Thomas Nashe and Literary Performance

Thomas Nashe is typically regarded as an urban author and a University wit, but his writings are inflected and shaped by regional travel, non-literary, non-elite works, and oral culture. The essays in this collection address Nashes use of the past, his engagement with the Elizabethan present, and his textual legacy.
As an instigator of debate and a defender of tradition, a man of letters and a popular hack, a writer of erotica and a spokesman for bishops, an urbane metropolitan and a celebrant of local custom, the various textual performances of Thomas Nashe have elicited, and continue to provoke, a range of contradictory reactions. Nashes often incongruous authorial characteristics suggest that, as a King of Pages, he not only courted controversy but also deliberately cultivated a variety of public personae, acquiring a reputation more slippery than the herrings he celebrated in print. Collectively, the essays in this book illustrate how Na