Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller: The “Newes of the Maker” Game

MARGARET FERGUSON

,%&he: The Unfortunate Traveller:

N “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” Gregory Bateson discusses forms of complex play in which a game is constructed “not upon the premise ‘this is play’ but rather around the question ‘is this

play?”’ To illustrate such a game, he describes a peace-making ceremony observed in the Andaman Islands: “peace is concluded after each side has been given ceremonial freedom to strike the other. This example illustrates the labile nature of the frame ‘this is play’ . . . the ritual blows of peace-making are always liable to be mistaken for the ‘real’ blows of combat. In this event, the peace-making ceremony becomes a battle.”’ I propose to analyze Thomas Nashe’s The unfortunate Traveller as a game which questions the distinction between play and earnest. Nashe presents the artist as a “maker” who plays an inherently dangerous game when he creates fictions or “counterfeits” that subvert established forms of authority. Moreover, by using his verbal skills to satisfy what Nashe calls “desires of revenge and innovation,” the artist com- petes, implicitly or explicitly, with the divine maker.* In The Unjortu- mte Traveller, Nashe creates a space of play in which the human artist’s power can be exercised and analyzed at once.3

The second preface to Nashe’s story, entitled “The Induction to the

1. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York, 1972), p. 182. 2. All quotations of Nashe are from The Works o / T h o m s Noshe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, revised

by F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1966). The Unforturmte Trnoeller is in vol. 11; the phrase quoted is from p. ’239.

3. See Madelon S. Gohlke, “Wit’s Wantonness: The Unfmuwte Traue//er as Picaresque,” Studies in Philology, LXXlII (Oct. 1976), 397-413, for a reading that parallels mine in its focus on Nashe’s concern with the moral problems of “wit.” Gohlke, however, claims that Nashe clearly distinguishes “wit” from “wisdom” and condemns the former in a way that offers a coherent and traditional moral statement.

166 English Literary Renaissance Dapper Monsieur Pages of the Court,” compares the story of Jack Wilton to a game:

Gallant Squires, have amongst you: at Mumchaunce I meane not, for so 1 might chaunce come to short commons, but at novus, nova, novum, which is in English, newes of the maker. A proper fellow Page of yours called Jack Wilton by me commends him unto you, and hath bequeathed for wast paper here amongst you certaine pages of his misfortunes. (p. 207)

In these sentences Nashe not only invites an audience to participate in a new game but rhetorically illustrates one of its characteristic moves. In place of the old dice game called “Mumchance,” with its pun on “mum” as silent, Nashe offers a new game called Novus, named in an old lan- guage which is immediately replaced by the witty English mistransla- tion, “newes of the maker.” Having thus twice demonstrated a linguistic move that replaces the old with the new, Nashe invites us to see, in the phrase “newes of the maker,” a sign of his verbal dexterity and powers of self-reflection. Indeed, the phrase “newes of the maker” exploits the same ambiguity of the genitive that Erasmus exploits in the title Encomium Moriae, suggesting that Folly and her rhetoric will be both the subject and object of the oration! “Newes of the maker” means both

the maker’s news,” his new creation, and “news of the maker,” infor- mation about him or about his mode of operation.

The double meaning of “newes of the maker” prepares us for the am- biguous relation between the “I” who speaks in the preface, presumably Nashe himself, and the absent narrator, Jack Wilton. For Jack may be either the “news” created by the “I,” or the maker whose news is contained in the pages bequeathed to his “fellow pages.” Nashe plays with a similar ambiguity in the clause, “A proper fellow Page of yours called Jack Wilton by me commends him unto you”: the prepositional phrase “by me” may modify either the word “called” or the word “commends.” In the first reading, the “I” would be the maker who here names his creation; in the second, the “I” would merely be serving as an intermediary between Jack and his audience.

Through the play with doubled senses and doubled figures of the maker Nashe dramatizes the self-reflective aspect of his game. By creating a surrogate of the maker in Jack, who is punningly described as a page of the court and a page of the book, Nashe presents the book itself

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4. For a discussion of Erasmus’ paradoxical title see Walter Kaiser, Pmisen of Folly: Emrmus, Rnbelrris, Shnkespre (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 36 ff.

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as a kind of looking-glass world.5 In this world the maker is reflected not only in Jack but also in a series of characters whom Jack himself ob- serves, ranging from the Anabaptist leader Jack Leyden through the satirist Aretino to the orator-villain Cutwolfe; Cutwolfe, in fact, replaces Jack as a first-person narrator for several pages at the end of the story as Jack replaces the authorial “I” after the preface to the “Pages.” The narrative procedure which distributes the role of speaker among several different personae is indeed an important part of the game Nashe defines, which involves competition among various makers for the position of authority. In this competition new authorities constantly replace old ones.

The story’s first episode shows Jack using words as weapons to under- mine the authority of a cider merchant who is mockingly described as a “great Lord,” a “Lord of Misrule,” and a “patrone” or “peere of quart pottes” (p. 210). These terms make the merchant a burlesque version of the noble patron whose authority Nashe himself challenges in the first preface to the text, the Epistle Dedicatory to the Earl of Southampton. Nashe begins that letter by impudently questioning the “blinde cus- tome” of dedicating such books as we publish to one great man or other” (p. 201). He presents his own text as “goods uncustomed,” and thereby slyly hints at the work’s potentially illegal content. Later Nashe links the description of the text as “uncustomed,” meaning both “smug- gled” and “new,” with the theme of the noble patron’s censoring power: the author’s papers may be “forfeite to contempt” if they are not “seale[d]” by Southampton’s “excellent censure” (p. 201).

We may wonder, however, whether Nashe was seriously concerned either with avoiding Southampton’s “censure” or with gaining his

authorized commendation. ” Since middle-class readers were replacing aristocratic ones as Nashe’s chief source of financial support, he may well have intended to please his new audience by gently poking fun at the old convention of addressing books to noblemen. Though G. W. Hibbard sees the letter to Southampton as a “genuine”dedication, albeit the last Nashe wrote in his career, it seems to me an ambiguously counterfeit product, and hence an integral part of the authority-questioning game defined in the text as a whole.6 By writing not one but two

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5. The pun on ‘‘page” shows Nashe’s interest in the peculiar ontological status of the printed object, as does his reference to Jack’s pages as “wast paper.” For some useful comments on Nashe’s creation of a “fictional audience” in the “Induction to the Pages,” see Walter Davis, Idtn nnd Act in Elizakrhnn Fiction (Princeton, 1%9), pp. 217-18.

6. G. W. Hibbard, Thomar Nashe: A Critical Introduction (London, 1%2), p. 21. Hibbard thinks

168 English Literary Renaissance prefaces, and by addressing the second to a fictive audience of pages who figuratively take the place of the noble reader, Nashe makes an exem- plary move in the “newes of the maker” game, as well as offering a shrewd bit of social commentary. Members of the middle classwere indeed buying the title of “gentleman” during Elizabeth’s reign, and Nashe alludes to this fact when he portrays Jack’s audience as a group of marginal but eagerly ambitious people who are “waiting together at the bottom of the great chamber staires, or sitting in a porch,” their “parlia- ment house” (p. 208). The address to the pages, which anticipates the “gentleman-making” game Jack later invents so that he and his fellow pages may decide who shall “pass” into the court (pp. 27-28), contains social news that a gentleman like Southampton might well have found unsettling.

Like Nashe, Jack Wilton begins his narrative by questioning the authority and censoring power of a “patrone,” the credulous cider merchant. Jack dupes him into believing that the king considers him a traitor and that he must distribute his cider free to prove his loyalty. ‘“11s it true that I am thus underhand dead and buried by these bad tongues?” the merchant asks (p. 214). Jack sadistically teases his victim by delaying an answer; instead he offers not only an extraordinary comment on the mouth as the physical “source” of rhetoric but also defines an act of playing that stops just short of the boundary between speaking daggers and using them. I have spoken too much alreadie,” Jack says; no definitive sentence of death shall march out of my well meaning lips; they have but lately suckt milke, and shall they so sodainly change their food and seeke after bloud?” (pp. 214-15). If this is play, it is also poly- morphous perversity; but Jack has called himself an “ingenious infant,’’ and Nashe seems deliberately to be offering us a portrait of the maker as a roguish young man. Jack overthrows a surrogate father figure to get at a forbidden oral gratification midway between milk and blood; cider, an inebriating liquid traditionally associated with Bacchic inspiration, is what Jack wants and uses his lying tongue to get. He associates cider, moreover, both with the maternal and Bacchic image of the belly (he tells the merchant to distribute the cider, “frankely amongst poore Souldiers” so they can “burst their bellies” with it [p. 215]), and with the totemic delicacy of a castrated beaver’s “stones.” The cider merchant is compared to a beaver who bites off his own

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that Nashe became disillusioned with the system of patronage only after The Un/orrunare Traveller was published.


testicles to save his life when pursued by “greedy hunters and hungrie tale tellers” (p. 215). Jack plays the role of “greedy hunter” in this passage. Metaphorically he enacts a phantasmagoric Oedipal drama in which the “ingenious infant” at once gains paternal potency by eat- ing the testicles of the beaver, and uses his new power to gain access to a forbidden vessel, the cider barrel.

One might want to ask, at t h s point, whether Nashe is not simply expressing unconscious fantasies through the medium of the text, as C. S. Lewis suggests when he describes the story as a “whirlwind of words” that contains “not thought nor passion but simply images: images of ludicrous and sometimes frightful incoherence boiling up from a dark void. ”7 There is certainly something frightful about Nashe’s images, but there is also more evidence of thoughtfulness and passion than Lewis sees. When Nashe uses oral imagery to call attention to the mouth as the source of lies, and when he associates cider with inspiration, he is giving us “newes of the maker.” “I had moismed my lippes to make my lie run glibbe to his journeies end,” Jack says, suggesting that the lie or fiction is a potent tool for bringing the speaker satisfaction (p. 212). Nashe offers an interesting gloss on this idea of oral potency in a passage that occurs during Jack’s recapitulation of Vanderhulke’s oration at Wittenburg:

0 orificiall rethorike, wipe thy everlasting mouth, and affoord me a more Indian metaphor than that . . . . Oratorie, uncaske the bard hutch of thy complements, and with the triumphantest troupe in thy treasurie doe trewage unto him. What impotent speech with his eight partes may not specifie, this unestimable gift, holding his peace, shall as it were (with teares I speak it) do. (p. 248)

The “hutch” in which “orificiall” (“mouth-making”) compliments are stored is, like the merchant’s cider barrel, a barrier between the orator and the inspirational power he desires: the hutch is “barred” and must be opened or “uncaskt.”

The closed container is surely an overdetermined symbol, but Nashe suggests one interpretation of it when Jack says to the merchant, “It is buzzed in the Kings head that you are a secret frend to the Enemie” (p. 214). Here the listener’s head-the merchant’s, as a substitute for the king’s-is the vessel penetrated by the speaker’s lie. And the lie itself, which is both about rebellion and a part of a rebellious verbal action, is

7. Eng/ish Literoture in the Sixteenth Cowry, Excluding Dram (1954; rpt. Oxford, 1973). p. 416. Richard Lanham extends Lewis’ view of the narrative when he argues that Jack Wilton is the imitation of a truly neurotic personality” in “Tom Nashe and Jack Wilton: Personality as

Structure in The Unfortumfe Trove//er,” Studies in Short Fiction, IV (1%7), p. 215.

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170 English Literary Renaissance also a symbolic seduction that leads to procreation. For ifJack’s lie makes the merchant into a rebel against royal authority, then Jack has effectively generated an image of himself in the merchant, undermining the merchant’s authority while at the same time gaining access to his cider barrels-and also to his head, into which Jack has buzzed that idea of his own making.

The darker implications of this scene of lying make it comparable to the passage in Hamlet in which Shakespeare metaphorically conflates the idea of a murderous usurpation with the idea of a primal lie that violates an unwary audience’s ears: “Sleeping within my orchard,” the ghost tells Hamlet,

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole With juice of cursed hebona in a vial And in the porches of my ears did pour The leperous distillment. ( I . v. 59-64)s

The victim of the lie, according to Shakespeare and Nashe, is not only symbolically deprived of his manhood, but at the same time treated as if he were a woman. Claudius’ usurpation springs from “lust,” the ghost says, and he proleptically defines the act ofusurpation in terms of its ulti- mate aim: penetration of the woman on the “royal bed” from which the sleeping king has been displaced, the bed that becomes “a couch for luxury and damnkd incest” (I. v. 83). Shakespeare underscores the point about the listener’s symbolic role as erotic victim in the closet scene in which Gertrude exclaims : “These words like daggers enter in my ears. / No more, sweet Hamlet” (111. iv. 96-97).

I have dwelt upon the complex sexual overtones of Nashe’s scene of lying because they are important for understanding Jack’s role as an impotent “figure of the audience” later in the narrative. In the cider merchant episode, however, Jack is playing the role of a maker who tests his usurping powers. Nashe shows Jack’s powers in action, but he also shows how those powers are limited by an authority figure who restores order: the king, having discovered Jack’s prank, has Jack ‘‘pitifully whipt” for his “holiday lye” (p. 216). The lie has indeed created a “holiday” world where everyday rules are suspended; one recalls that the cider merchant is described as being, like Falstaff, a “Lord of Mi~rule .”~ Jack, who was

8. Hamkt, ed. Edward Hubler, “The Signet Classic Shakespeare” (New York, 1963), p. 60. 9. See the classic study of the “Lord of Misrule” in C. L. Barber’s Shokespeme’s Festive Comedy:

A Study ofDramntic Form m d h Relation to Socid Custom (Princeton, 1959), pp. 24-30. Nashe introduces the theme of “misrule” in the preface to the “Pages,” where he defines the book itself


called the “King of Pages” in the preface (p. 208), also becomes a Lord of Misrule, an authorizer of license. Briefly displaying his desire to be a servant neither to the reader nor to the king, both of whom are associated with censoring powers, Jack sets the stage for the question that his playing necessarily raises: how far can one go as a “holiday” maker without being punished?

The question is serious because the power of the imagination, which raises the mind and carries it aloft,” as Bacon says, is dangerous when it

encounters no authority strong enough to limit it.10 Nashe explores this problem in the next episode, in which Jack is still playing the role of demy-soldier in jest” in Henry VIII’s camp during the siege of

Tkrouanne.11 Jack again undermines an authority figure, an “ugly me- chanicall captain,” by making him into a counterfeit rebel against the king. This time, however, Jack makes his victim act the part of a rebel rather than merely think himself one. Ravished by Jack’s tale of the ad- vantage to be gained by becoming a spy for the English king in the French king’s court, the Captain accepts the counterfeit role, literally the role of a counterfeiter or spy, that Jack has created for him. He goes off pretending to be a disgruntled traitor who will sell English secrets. Jack has quite graphically extended his rhetorical power in this episode: he makes his auditor actually take a journey from the realm of lying words to that of false action. Nashe calls attention to Jack’s increased potency by describing his tongue as a “serpent’s tail” that engenders another kind of “tale” that in turn engenders a man who plays the role of the archetypal serpent Satan, rebel against God’s authority. “What serpent is there but hydes his sting?” Jack asks the captain, paradoxically exposing, in the mode of the Cretan liar, an important truth about his own power to lie:

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as a space of illegal play: “it shall be lawfull for anie whatsoever to play with false dice in a corner on the cover of t h ~ s foresayd Acts and Monuments” (p. 208).

10. The Advtlncemenr oflenrning, 11, xiii, quoted from Bnconi Works, ed. James Spedding et A/.

(1870; rpt. New York, 1968). IV, p. 316. 11. “As at Turwin I was a demy souldier in jest, so now I became a Mar t i ah in earnest,”

Jack remarks just before he witnesses, rather than fights in, the battle of Marignano (p. 231). The comment is interesting, since it not only signals the moment when the narrative leaves its “source” in the genre of the jest-book but also associates the concept of “earnest” with Jack’s role of spectator. Johan Huizinga’s argument in Homo Ludm: A Srudy ofrheP/tly E k r in Cdrure (Boston, 1955) that “the opposite of play is earnest” (p. 44) seems less useful for understanding Nasheh text than Freud’s argument, in “The Poet and Daydreaming,” that “the opposite of play is not serious occupation but-reality” (On Creativity A& rhe Unconscious [New York: Harper, 19581 p. 45).

172 English Literary Renaissance and yet, whatsoever be wanting, a good plausible tongue in such a man of imployment can hardly be sparde, which, as the fore-named serpent with his winding taile fetcheth in those that come nere him, so with a ravishing tale it gathers a1 mens harts unto him: which if he have not, let him never looke to ingender by the mouth, as ravens and doves do, that is, mount or be great by undermining” (p. 221)

This meditation on the seductive power of a fiction which engenders rebellious thoughts (“mount or be great by undermining”) anticipates the passage in Pmdise Lost where the angels find Satan “close at the ear of Eve, / Assaying by his develish art to reach / The organs of her fancy” (IV, 800-02).

In the “mechanical Captain” episode, which is in narrative terms a repetition and extension of the cider merchant jest, Jack extends not only his power of speech but also our understanding of the subversive implications of counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is presented as a process that may be infinitely extendable: Jack’s lie makes the Captain become a counterfeit spy who imitates not only the portrait of him Jack has drawn in words but also the previous literary models Jack adduces in his persuasive effort: “Ulysses, Nestor, Diomed [who] went as spies together” (p. 220). Moreover, the new-made counterfeit captain is told to model himself not only on Ulysses but also on Palamedes, who could pry into Ulysses mad counterfeiting”-that is, spy on a spy (p. 221).12

It is therefore appropriate that in the French court, the Captain meets not the true king but a counterfeit, a servant whom the king, fearing treason, has ordered “to take upon him his [the king’s] person.” “Stand- ing before the supposed King,” the Captain presents an emblematic picture of one counterfeit competing with another (p. 223). The Captain loses the competition not because he is wicked, Nashe suggests, but because he is not sufficiently potent in the art of lying:

He said diverse, diverse matters . . . but in good honesty they were lies which he had not yet stampt. Hereat the true King stept forth, and commaunded to lay hands on the Lozell, and that he should be tortured to confesse the truth, for he was a spie and nothing else (p. 224).

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12. As McKerrow notes (Works, IV, 260), Nashe draws his examples of counterfeiters both from the Ilkd (X, 203) and from Ovid’s Metmnorphoses (XIII, 35-39), where Ulysses’ effort to avoid going to war by feigning madness is exposed by Palamedes. Ulysses takes revenge on Palamedes, however, by forging a letter that results in Palamedes being stoned to death as a traitor. If Jack’s Captain had known his Ovid better, he might have been less gullible. In its de- piction of a mechanical process of counterfeiting for which no “original” seems to exist, Nashe’s episode anticipates the eighteenth-century meditations on “mechanically reproducible” phe- nomena that Hugh Kenner analyzes in his brilliantly funny book The CounrerfPiters (New York, 1973).


The process of counterfeiting is temporarily halted because the Captain fails to “stamp” the coins of his lies; but Nashe does not say that the Captain could not stamp his lies, only that he did n0t.13 Although it should be the king’s sole prerogative to stamp as “genuine” the coins that bear his image, Nashe has effectively called the concept of royal authority itself into question during the course of the anecdote. For like Shakespeare’s Henry IV at the battle of Shrewsbury, the French king counterfeits himself in a way that dramatizes that he is fighting for his authority rather than in stable possession of it. He has good reason to fear treason, since the English king is occupying French terri- tory and desires to usurp his rival’s place. The “true king,” in Nashe’s ironic phrase, steps forth to punish the counterfeit spy and send him home with a message that challenges the English king’s -authority by equating him with the recently whipped spy: the French king will “whip home all the English fooles very shortly,’’ his herald proclaims (p. 224). This narrative suggests that the game of counterfeiting cannot be contained in a clearly demarcated “holiday” space, for royal authority is not powerful enough to put a stop to the dangerous play ofcounter- feiting in which authority itself is vunerable. Note that Jack is not punished for his jest at the Captain’s expense. The Captain is punished by both kings, but Jack, like a naughty boy who has revealed the emperor’s lack of clothes, evidently escapes scot-free.

But Jack does not escape without paying a price that reflects Nashe’s ambivalence about the maker’s power and about the apparent absence of any social or religious authority strong enough to limit definitively the production of counterfeits. Jack begins to pay a symbolic price for his transgressions when he is transformed from an active “maker” of fictions into someone who increasingly plays the role of spectator.14 One of the first scenes he witnesses, after fleeing the plague in England, is the massacre of the Anabaptists at Munster. Before describing the massacre, Jack makes a sermon defending the forces of law and order against the forces of rebellion represented by the Anabaptists. How is one to interpret this strange sermon against those whose “desires [for] revenge and innovation” lead them to follow God “as [if] daring him”? (p. 239). What is a t stake in a passage such as the following?

13. Jack does succeed in stamping his lies: see p. 222, where Jack gets the Captain’s “place

14. For a discussion of Jack’s role change from actor to spectator, see Gohlke, “Wits begd for another immediately” by “certifying” to a general that the Captain has deserted.

Wantonness,” pp. 41-02.

1 74 English Literary Renaissance I say unto you that which this our tempted Saviour with manie other words besought his Disciples, Saw your selvesfrom this frowardgenerotion. Verily, verily, the servant is notgreoter t h n his mclster: Verily, verily, sinful1 men are not holier than holy Jesus, their maker

(P. 235).

The “newes of the maker” game itself is called into question in this sermon, as Jack, the innovator who has considered himself greater than several masters, inveighs against that impulse to “innovation” which threatens to replace “the auncient gold of the Gospell” with counterfeit heresies :

We have found out a sleight to hammer it [the Gospel] to anie Heresie whatsoever. But those furnaces.of Falshood and hammer-heads of Heresie must bee dissolved and broken . . . or els I feare mee the false glittering glasse of Innovation will bee better esteemed of, than the auncient golde of the Gospell (p. 236).

Most critics have simply viewed Jack’s sermon as an expression of what they assume are Nashe’s orthodox Anglican beliefs, although a few, like Richard Lanham, see that the sermon poses interpretive problems that have to do with the nature ofJack’s aggressive rhetoric.15 But to my knowledge no critics have considered the possibility that the author who had been paid by Anglican bishops to attack Puritans and who was a friend of Christopher Marlowe might have religious doubts. Nor have they considered the possibility that there may be elements of sado-machochism, as well as an awareness of epistemological problems, in a discourse in which one rebellious maker condemns others. If we look closely at the sermon, however, we can see in it an example of the kind of play Gregory Bateson discusses in terms of Epimenides’ paradox and diagrams thus :I6

15. See, for example, G. R. Hibbard, Thorns Nmhe, p. 153: “The conservative-minded Nashe . . . had very decided views about it [the Anabaptist uprising].” Hibbard bases his view that Nashe is “deadly serious” in condemning the Anabaptist challenge to “deep rooted ideas about the need for order” on the parallels between Jack’s sermon and passages in Nashe’s other works, such as Christ’s Tears Overjmsalem. Agnes Latham, who takes everything else in Nashe’s story as a parody, assumes as Hibbard does that Nashe’s religious beliefs were monolithic and stable and that the sermon is a “perfectly serious” condemnation of “SpiriNd and intellectual pride” (“Satire on Literary Themes and Modes in Nashe’s Unfonuncrte Traveller, ” English Srudies rev. series, I [1948], p. %). Lanham, in “Personality as Structure,” rightly wonders how “serious” the religious satire can be when Jack so clearly “enjoys playing the role of [scourge]” (p. 213); but Lanham does not credit Nashe with any awareness of the epistemological paradox that arises when one “scourge of God” denounces others. For other perspectives on the sermon see Gohlke, “Wits Wantonness,” pp. 402-03; and Alexander Legatt, “Artistic Coherence in The Unfonuncrre Traveller, ” Srudies in English Lirerarure, XIV (Winter, 1974), p. 42.

16. Bateson, Sfeps to an EEo/ogy of Mind, p. 184.


All statements in this tranie a r e untrue. I love you. I hate you.

Epimenides’ paradox, also known as the Cretan liar paradox (“All Cretans are liars. I am a Cretan”), characteristically arises when a member of a class speaks about h s own class. Erasmus’ Folly is a Cretan liar when she condemns fools, and Jack is her literary cousin when he speaks against those whose “desires for revenge and innovation” re- semble his 0wn.17 A paradoxical mode of rhetoric which prevents the reader from knowing where the author’s beliefs lie is clearly useful for an inquiry into ideologically sensitive matters; i t is equally useful in terms of a psychic economy, since it allows conflicting attitudes to play against each other. The play is at its most serious when Jack, who has apologized for being “so young a practicioner in divinity,” exclaims that “the fault of faults is ths , that your deadborne faith is begotten by too-too infant Fathers” (pp. 236-37).

The problem Nashe grapples with in the sermon is that “too-too infant Fathers” are the only kind there are in the world where Jack finds himself. Even God, as Jack depicts Him, is involved in a struggle to prove His authority that resembles the struggles between paternal and filial deities in classical mythology: in those struggles authority is a relative and “positional” phenomenon rather than a natural o r essential one; fathers may seek to usurp the place of sons as well as vice versa. Jack raises the spectre of a cycle of usurpation and revenge in w h c h no authority is primary when he compares the Anabaptists to the giants “that thought to scale heaven in contempt ofJupiter” (p. 236); a t first, one might consider this merely a conventional simile, but in the following passage, Jack deepens its metaphysical significance by dissociating the ethical question of the goodness o r badness of religion from the issue of power:

The name of Religion, bee it good o r bad that is ruinated, God never suffers un- revenged: Ile say of i t as O v i d said of Eunuchs:

17. The par.illel betweeii Jack and thc Anabaptists is particularly striking in the passage where Jack describe5 the Anabaptists’ “inspirdtion,” which “buzd in their cares like a Bee i n a boxe cverie hower what newes troni heaven, hell, and the land oiwhipperginnie: displease them who durst, he should havc his mirtims to damnation e x ronyorr” (p. 233). The description recalls the cider-nicrchait episode. in which Jack selects a victim “to damne with a lewd monilesse device” (p. 21 1) and uws his inspirational powers, as we havc seen, to “buzz” a rebellious idea into the nicrchmt’b hcdd (p . 214).

176 English Literary Renaissance Qui primus pueris genitalia membra recidit, Vulnera quae fecit debuit ipse pati.

Who first deprivde yong boies of their best part, With selfe same wounds he gave he ought to smart (p. 238).

Jack aims his invective here at Cardinal Wolsey, England’s last Catholic Archbishop, who had “gelt religion,” Jack says, by selling “church livings.” But the quotation from Ovid suggests that God Him- self, offended and challenged both by Catholics and Protestants, proves his authority only in the mode of vengence.18 And as in the Old Testa- ment, God’s “scourges” are the same men who are also challenging his authority-such as Jack, who plays the role of “scourge of God” against some “finical clerks” he dislikes (p. 226); or Cutwolfe, the Marlovian villain-hero who takes vengeance on another villain and exclaims, “There is no heaven but revenge” (p. 324). In this narrative world it is truly difficult to distinguish rebellious sons from those who play the role of punishing father. It is also extremely hard to define Nashe’s attitude toward those who hold positions of religious authority. Jack condemns the Anabaptists for refusing to obey the bishops, but he does so with a scriptural analogy that raises more questions than it answers :

Though the High Priests Office was expired when Pdul said unto one of them, God rebuke thee, thou painted sepulchre, yet when a standerby reprooved him, saying, Revilest thou the High Priest? he repented and askt forgiveness.

That which I suppose I doe not grant: the lawfulnes of the authoritie they oppose themselves against is sufficiently proved: farre be it my under-age arguments should intrude themselves as a greene weake prop to support so high a Building (p. 236).

Is it better to obey a “painted sepulchre” than to rebel against it? And just how securely “propped” is the “high Building” of the recently established Protestant church? The fact that Jack’s journey begins in the camp of Henry VIII and ends in Rome, the seat of that Papal authority Henry had successfully challenged, suggests that questions about the conflict between new and old religions are an integral part of the “newes of the maker” game. The Protestant rebels may be hypocrites and “counterfeiters”: Jack compares them to the cynic Diogenes, caught “coyning monie in his cell” after posing as a critic of worldly values (p. 237). But those against whom the Anabaptists rebel may also

18. The quotation is from Ovid’s Amores ii, 3 , 3 4 , the translation. as McKerrow notes( Ctbrks, IV, 268), is Marlowe’s.

Margaret Ferguson 177 be hypocrites, as the phrase “painted sepulchre” indicates. Christ con- demned the Pharisees as “whited sepulchres” (Matt. 23:27), and Paul was also exposing hypocrisy when he was struck on the mouth by the command of the high priest Ananias (Acts 23:2). Although Paul did apologize to the high priest, saying “it is written thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of thy people,” his belated acknowledgment of his duty to submit to the priest’s authority-an acknowledgment itself based on the authority of the written Law which Paul so often questions- hardly provides a clear principle of obedience in the context of Nashe’s story. Nashe, whose own books were banned by the Anglican bishops in 1597, praises the Italian satirist Aretino for refusing to allow his speech to be impeded. Aretino, who was no timorous servile flatterer of the commonwealth wherein he lived,” confidently spoke whatever he thought about “princes . . . that in the least point transgrest. His lyfe he contemned in comparison of the libertie of speech” (p. 265).19

Jack’s sermon against the Anabaptists is rhetorically complex because it is at once an exercise of free speech and an authorial gesture of self- censorship, undertaken to ward off reprisal from social authorities and from the psychic authority Freud called the superego, the force which, in Freud’s interesting political metaphor, introduces a garrison . . . into regions that are inclined to rebellion.”m Jack’s sermon, and the astonishing sado-masochistic description of the massacre which follows it, testify to Nashe’s ambivalence about the transgressive power of the human artist:

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The Emperials themselves that were their executioners (like a father that weepes as he beates his child yet still weepes and stil beates) not without much ruth and sorrow prosecuted that lamentable massacre ( p. 240).

This quotation shows Nashe’s ambivalent attitude not only toward transgressors, artists or children, but also toward the social and religious authorities invested with punitive powers. In this passage and throughout the Anabaptist episode, Nashe seems to identify both with the perpetrators of the massacre and with their victims. His dividend sym- pathies reflect his inability to resolve a problem no less thorny, for him,

19. See Hibbard, Thorn Nuhe, p. 132, for a dwussion of the banning of the satires Nashe wrote during his quarrel with Gabriel Harvey.

20. The quotation is from “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” in Nac~ Inrrodurrory Lectures on Psy- choonnlysis, ed. James Strachey (New York, 1%5), p. 110. Freud’s discussions of masochism, sadism, and the “unconscious sense of guilt” in this lecture are also relevant to Nashe.

178 English Literary Renaissance than it was for Milton: is the human artist “self-begot, self-raised,” as Satan claims to be in Paradise Lost (V, 860)?

Nashe addresses this question throughout his literary career, but nowhere more forcefully than in his story of a hero who seeks to prove his verbal powers by competing with foreigners as well as with English- men. “The vaine which I have . . . is of my owne begetting, and cals no man father in England but my selfe,” Nashe wrote in a pamphlet di- rected against Gabriel Harvey.21 In The Unfortunnte Traveller, he extends this claim to originality by competing, through subversive imitation, not only with native precursors like Surrey and Lyly, but also with continental giants such as Rabelais and Dante, whose homeland is the goal of Jack’s journey and whose Christian epic is, in my opinion, a major subtext of Nashe’s narrative.” Creating an ambivalently Protest- ant version of a journey through a purgatorial landscape inhabited by recently dead characters, giving us a hero guided by a poet whose best known sonnet imitates Dante’s “La Pia” episode, Nashe at once exer- cises and reflects on his own “self-begetting” power.3

In so doing, he “anatomizes” the artist’s “vaine”-as inspirational power and as potential source of moral vanity-in a way that paral-

21. Srrnnge Newes o f t h e Intercepting Certnine Letters, 1592 (Works, I , 319). For useful discussions of Nashe’s preoccupation with originality, see David Kaula, “The Low Style in Nashe’s 7% Unfortunclte Tmveller,” Studies in English Liternture, VI (1966), 43-57; and Walter Davis, lden ond Act in Eliznbrthnn Fiction (Princeton, 1969). pp. 215 ff.

22. McKerrow dismisses the idea that Rabelais influenced Nashe in any significant way (Works, V, 128-31); he does not mention Dante at all in h i s commentary on Nashe’s reading. But McKerrow conceives of influence in a positivistic way that prevents him from considering the possibility of a competitive and creative imiration. There is much evidence that Nashe not only read Rabelais and Dante but labored to outdo the former in stylistic virtuosity and to rival the latter in more subtle ways. Consider, for example, the parallels between Vanderhulke’s oration in The Unforturwte Traveller (pp. 247-49) and Janotus de Bragmardo’s speech in Cnrgontun, ch. 19; or consider the parallels between Nashe’s “Induction” to the Pages and the Prologue to Pnntngruel, where Rabelais punningly defines his narrator as a “page” (Oeuvres Compl&s, ed. P. Jourda [Paris, 19621, I , 219). There is even more interesting evidence for Dante’s influence on The Unfortunclte Trclueller. Note, for instance, that Jack’s experiences in Rome constitute a care- fully structured inversion of the “progress” of Dante’s Pilgrim from hell through purgatory to paradise. Jack begins h i s Roman sojourn with a visit to a counterfeit paradise (pp. 282-85); he undergoes purgatorial trials in Heraclide’s plague-ridden house (“Here beginneth my purga- tone,” p. 295); and then he falls into a Jew’s cellar, as “a blinde man should tumble on a sodaine into hell” (p. 303).

23. As John Berryman remarks in hs Introduction to The Unfortunnte Trnve/ler (New York, 1960, p. l l ) , Nashe used Surrey’s sonnet “From Tuscane came my lady’s worthy race” as the source for his fictional plot of Surrey’s journey, with Jack, to Geraldine’s Florentine birthplace. Surrey’s sonnet echoes La Pia’s famous line from Purgatorio V, “Siena mi fe, disfecemi Ma- remma. ”

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lels the operation which the Jewish doctor Zachary threatens to perform on Jack’s body late in the tale. The hero who boasted earlier of his power to conquer rivals and chance itself by his “right vayne of sucking up a die twixt my fingers” (p. 217) becomes, in Zachary’s hellish basement, a victim whose veins are literally in danger. The anatomizing surgeon, Jack imagines, will kill him by “pricking” his “veyne” (p. 308) .24

In threatening Jack with a castrating punishment, Zachary the doctor joins the company of “too-too infant Fathers” who people the dark landscape of Nashe’s text. Some of these surrogate fathers are kind rather than cruel to Jack, but none of them, including Surrey, has the authority to answer the question which Nashe poses again and again, most overtly perhaps, in the dialogue between the Roman matron Heraclide and the villain Esdras of Granado. Esdras enters Heraclide’s house, where Jack is staying during the plague, and claims, before raping the lady, to have a charter above scripture” to do as he likes. Heraclide asks the crucial question: “How thinkest thou, is there a power above thy power?” She then answers doubtfully: “if there be [a power above thy power] he is here present in punishment” (p. 289). Heraclide, whose faith is a confused amalgam of Stoic, Catholic, and Calvinist ideas, is certainly punished, since Esdras rapes her despite her pleas; but the rape does not provide an answer to her question about the existence of a higher power. Unable to decide whether she lives in a Calvinistic world of predetermination or a Catholic one where sinners are pardoned by a God of mercy, Heraclide finally decides, in despair, to take the Roman way of suicide-a sin in the eyes of both Protestants and Catholics.25 In so doing, she implicitly usurps the place of the deity who said “vengeance is mine” even while she is seeking to be virtuous: “The onely repeale we have from Gods undefinite chastisement,” she says, “is to chastise our selves in this world” (p. 294).

Heraclide arrives at her doubtful decision to chastise herself through a process of self-reflection that serves as a kind of mirror for the self-

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24. For other significant uses of the word “vein” in Nashe’s work, see Cutwolfe’sdescription of Esdras’ torture (p. 326) and the “Letter to the Reader” affixed to The Prclise ofdw RdHemr1g (U’orks, 111, 152).

25. Madelon GohIke (“Wits Wantonness,” p. 404) argues that “Heraclide’s faith in eventual retribution” is “confirmed” by the fact that Esdras is later lulled by Cutwolfe. But “faith,” for Heraclide, is as doubtful a matter as it is for Hamlet; the problem is “which faith?” Heraclide’s extraordinary vacillations from expectations of heaven (“Husband, Ile bee thy wife in Heaven”) to visions of damnation (“why should not I hold my selfe damned [if predestinations opinions be true] that am predestinate to this horrible abuse?”) anticipate Hamlet’s vacillations in the soliloquy beginning “To be or not to be.”

180 English Literary Renaissance reflexive game played in the text as a whole. Having constructed a contradictory portrait of herself as a virtuous sinner who cannot know whether she will be damned or saved, she runs to a mirror as if to check whether her reflection corresponds with, or perhaps illuminates, the self-image she has been creating in words:

Having passioned thus awhile, she hastely ran and lookt hir selfe in hir glasse, to see if her sin were not written on her forehead: with looking shee blusht, though none lookt upon her but her owne reflected image (p. 294).

Significantly, the moment of looking in the mirror, which is at once comically narcissistic and anguished, does not resolve the problem of whether Heraclide’s sin is “written on her forehead.” The mirror scene does, however, offer a subtle comment on the issue of “seeing” images in a written form of discourse. For the reader looks upon Heraclide looking at herself in a moment of privacy. And the reader’s complex voyeuristic role is reflected in the narrator’s position; in this scene Jack is locked in a room where he can hear but not see what is happening downstairs. The scene is constructed like a Chinese box; at the center of the box is the problem Nashe formulated in his initial address to a reader, the Earl of Southampton: “the eye that sees round about it selfe sees not into it selfe,” Nashe wrote-and related the problem specifically to the author’s inability to judge his own work (p. 201).

In the Heraclide episode Nashe suggests that there is a strange “fellowship” among the characters, the narrator, the author and the reader: all are trapped in an epistemological and sexual dilemma that has to do with the problem of translating what is “seen,” literally or metaphorically, into what is known about the self. Heraclide sees herself in a mirror and does not know whether or not she is sinful; Jack sees Heraclide by a process of imaginative reconstruction that resembles the process of reading, but he shows no sign that he understands the parallels between himself and the lady, even though he too has been raped (albeit symbolically) when a character named Bartol-the henchman and double of the villain Esdras-comes into the room where Jack is sleeping with his courtesan and runs at Jack “ful with his rapier” (p. 287). Although Jack escapes to the window where his pistol lies “uncharged,” his sexual potency is mvertbeless taken from him, since Bartol takes Jack’s woman away and rapes her in a bizarre doubling of Esdras’ rape of Heraclide. This turn of the plot makes Jack into a double of Hera- clide’s dead husband, who now awakens from his counterfeit death


to accuse Jack of having raped and murdered his wife. In this vicious circle of substitutions, Jack, in the impotent position of a spectator “lying on [his] bed, the doore lockt . . . on the outside” (p. 295), is made, symbolically, to occupy all three positions in the primal triangle of father, mother, and aggressive son. A clue to the interpretation of this tangle appears in the passage where Nashe compares Hereclide’s grief to that of Oedipus, who “bewailed . . . when ignorantly he had slaine his father, & known his mother incestuously” (p. 293).

Like Jack, I “must not place a volume in the precincts of a pamphlet” (p. 227), so I shall venture only a brief comment on the meaning of the allusion to Oedipus. Throughout the story, as we have seen, Nashe defines the maker’s activity in terms of the ongoing struggle for authority that occurs between fathers and sons, masters and servants, and speakers and listeners who represent authors and readers. In the Hera- clide episode, however, Nashe wonders whether anyone engaged in such a struggle can pause, as it were, and reflect on its meaning. Can the eye that sees round about itself also see into itself? Insofar as Jack represents a “maker” in the role of a spectator who can “see” the action and passion of others like himself but who does not draw any self- reflexive conclusions that would change his future course of behavior, the answer to the question seems to be no. But the comparison between Heraclide’s grief and that of Oedipus offers an oblique counter-answer, which is not “yes” but “possibly.” For both Heraclide and Oedipus experience a moment of self-reflexive passion that leads them to the action Nashe defines as self-chastisement. ” Heraclide kills herself, and Oedipus blinds himself. Nashe, I think, offers his readers a similar model of self-chastisement.

The self-chastisement is not a moral phenomenon in the sense that it implies regret or repentance for a transgression; on the contrary, it is, like Oedipus’ self-blinding, an integral part of the tragic play in which unravelling the riddle of one’s own origins necessarily involves ignorant” transgressive action. Nashe’s symbolic act of self-chastise-

ment occurs throughout the text in the scenes in which makers are tortured; it is most dramatically presented, however, in the final pages, in which the villain Cutwolfe kills Esdras, Heraclide’s violator, by shooting him “full into the throat” with a pistol so that “he might never speake after, or repent him” (p. 326). Cutwolfe himself is then punished by an executioner who pulls his tongue out, “least he should blaspheme in his torment” (p. 327). The story that began with Jack generating an

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182 English Literary Renaissance image of himself as a rebel by using his tongue to make hs “lye run glibbe to his journeis end” concludes with Jack “mortifiedly abject and daunted” after witnessing the “end” of Cutwolfe’s power to.corrupt an audience by speaking blasphemously.

Jack’s resolution to lead a life of virtue after seeing the symbolic castration of a fellow liar is complicated, however, by his final promise that if his tale has “pleased anie, it shall animat mee to more paines in this kind” (p. 328). The “newes of the maker” game, we remember, began as a replacement for the “silent” game of mumchance, and Nashe suggests that if characters like Jack and Cutwolfe are silenced by an authorial gesture of self-chastisement that consists in killing a speaker or ending a story, such characters are nevertheless “pages” that the reader can bring back to life. If the reader does reanimate the pages, the “newes of the maker” game will begin again. For the reader, as Nashe ruefully acknowledges in the preface to a pamphlet entitled Strange News, may also be a “maker” who replaces old meanings with new ones. Upstart Commenters,” Nashe says, have

with their Annotations and gloses . . . extorted that sense and Moral1 out of Petmrch, which if Pefrclrch were alive, a hundred Strappadoes might not make him confesse or subscribe too; So may I complaine that rash heads, upstart Interpreters, have extorted & rakte that unreverent meaning out of my lines, which a thousand deaths cannot make mee ere grant I dreamd off (Works, I , 260).

This passage, whch offers interpreters an unsettling image of themselves as torturers (“we murder to dissect”), reminds us that critical commentary is not an innocent activity. If it is a game, it requires its players not only to engage in the risky enterprise of replacing the old with the new, but also to ask themselves, as Nashe does, “Is this play?”

YALE UNIVERSITY

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Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller: The “Newes of the Maker” Game

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