The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works

by Thomas Nashe, J.B. Steane

Thomas Nashe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, was writing in the 1590s, the zenith of the English Renaissance. Rebellious in spirit, conservative in philosophy, Nashe's brilliant and comic invective earned him a reputation as the 'English Juvenal' who 'carried the deadly stockado in his pen.' In its mingling of the devout and the bawdy, scholarship and slang, its brutality and its constant awareness of the immanence of death, his work epitomizes the ambivalence of the Elizabethans. Above all, Nashe was a great entertainer, 'his stories are told for pleasure in telling, his jokes are cracked for the fun of them, and his whole style speaks of a relish for living.'

In addition to The Unfortunate Traveller, this volume contains Pierce Penniless, The Terrors of the Night, Lenten Stuff, and extracts from Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, The Anatomy of Absurdity, and other works.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Poetry, Renaissance, Literature, Essays, Short Stories

512 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1620

About the author

Thomas Nashe (November 1567 – c. 1601) was an English Elizabethan pamphleteer, playwright, poet and satirist.

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Nashe wrote no masterpieces. In the big leagues of English literature, he's a utility player among steroidal superstars. As a scrounging Elizabethan journalist, he turned out a few pamphlets, some pornographic verse, a novel and a play, before dying, in obscure circumstances, at thirty-four or so. Although he continues to hover around the fringes of the canon, almost nobody reads him but the odd scholar, and that's as it should be, I think.

And yet, sentence for sentence, Nashe is one of the most outrageous stylists in the language. The editor of the Penguin miscellany compares him to the later, logomaniacal Joyce. Like Joyce, Nashe was an incorrigible show-off, clapping together Latinate nonce-words and mixing academic flimflam with the billingsgate of fishwives. For whole paragraphs at a time, he goes off on verbal spending sprees, seemingly intent on burning through the riches of the English language, while his ostensible subject, poor thing, sits at home darning socks.

What saves him (sometimes) from empty virtuosity is his comic flair. He speaks of a certain kind of ‘small beer, that would make a man, with a carouse of a spoonful, run through an alphabet of faces’. Libeling an over-prolific rival, he invents a rumor that ‘an incubus in the likeness of an ink-bottle had carnal copulation with his mother when he was begotten.’ He imagines ravenous mice falling upon a cod-piece, ‘well-dunged and manured with grease, which my pinch-fart penny-father had retained from his bachelorship' (don't ask). Instead of saying that a bunch of old skinflints lived to regret their stinginess, he writes: ‘Those greybeard huddle-duddles and crusty cum-twangs were struck with such stinging remorse of their miserable euclionism and snudgery…’

He's not always this much fun, however. His longer writings are shamelessly padded with second-hand narratives and medieval pseudo-scholarship. There are many passages of exuberant unintelligibility, duly footnoted with an editorial shrug. When Nashe is really humming, though, his combination of hilarious invective and pedantic tomfoolery is unlike anything else I've read.

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acknowledgements and References
Introduction
Select Bibliography

Complete Texts

--Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil
--Summer's Last Will and Testament
--The Terrors of the Night
--The Unfortunate Traveller
--Lenten Stuff
--The Choice of Valentines

Extracts

--The Anatomy of Absurdity:
Prodigal Sons
Poor Scholars
Advice to Scholars
--Preface to Greene's Menaphon: English Seneca, Whole Hamlets and St John's in Cambridge
--Strange News: Robert Greene
--Christ's Tears over Jerusalem:
Atheists
Frost-Bitten Intellect
Gorgeous Ladies of the Court
Stews and Strumpets
Prayer for London
--Have with You to Saffron Walden: Gabriel Harvey

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller was a major influence on the development of the novel, and also a major influence on horror: Nashe shares his contemporary Philip Marlowe's taste for the lurid, but he takes it to places even Marlowe shied away from.

Degrees of Elizabethan Nastiness
Janet nasty
Ben Jonson
[probably all the other dudes I haven't read]
Shakespeare
Marlowe
Nashe
Miss Jackson nasty

Dude's like "I dared not let out a wheal [pop a zit] for fear through it I should bleed to death." Ew, Nashe - and that's the nice part. That scene at the end is rough going, friends, and I wouldn't blame you for stopping at the word "firmament." That means ass, and the dude definitely dies so you can skip the rest. Unless you've toured the Tower of London and seen the torture exhibit and you're super curious about what they did with all those tongs, in which case here you go.

But before that, we get what amounts to a fairly standard Elizabethan plot, with some decent moments. You have your mistaken identities, your cross-dressing, your false imprisonment, your star-crossed lovers, your evil Jew (Marlowe's Jew of Malta is clearly an influence). It's perfectly good fun. Nashe was a pamphleteer by profession, and it shows: he switches tone and style wildly, from storytelling to sermonizing to satire with some godawful poetry in between. Some parts work better than others. Some of it is very boring. Sometimes you get blindsided by a rape scene.

So the thing is, as a book it's not really 100% successful. But it gets four stars because some of the prose is amazing: what it has going for it is Nashe's batshit lexicon. Here are some words I think we should all start using:

Drumbling: Idling, time-wasting
Finigraphical: Fastidious, finicky
Dunstically: in the manner of a fool or dunce
Gallimaufries: a confused jumble or medley
Quean: A hoyden; an impudent or ill-behaved girl
Pontificalibus: Splendour

And, I mean, this sentence in general: "Why should I go gadding and fizgigging after firking flantado amphibologies?" It means something like, "Why should I go chasing after rhetorically showy, bullshit prose?" Which is funny because rhetorically showy, bullshit prose is totally Nashe's whole thing. No book can be all bad that contains that sentence, and I haven't run across many authors in the world with this sort of flair for made-up words.

Top Five Nine Authors Who Are Just Making This Shit Up
9. Roald Dahl
8. Stella Gibbons
7. David Foster Wallace
6. Anthony Burgess
5. Thomas Nashe
4. James Joyce
3. Lewis Carroll
2. Rabelais
1. Shakespeare

"Unreprievably perisheth that book whatsoever to waste paper, which on the diamond rock of your judgment disasterly chanceth to be shipwrecked," says Nashe, and here is the diamond rock of my judgment: so as long as I get words like this in my life, I'm down for this book.

But skip the ending.

[Sammi · Rating 1 out of 5]

* I only read “The Unfortunate Traveller” & it was awful. Dreadfully dull and slow to read.

Read for Boxall’s list.

[Arukiyomi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here’s a funny old book. Not very long, for which I am thankful, and possibly the only Tudor ‘novel’ on the 1001 list, for which I am also thankful.

It’s a picaresque novel and arguably one of the first and this has earned it a place on the 1001 Books list. It’s almost definitely the shortest because writers of picaresque novels never know when to shut up. It’s a genre which I’m grateful has dropped out of favour with modern readers and writers.

I can barely remember what happened, not least because my edition was a reprint of the original text complete with original spelling which, compared to modern standard spelling, requires some lateral thinking to process. Then there’s vocabulary which we simply don’t use anymore for which the Internet was essential.

Then there’s a story which isn’t as straightforward as simply a guy going on a jaunt overseas (why must picaresque novels always head overseas?) There were twists and turns of ‘plot’ and the obligatory japes and close calls. I say ‘obligatory’ but, of course, Nashe was one of the first to do this. The popularity of the form in later years testifies to his influence, at least on the English novel.

I wouldn’t bother rushing out to get a copy of this unless you are a real die-hard lit fiend. Having said that, if you are, you’ve probably already read it. What did you think?

[Mia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only read the 'Unfortunate Traveller' portion of this book, and yet it still took me almost two months to finish. The start, I found to be quite slow and I was often confused as to what was going on - this may have been partly due to the archaic language.
In saying that, I did find it valuable to have such an insight into the mind of one living so far in the past; though it was published after the reign of Henry VIII, it still brings to light both religious and very real feeling of the 16th century. In example of this, the recurrent theme of religion throughout the book is intermingled with the mundane, showing Christianity to have a profound impact on the typical Englishman at this time. The idea that Prince Arthur at the round table would sit celebrating Pentecost shows this further - something that I found quite entertaining.
Nashe makes it clear throughout that you are reading a book, interrupting the intrigue with reference of boring his readers ('I'm sure I have wearied all my readers'). This makes it harder, I find to fluently become enthralled with the happenings of the novel. In saying that, when Jack reached Rome, I found myself in more comprehension as to what was happening.

I love the description of this collection: 'In its mingling of the devout and the bawdy, scholarship and slang, its brutality and its constant awareness of the immanence of death, his work epitomizes the ambivalence of the Elizabethans. Above all, Nashe was a great entertainer, 'his stories are told for pleasure in telling, his jokes are cracked for the fun of them, and his whole style speaks of a relish for living.' Though the book as a whole doesn't quite meet the expectations raised by this description for me, it was still moderately enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed reading his vivid descriptions of certain characters, places and faces, of which I did not need to fully be aware of the context in which they were written.

The novel concludes in a rather brutish way, again presenting the normalcies of 16th century English life; it rather reflects my opinions of the book. An interesting insight into the time period, and yet not quite wholly interesting or sustainable.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Nashe was one of the `university wits' of the late sixteenth century and was at Cambridge from c.1581-1588 where he would have known Christopher Marlowe and, possibly, John Donne. He is supposed to have collaborated with Marlowe on his Dido, Queen of Carthage though it is impossible now for us to identify his contributions.

This collection does justice to the wide range of his writings from the picaresque prose work that gives this its title to the actually very dirty and quasi-pornographic The Choice of Valentines.

Far less well know outside academic circles than his peers and friends, Nashe is just one of the Elizabethan writers who has been pushed aside for the more canonical writers but is well worth discovering. The Penguin edition is a good sample of this fascinating, funny, bawdy and entertaining writer - who also reveals serious issues about the Elizabethan way of thinking, not least about gender distribution.

[Yrinsyde · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me awhile to read as it was part of a collection of works and I read the entire book. I really enjoyed it and I'm glad that I joined the 1001 Books challenge as otherwise, I wouldn't have discovered this author. I enjoyed reading him - he was great at characterisation and you can see where Dickens was influenced. The Unfortunate Traveller itself is full of violence, but it is very much removed from our contemporary life so it doesn't jar too much. There are a lot of laugh out loud moments in his works - especially in Lenten Stuff. I really enjoyed his use of language although his circumlocutions annoyed me somewhat. He was very much a show-off but in a winning, artless way. His combat with Harvey is also very amusing. Overall, a fun author.

[Timothy Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a number of works, in whole or in part in the volume. The language throughout is pyrotechnic and worth reading for its vocabulary alone (especially the invective). The eponymous work is highly memorable, if a little hard to stomach: scenes of scurrility and deception alternate with descriptions of torture and execution, along with elements of sexual violence which seem proto-Sadean. But the overall effect, which appears casual on the surface, is not amoral, and certainly not immoral (although the morals of the protagonist are certainly loose and questionable at many points). Of particular note is the amazingly well controlled, and therefore viscerally highly shocking, description of a rape. Somehow this is handled quite graphically while avoiding prurience or any hint of the pornographic (and this is not something to do with the distance between modern and sixteenth-century English). The scene takes the part of the woman, though from a helpless descriptive distance. The scene is set in Italy, the perpetrator a habitual rapist and brigand, and we experience, along with the author's fictional protagonist, both a sense of culture shock (this is the unfortunate thing about travelling, it would seem), and - this seems almost contradictory - a feeling that it is all far too human and familiar. Nashe leaves the reader not so much atavistically disgusted as deeply disappointed that such behaviour is possible, while having shown exactly what kinds of almost unremarkable yet basically flawed social structures have allowed it to flourish. (This leaves one feeling that, most depressingly, the description can be transposed wholesale to far too many modern settings). Nashe died very young (in his early thirties, around 1601) and one can only wonder what he might not have written, given longer. Like von Kleist, he has the rare gift of making us acknowledge our joint humanity while shaming us over the essentially human drives that produce the gross imperfections of our various societies.

[mencey]

puesss sorprendente me ha parecido entretenido!!! me ha incomodado OBVIAMENTE con tanto antisemitismo, violaciones y tanta violencia tan gráficamente descrita,,,, pero es tremendamente curioso ver cómo empezaban a escribir en prosa en esta época (siglo XVI) y cómo esta es una de las primeras semillitas del género del crimen actual.

[Andrew]

I am a reader in the 21st Century. Let's start with that.

This is a hard one to put a finger on... it's such an alien experience-- a 16th Century martial picaresque written by an Elizabethan convict. It has its funny bits (hey, what to do in Rome, pee on Pontius Pilate's house).

But I can't get into it. There's just so little for me to hook onto. I could "get" Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Browne without too much difficulty, but this is just not my world.

[Em · Rating 1 out of 5]

Antiquated Elizabethian language and a lack of internet guides prevent modern readers from being able to appreciate this text.

[Jo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nashe was one of the lesser known writers of the period, outshone by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser. This collection of works was okay but nothing special.

[Olivia · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book is boring and thomas nashe is not a feminist

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I preferred Piers Penilesse

[Paul H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, at least Sterne makes a bit more sense now.

[Francis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just Unfortunate Traveller.
Highly nostalgic for me, 4 re-reads

[Lee Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a student and practitioner of the novel form I love seeking out this exemplars from before the form really codified itself and became a series of formulas. Oddly, though, as one is put in the position of evaluating such works in some way, you find you have little other aesthetic criteria available to you except to judge how well a novel executes the formula that the novel you've read specifically lacks because it predates the invention of said formula and thus has no chance of being judged "good" a priori.

So, no, by any contemporary standard of the novel form this one stinks. It's written in a hard to read archaic Elizabethan English, it's more of a romance insomuch as it's episodic, but it doesn't really hold together, its characters are the stock and trade of pre-modern pure narratives, hardly real and in no way nuanced, it swings from humor to horrific dismemberment in a wink, thus displaying no taste, no sense of tone, and adhering to no aesthetic of keeping or even staying close to any single topic.

Still, I enjoyed its ragged freedom even as it confounded my received aesthetic sensibilities. At the very least it made me reassess these sensibilities and realize how silly and received they are, how they can only be a closed box I'm incapable of thinking outside of when "reviewing" books here and in my head as I read them. This whole star-system etc. It's all so banal and capitalist, this "Is it worth the ten bucks?" book review mentality. As if art were a competition. Name the ten best... All bullshit of course. Yet here we are.

If you want an open mind, by all means read this un-cagorizable narrative that has no sense of keeping, tone, or even theme or topic, which maligns just about everyone, is slightly funny here and there as well as quite horrific and very cruel in several spots but which has a dumb happy ending after all.

PS. I was pleased he traveled to Italy and to get an English view of Italy from that odd period in which the English were rushing through their own Renaissance trying to catch up to the Italians already plowing ahead into the Baroque. Needless to say, this English patriot writer--who I think was never here and who therefore cribs all of his information about Italy from other books--finds it a lawless place to avoid, despite the brutal acts of justice we're shown in the form of punishments for criminal behavior. The novel's assessments of Italy are all self-contradictory as such things always are when we're confronted with the ways of other cultures--they're either too primitive or too decadent, never as good or better than our own.

[Ian Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Nashe was a contemporary of Shakespeare – born a few years after the bard and died when he was fairly young, in his early thirties. I’d heard of him before my wife bought me this book but I’d never read anything by him. He’s always struck me as one of those writers who don’t make it onto undergraduate literature courses and has to wait for a post-grad looking for something off the beaten track to come along and see what he has to offer.
And he does have a lot to offer, as the editor JB Steane points out in his excellent and comprehensive introduction. Nashe wrote a wide range of pieces: essays, plays, poetry, as you would expect of a Renaissance man. What we have here are several complete works, including The Unfortunate Traveller, and a selection of excerpts. Just enough to make you realise that even if Nashe was only in the second rank of Elizabethan writers, he was still a highly talented wordsmith. One of the most entertaining features of this book is that you’re reading Elizabethan English in full pelt. It’s bawdy, it’s bitter, it’s satirical, it’s funny. Most of it is easily understood by a modern reader, but it is still packed with lots of obscure words and phrases, and topical references. Fortunately, the editor provides very helpful footnotes, both for the archaic English terms (“fizgigging”, “beeves”, “marybones”) and the frequent Latin tags. Behind it all you sense that Nashe has a thwarted sense of entitlement. His message is often, “I went to Cambridge, I know Latin, I can write well, so why am I so poor?” His dilemma is that of the professional writer who struggles to make a living from his or her craft and desperately needs a rich patron to pay the bills. I know just how he feels.

[Pip · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Unfortunate Traveller is one Jack Wilton, who was a page in the camp of Henry the Eighth at the siege of Tournay. He travels through Western Europe meeting Thomas More and Erasmus among other famous people, playing jokes on others, getting himself imprisoned, tortured and bedded in an episodic and, at least for me, incoherent way.This was a challenging read for me because the archaic language was often not explained by Kindle's dictionaries and Wikipedia and it was a slog to look words up elsewhere. It was published in 1594, the first picaresque novel in English and was set a generation earlier, so the language being a challenge was explicable. Nashe, however, was "the first of the prose eccentrics" according to Britannica and he had a lot of fun with words. The book is stuffed with puns, newly coined words apparently, and "my boisterous compound words" as he described them himself. He loved to pour scorn on religion, hypocrisy and pomposity, but his character, Jack Wilton, was scarcely a hero. There are particularly gruesome depictions of torture which I found difficult to read and to reconcile with the playful episodes which sometimes caused me to laugh out loud. I found this book to be a curiosity in its uneven development.

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest, I only bought this book for The Unfortunate Traveller.

Although the beginning of the novel is bit of a slow start, it really picks up after Jack reaches Italy. There, his life certainly gets interesting (or well, more interesting than it was considering all his previous pranks) and the descriptions of events get more vivid (and morbid). This isn't a novel in the usual way we think about them nowadays with a clear plot and climax, but it's evident why this could be considered to be a precursor to modern ones. It has rising actions which increase tension, even if there isn't a specific climax the books seems to be building up to. In addition, it contains certain elements of a bildungsroman, and even ends in a circular fashion. While The Unfortunate Traveller doesn't exactly resemble a modern novel, it's enjoyable nonetheless and an interesting example of early fiction.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

more than the sum of its parts, with steane's loving introduction and essential notes (although the recurrence of "meaning unknown" or just "nonsense" gets funny) this becomes an essential experience for any reader, especially in my old gaudily orange pocket size edition. i have a great affection for nashe, a brawling wildboy who batters at the limits of language (he is also the subject of my favourite academic essay for its batshit (but well supported) claim he only faked his death and re-emerged as thomas dekker to avoid controversy, aided by other writers in a masonic conspiracy)

and of course the unfortunate traveller is a true novel, because the novel is more than the dull stultifying so called realism of defoe and richardson who saw how much fun nashe had and felt they had to put a stop to it

[Chris Fluit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like most anthologies, this is a bit of a mixed bag. Pierce Penniless is hilarious. Top-notch satire with wonderful wordplay. Summer's Last Will is boring. Not much happens and would probably be even worse to watch as a play. The Terrors of the Night is good. A funny discourse on dreams and demons, though it runs a little long in points. The Unfortunate Traveler is another solid satire. Shades of Sancho Panza, the put-upon servant commenting on his superior's travails. Lenten Stuff is delightful. An interesting look at English ports and towns other than London, though it meanders a little. On the whole, Nashe is a wonderful wit who turns a great phrase, but loves the sound of his voice too much and doesn't much bother with devices such as structure and plot.

[Peter Talbot · Rating 5 out of 5]

The selectivity of modern reading of the Elizabethans is truly incomprehensible: a case of the cannon strangled by public schools' (understandible) Shakespeare worship and the natural cherry-picking that attends teaching to "the tests".

Nashe is wonderfully inane, corrupt and perfect in raillery. Reading him colors Shakespeare's audiences and the more latinated Cambridge back-slapping comradery that formed the cannon itself.

Frankly a must read and must study for any Elizabethan scholar. Wildly under-rated for a lot of bad reasons. Nashe is the antithesis of politically correct in any age, and all the more informative for a'that.

[James Violand · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a difficult critique because of the sorrow the reader encounters as he reads words from a decaying mind. Nashe had a wonderful gift for the written word. He also was very impressed with his superior education. Considering that he died fairly young and never succeeded in his aspiration to greatness but suffered from penury, Nashe became a bitter, unstable man. His wit is impressive, sometimes brilliant, but then it degenerates into a pitiful screed. From his brief biography, I wonder if he died - exact time and whereabouts unknown - in a syphilitic delirium.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this picaresque novel from the depths of the Elizabethan era is a reminder of how bare and brutal life was in those times and yet how rich and subtle our language was (and is). Amidst the wanderings of Jack Wilton, we bypass the meeting of Thomas More and Erasmus, take in some horrifically violent executions, slip in plenty of extra-marital bawdiness and see life from the inside of an Italian prison. Wilton's narration is satirical and funny and, despite the title of this influential but little-read work, he is actually lucky to make it back home to England before the end.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

[I only read The Unfortunate Traveler and not the "Other Works" in this collection] Meh. I suppose I see why this one is considered a "classic," but it's not one that resonated with me much. There are a few amusing little passages in the novella-length tale of a rakish rogue working his way through Europe and getting into seedy adventures, but it felt like something only an English literature scholar would really appreciate.

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

fine - but some super graphic descriptions which were not pleasant to read

[Lisa of Troy]

Renaissance Recommended Reading List as per Benjamin McEvoy in How to Get an Oxford English Education for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Q2J...

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Elizabethan novella, humorous but somewhat repetitive at times.