffe," 1599. VI. "The tragedie

of Dido," 1594 (in collaboration with Marlowe); "Summers last will and

testament," a play by Nash alone.

His "Isle of dogs" is lost, having been suppressed as soon as performed.

The troubles Nash got into on account of this unlucky play are thus

commemorated by him: "The straunge turning of the Ile of Dogs from a

commedie to a tragedie two summers past, with the troublesome stir which

hapned about it is a generall rumour that hath filled all England, and

such a heavie crosse laide upon me as had well neere confounded mee."

("Lenten Stuffe," vol. v. p. 199).

[262] "The unfortunate Traveller," vol. v. p. 93; "Lenten Stuffe," vol.

v. p. 262.

[263] "Pierce Penilesse," "Works," vol. ii. pp. 60, 61.

[264] "The unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton," "Works,"

vol. v. p. 60, and Prefatory letter to Greene's "Menaphon."

[265] Greene's "Groats-worth," "Works," vol. i. p. 143; Mere's "Paladis

Tamia"; "Merchant of Venice," act v. sc. 1.

[266] "Pierce Penilesse," "Works," vol. ii. p. 92.

[267] "Histrio-mastix," 1633, 4to, p. 215. Coryat reports on hearsay

(1608) that women had already appeared at that date on the English

stage; but he is careful to note that he had never personally witnessed

this extraordinary phenomenon; and he adds that he was greatly

astonished to see in Italy women perform their parts in a play "with as

good a grace, action and gesture and whatsoever convenient for a player

as ever I saw any masculine actor" ("Crudities," London, 1776, vol. ii.

p. 16).

[268] "Strange newes of the intercepting certaine letters," 1592,

"Works," vol ii. p. 267.

[269] "Lenten Stuffe," vol. v. pp. 226, 244, 216.

[270] "Works," vol. v. p. 231.

[271] Preface to "Christ's teares," edition of 1594, "Works," vol. iv.

p. 6.

[272] Prefatory letter to Greene's "Menaphon."

[273] "Anatomie of Absurditie," 1589, "Works," vol. i. p. 37.

[274] "The unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton," 1594,

"Works," vol. v.

[275] In these cases, Nash, or rather his hero (for Nash does not

himself make use of this language which he in no way admired, but only

puts it into the mouth of his self-confident good-for-nothing as the

finishing touch to his portrait), adopts Lyly's style entirely,

alliteration and all: "The sparrow for his lecherie liveth but a yeere,

he for his trecherie was turned on the toe."

[276] "Works," vol. v. pp. 15 _et seq._

[277] Name of a room in the tavern.

[278] It was translated into English from the Latin by John Palsgrave:

"Acolastus," London, 1540, 4to. As to this play and its author,

Gulielmus Gnapheus (Fullonius) of the Hague, who had it represented in

1529, see C. H. Herford, "Studies in the Literary Relations of England

and Germany in the Sixteenth Century," Cambridge, 1886, 8vo, pp. 84 _et

seq._, 108 _et seq._

[279] _Ibid._ p. 71. _Cf._ "Returne from Parnassus," 1601, ed. Macray,

Oxford, 1886, act iv. sc. 3, pp. 138 _et seq._, where the rules of good

acting are also under discussion. Shakespeare's opinions on the same are

well known ("Hamlet," act iii. sc. 2, A.D. 1602).

[280] "Works," vol. v. p. 183.

[281] "Christs teares" (preface of the edition of 1594), "Works," vol.

iv. p. 5. He recurs again to the same topic in his "Lenten Stuffe"

(1599), and complains that when he talks of rushes it is taken to mean

Russia, &c.

[282] "Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the Divell" (1592), "Works,"

vol. ii.

[283] Nash speaks of himself as being Pierce: "This is a predestinate

fit place for Pierse Pennilesse to set up his staff on." "Lenten

Stuffe," "Works," vol. v p. 201.

[284] "Works," vol. ii. _Cf._ Ben Jonson: "Sir Politick (speaking to

Peregrine):

"First for your garb, it must be grave and serious,

Very reserv'd and lock'd; not tell a secret

On any terms, not to your father; scarce

A fable, but with caution" ("The Fox," act iv. sc. 1).

[285] "Works," vol. ii.

[286] "Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, containing the description ... of Great

Yarmouth ... with a ... praise of the Red Herring," 1599, "Works," vol.

v.

[287] "Lenten Stuffe," vol. v. p. 280.

[288] "The Returne from Pernassus," ed. W. D. Macray, Oxford, 1886, p.

87.

[289] "A Knights Conjuring," 1607, "Works," ed. Grosart, vol. v. p. xx.

[290] Only one of this sort has been preserved: "The tragedy of Hoffman

or a revenge for a father," published in 1631. Chettle died about 1607.

[291] London, 1595, 4to. It has never been reprinted; only one copy

belonging to the Bodleian Library is known to exist.

[292] Some also are in Greene's and Harman's vein; for example, his

"Belman of London," 1608, and his "Lanthorne and candle-light," 1608, in

which he describes, with no less success than his predecessors, "the

most notorious villanies that are now practised in the kingdome."

[293] "Dramatic Works, now first collected," London (Pearson), 1873, 4

vol. 8vo; "Non-Dramatic Works," ed. Grosart, London, 1884, 5 vol. 4to,

which non-dramatic works are the following:

I. "Canaans Calamite, Jerusalem's misery," 1611 (a poem on the siege and

destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans); "The wonderfull yeare 1603" (on

the plague of London); "The Batchelars banquet," 1603 (an adaptation of

the "Quinze joyes de mariage"). II. "The seven deadly sinnes of London

... bringing the plague with them," 1606; "Newes from Hell," 1606,

shortly after reprinted as "A Knights conjuring"; "The double P. P., a

papist in armes," 1606 (in verse); "The Guls Horne-booke," 1609; "Jests

to make you merie," 1607. III. "Dekker his dreame," 1620 (in verse);

"The Belman of London," 1608; "Lanthorne and candle-light," 1609; "A

strange horse race, at the end of which comes in the catch-poles

masque," 1613. IV. "The dead tearme or ... a dialogue betweene the two

cityes of London and Westminster," 1608; "Worke for armourers ... open

warres likely to happin," 1609; "The ravens Almanacke, foretelling of a

plague," &c., 1609; "A rod for run-awayes, in which ... they may behold

many fearefull Judgements of God ... expressed in many dreadfull

examples of sudden death," 1625. V. "Foure birdes of Noahs Arke," 1613;

"The pleasant comodie of Patient Grissil," 1603 (with Chettle and

Haughton).

[294] Only there was this notable difference, he died old, at about

seventy years of age, probably in 1641.

[295] "A Knights conjuring," 1607. In the same happy retreat Dekker,

gives a place to Watson, Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Nash, Chettle, who

comes in "sweating and blowing, by reason of his fatness" ("Non-Dramatic

Works," vol. v. p. xx.).

[296] "Notes on the Elizabethan Dramatists"; "Philip Massinger; Thomas

Dekker."

[297] "Satiro-mastix or the untrussing of the humorous poet," 1602.

"Dramatic Works" vol. i. p. 186. This is the play Dekker wrote as a

revenge for Ben Jonson's "Poetaster," 1601, in which he was himself

ridiculed under the name of Demetrius.

[298] _I.e._, Gabriel Harvey, Nash's obstinate adversary.

[299] "Newes from Hell," "Non-Dramatic Works," vol. ii. pp. 102-103.

[300] "Newes from Hell," "Non-Dramatic Works," vol. ii. p. 101.

[301] "Non-Dramatic Works," vol. i. _Cf._ Defoe's "Journal of the plague

year ... 1665," London, 1722.

[302] "Non-Dramatic Works," vol. i. pp. 138 _et seq._

[303] "Grobianus. De morum simplicitate, libri duo. In gratiam omnium

rusticitatem amantium conscripti," Francfort, 1549, 8vo. It was

translated into English by "R. F.," a little before Dekker adapted it:

"The schoole of slovenrie: or Cato turned wrong side outward ... to the

use of all English Christendome," London, 1605, 4to. In the same

category of works may be placed Erasmus's famous: "Moriae Encomium,"

Antwerp, 1512, 4to, translated by Sir T. Chaloner: "The Praise of

Folie," London, 1549, 4to. Many scenes in the comedies of the period are

written in a style akin to Grobianism. They are especially to be found

in Ben Jonson; see, for example, his satire of courtiers in "Cynthia's

revels," act iii. sc. 1 and 3, &c.; note how their elegancies of speech

are mostly derived from plays and novels.

[304] "The Bachelars banquet ... pleasantly discoursing the various

humours of women," 1603; "The Guls Horne-booke," 1609; "Non-Dramatic

Works," vols. i. and ii.

[305] "Non-Dramatic Works," vol. ii. pp. 246 _et seq._

[306] 1603; with Chettle and Haughton.

[307] A scene at court. "_Amorphus_ (to the prentice courtier Asotus):

If you had but so far gathered your spirits to you as to have taken up a

rush when you were out, and wagged it thus, or cleansed your teeth with

it; or but turn'd aside ..." &c. Ben Jonson, "Cynthia's Revels," act

iii. sc. 1.

[308] _Cf._ Ben Jonson: "Why, throw yourself in state on the stage, as

other gentlemen use, sir."--"Away, wag; what, would'st thou make an

implement of me? 'Slid, the boy takes me for a piece of perspective, I

hold my life, or some silk curtain, come to hang the stage here"

("Cynthia's Revels," Induction).

[309] "Les Facheux," act i. sc. 1 (Van Laun's translation, vol. ii. p.

97); _cf._ "Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes," sc. vi.

[310] The connection of Swift with Grobianism was noticed in his time,

and a new translation of Dedekind's poem, "Grobianus or the compleat

Booby," 1739, was dedicated by Roger Bull "to the Rev. Dr. Jonathan

Swift, ... who first introduced into these kingdoms ... an ironical

manner of writing, to the discouragement of vice, ill-manners and

folly." To come to even nearer times, Flaubert's "Bouvart et Pecuchet"

may be taken as a branch of Grobianism.

[311] "The fifteen comforts of rash and inconsiderate marriage ... done

out of French," London, 1694, 12mo, fourth edition.

[Illustration: HEROICAL DEEDS IN A HEROICAL NOVEL, 1665.]