Nashe, Thomas 1567-1601
English dramatist and satirist

Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, he studied for seven years at St John's College, Cambridge, travelled in France and Italy, and then went to London. His first work was the Anatomie of Absurditie (1589), perhaps written at Cambridge. He plunged into the Marprelate controversy, showing a talent for vituperation which he expressed in such works as Pierce Penilesse, his Supplication to the Divell (1592), against Richard Harvey who had criticized Nashe's preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon, and Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596), against Gabriel Harvey, who had by then assailed Greene's memory in Foure Letters. In 1599 the controversy was suppressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nashe's satirical masque Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592) contains the song 'Spring the sweet Spring is the year's pleasant king'. The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) is a picaresque tale, one of the earliest of its kind. After Christopher Marlowe's death, Nashe prepared his unfinished tragedy Dido (1596) for the stage. His own play The Isle of Dogs (1597), now lost, drew such attention to abuses in the state that it was suppressed, the theatre closed, and the writer himself thrown into the Fleet prison. His last work was Lenten Stuffe (1599), a panegyric on the red herring trade at Yarmouth.

Bibliography: M Schaluch, Antecedents of the English Novel (1963)