Penniless?: Thomas Nashe and Precarity in Historical Perspective
Thomas Nashe
Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1601) isn’t a household name. Today he makes cameo appearances on university literature courses, and almost nowhere else. Yet for the whole of the 1590s — the decade of Shakespeare’s emergence, and one of the most extraordinary in English literary history — Nashe was a bright star.
He tried his hand at established literary forms, like witty plays and erotic poetry, giving them his own twist. He also wrote prose, most famously the novella The Unfortunate Traveller. He worked ceaselessly because he was desperate for protection, promotion and money. Yet he couldn’t resist controversy and trouble; throughout the decade he participated in a vicious ‘pamphlet war’ with a prickly Cambridge academic and was commissioned by the Church to write anti-puritan tracts. The improvisatory looseness of prose appealed to him, as well as the new aesthetic and performative possibilities of commercial print. Often Nashe writes satirically: about the vices he saw overtaking elite London society; about superstitious groupthink; about the herring-smoking industry in Great Yarmouth.
Our Project: Precarity
Since 2017 scholars from several universities have been collaborating on a major new edition of Nashe’s complete works, the first for more than a century. (Read more about that edition here.) Beginning in 2022, a follow-up project at Newcastle and Sheffield is aiming to disseminate the last few years’ work, communicating a new picture of Nashe and his world beyond the academy. Entitled ‘Penniless?’, the project focuses on Nashe’s 1592 pamphlet Pierce Penniless, in which Nashe’s thinly disguised avatar meets the devil’s man in St Paul’s cathedral, and describes to him the overtaking of London’s society by the Seven Deadly Sins. It’s a text about a condition which was becoming increasingly common at the end of Elizabeth’s reign: precarity, the experience of insecurity and exposure at a socio-economic level but also an emotional one.
Our own society, reeling from the pandemic and a seemingly endless onslaught of other crises, is also experiencing precarity. Working-class and young people face an uncertain and often frightening future. While our project uses Nashe’s work to reveal the dark side of Elizabethan England, the hardship of life for those excluded from its splendour, it’s also attempting to trace the resonance between Nashe’s times and our own. For many of us in the UK, widespread precarity is uncharted territory. What can we learn from being in touch with a culture in which it was a norm, not the exception?
Podcasts
A series of six podcasts, entitled The Precarious World of Thomas Nashe, will situate Nashe in context. Today’s Britain (having just reached the end of a second Elizabethan age) often fixates on an ideal vision of Elizabethan England: swashbuckling exploration, fantastical pageantry, the rout of the Armada. But in the 1590s life was tense and difficult, both economically and politically. Our series, produced by Better Lemon Audio, explores precarity in Nashe’s world from a number of angles. The episodes take the form of mini-documentaries, each focusing on a certain theme — education, place and space, work and play, plague, experimental forms, ghosts — and draw on the knowledge of experts in Elizabethan literature and history.
Had he lived today, Nashe might well have had fun with podcasts. One of our concerns of the editorial work was to reframe Nashe as a theatrical writer (perhaps the highest profile event of his career was a scandalous play written with Ben Jonson, The Isle of Dogs, which exiled him from London). Even in his prose works there’s a constant impulse towards dialogue: he often seems to interrupt himself from the margins. He’d have enjoyed the ephemerality of the form, the way it reflects on present reality, as well as the sly possibilities of its intimacy: he’d have loved the chance to speak directly into our ears.
Artwork
Nashe is an irrepressibly visual writer. He has an eye for the grotesque, the contorted, the abject. The narrator of Pierce Penniless presents the devil with the Seven Deadly Sins in something like a medieval pageant. If not allegorical personifications, Nashe’s figures are moral examples of how social vices can warp and corrupt. Seignior Greediness, for instance, lives to pile up money; his life seems outwardly opulent, but as the mice living in his house know, there’s no food in the kitchen.
Sheffield-based artist Jessica Heywood has produced a series of pen-and-ink drawings which respond imaginatively to Nashe’s figures of the sins. Rather than simply reproducing the figures, the drawings present a very Nashean combination of images: fragmentary forms, often of clothes and accessories and animal life, from Nashe’s own fragmented, digressive sentences.
Jess’s drawings (excerpts of which appear around this page) will be exhibited in Sheffield. Meanwhile, the series will be printed as a zine, displayed in the excellent zine archive of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Nashe took great interest in the printing process, living for a period with a London printer. His work is full of references to the ephemerality and materiality of printed works. It’s fitting that Jess has chosen to print the zine on a mixture of papers, varying in texture and quality. Read more about Jess’s work here.
Performance
Jess’s drawings are one of several inspirations for a piece of devised theatre by Newcastle-based company Cap-a-Pie, who specialise in working with schools and researchers. Their main prompt is an excerpt from Pierce Penniless — Nashe’s loose pageant of the Sins — but they’re also working from summaries of interviews carried out as part of our Oral History project (see below). We’ve had productive discussions with the company, about how Nashe can speak to the condition of contemporary precarity, and how his writing strikes a non-academic audience, ahead of a performance on 28 October 2022. The performance will be attended by several representatives of academic, arts and third sector organisations in Newcastle, where the company is based.
Oral History Project
During the summer of 2022 we conducted a small oral history project, interviewing people about their experiences of precarious employment. We hired four student interns (second-year undergraduates studying English and History at Sheffield) to assist us with all aspects of the project, including carrying out interviews. We received training from Dr Michelle Winslow, a member of the Oral History Society with extensive experience in this particular form of research. Our aim was to speak to young people and mature students, and to focus on a few themes. Some of these had to do with precarious labour itself: how people narrate the story of their own career; the relevance of solidarity at work; changes brought about by the pandemic. But we were also interested in how people perceived the relationship between work and education.
This is a key source of fascination and frustration for Nashe, who received at school and at Cambridge a humanist education which projected an ideal job market, in which there were plenty of opportunities for young men distinguished more by their training in writing and thinking than in their connections. As Pierce Penniless shows us, the reality was much meaner and starker. Though this aspect of the project left Nashe and the early modern world to the margins, we couldn’t help but encounter continually the striking similarities and differences between this historic situation and our own.
Webinar
The precarity which is gripping the UK, and many other parts of the world, extends to the academic sector. We idolise student life as a carefree experience; we often think of academia as a wholesomely peaceful career path. But young people heading off to university face steep levels of debt and a volatile, uncertain job market, as well as the cost-of-living crisis affecting us all. Early career academics are themselves overworked and precariously employed. Adverse conditions like these don’t do any favours for the humanities, long since besieged by funding cuts and general uncertainty as to their value in a materialist society. We’ll be hosting a ‘webinar’ to discuss, with reference to Nashe and the various other strands of our project, how we might effectively envisage and talk about the relationship between the humanities and the world of work. We’ll hear from experts in a range of sectors: careers advice; headhunting; the arts; universities themselves.
We’ll be exploring each of these projects in more detail in dedicated posts, to follow on this page. Thanks for reading!
