Thomas Nashe

Thomas Nashe (November 1567 - ?1600) was an English Elizabethan pamphleteer, poet and satirist.

Born in Lowestoft. The family moved to West Harling, near Thetford in 1573. Around 1581 Thomas went up to St John's College, Cambridge gaining his bachelor's degree in 1586. Then he moved to London and started his literary career.

He remained in London apart from periodic visits to the countryside to avoid the plague, and in 1597, following the supression of The Isle of Dogs (co-written with Ben Jonson), Jonson was jailed, but Nashe was able to escape to the country. He remained for some time in Great Yarmouth before returning to London.

He was alive in 1599, when his last known work Nashes Lenten Stuffe was published, and dead by 1601, when he was memorialized in a Latin verse in Affaniae by Charles Fitzjeoffrey.

He was featured in Thomas Dekker's News from Hell and the anonymous The Three Parnassus Plays, which provides this epitaph:

Let all his faults sleep with his mournful chest
And there for ever with his ashes rest
His style was witty, though it had some gall;
Some things he might have mended, so may all.
Yet this I say, that for a mother of wit,
Few men have ever seen the like of it.

Works by Thomas Nashe

• 1589 The Anatomy of Absurdity
• 1590 Preface to Greene's Menaphon
• 1590 An Almond for a Parrot
• 1592 Pierce Penniless
• 1592 Summer's Last Will (play performed 1592, published 1600)
• 1592 Strange News
• 1593 Christ's Tears over Jerusalem
• 1594 Terrors of the Night
• 1594 The Unfortunate Traveller
• 1596 Have with You to Saffron Walden
• 1597 Isle of Dogs (Lost)
• 1599 Nashe's Lenten Stuff

He is also credited with the erotic poem The Choice of Valentines and his name appears on the title page of Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, though there is uncertainty as to what Nashe's contribution was. Some editions of this play, still extant in the 18th century but now unfortunately lost, contained memorial verses on Marlowe.