Stories of a kind, translations from or adaptations of the Italians, and notably Bandello, with imitations of Euphues and the Pastorals, were common in Elizabethan literature. But, perhaps because it suffered from the overpowering rivalry of poetry and the stage, the prose tale is rarely among the good things of the time. Greene, Lodge, and Breton[82] are interesting to the student, but it cannot be said, with any measure of accuracy, that they have a place in the history of the English novel. They were part of the literary production of their time, but were mostly imitation, and were too completely forgotten, and too soon, to produce any effect. An exceptional interest attaches to Nash’s Unfortunate Traveller, to which attention has again been attracted of late. It is curious that a story which has considerable intrinsic force should have put the model of the Novela de Pícaros before English readers five years earlier than the publication of Guzman de Alfarache in Spain, and that it should have been so completely forgotten that when this model was again introduced among us by Defoe, his inspiration came from Le Sage.[83]
Nash’s Unfortunate Traveller.
Thomas Nash (1567-1601), who was chiefly known as a pamphleteer, published The Unfortunate Traveller in 1594. It is difficult to read, at any rate the earlier parts of the story, and we doubt that the author had seen, if not the original of the Lazarillo de Tormes, then at any rate the French version of Jean Saugrain, published in 1561. If his work is quite independent, then we have a very remarkable instance of exact similarity in the method and spirit of two writers separated from one another in race and by an interval of nearly half a century, during which the first had enjoyed a wide popularity. This is difficult to believe. Nothing can be more like Lazarillo’s doings than the tricks which Nash’s hero, Jack Wilton, plays on the old cider-selling lord and the captain. It would seem, however, that the time had not come when the picaresque method was to be really congenial to Englishmen. Nash wanders away from it when he introduces the story of Surrey and the Fair Geraldine. Yet he comes back to it with the hero’s love-affairs with Diamante, the wife of a Venetian, whom he meets in prison at Venice. He keeps to it very close when Wilton runs away with his “courtezan,” and gives himself out to be the Earl of Surrey. From the time the hero and Diamante reach Rome the picaresque tone disappears, and Nash drops into familiar Elizabethan “blood and thunder.” With the inconsequence of his time he gives at the end a defiant last dying speech and confession of an Italian malefactor, who bears the English name of Cutwolf. Perhaps a certain want of finish, and an air there is about it of being hasty work done to make a little money, injured its effect. Yet The Unfortunate Traveller did show Englishmen a way they were to follow in the future, and it came before the Guzman de Alfarache.
Nash and the pamphleteers.
Thomas Nash was himself perhaps intrinsically the most able, and certainly not the least typical, member of a whole class of Elizabethan men of letters. He was born at Lowestoft, “a son of the manse,” in 1567, and was educated at St John’s, Cambridge. It has been supposed on the strength of some passages in his writings that he travelled abroad in his youth, though he does not write in his Unfortunate Traveller like a man who had seen Venice and Rome. He was settled in London by 1588, and lived the very necessitous life of a man of letters who depended wholly on his pen, till his early death in 1601. It was the misfortune of Nash and of many of his contemporaries that they were born too soon for the magazine or newspaper. His work consists mainly of matter written to please prevailing tastes of the time. Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem, a long, wordy, and decidedly pretentious collection of preachment, and denunciation of the sins of London, his violent quarrel with Gabriel Harvey, or rather with the whole Harvey family, which was rolled out in pamphlets for the amusement of the world, his collection of ghost stories, The Terrors of the Night, and what he called Toys for Gentlemen, which are lost, and into the nature of which it is perhaps better not to inquire, were journalism before its time. His Have with you to Saffron Walden, a piece of vigorous literary horseplay at the expense of Gabriel Harvey, is an excellent pamphlet of its kind—in the kind of Mr Pott and Mr Slurk; while his burlesque almanac, called A wonderful strange and miraculous Astronomical Prognostication, though undoubtedly suggested by Rabelais, and therefore not quite original, is a piece of solemn fun worthy of the irony and the good sense of Swift. Nash had ideas of style which sometimes led him into involved pomposity, but which also supplied him with an effective, though blackguard, controversial manner. Nobody was a greater master of loud-mouthed bragging, of the fashion of telling an opponent over pages of repetition of the dreadful things you are going to do with him. Consciously, or unconsciously, the Elizabethans were great believers in the maxim that if you throw mud enough some will stick, and it was one of the signs of their youth and primitive simplicity of nature that when they were angry they gave way to the instinct which leads men to scream vituperation and curses, with no regard to their application to the subject. To call a very eminent man on his trial for treason—and on the most flimsy evidence too—“a spider of hell” would now be thought not less silly than ignoble. But that is what Coke called Raleigh, and it is a very fair specimen of Elizabethan satirical controversy. Around Nash was a whole class of men engaged in the same work of writing little stories—pastoral or euphuistic—and pamphlets moral, satirical, political, which were often in verse. When they dealt with the low life of London, as in the case of Dekker (1570?-1641?), they possess a certain value as illustrations of contemporary manners. It is curious, when their bulk and their popularity are considered, that no London printer thought of bringing out a miscellany of them at regular intervals. He would have found abundant matter ready to his hand, and the magazine, if not the newspaper, would have been founded at once.
Martin Marprelate.
One section of the pamphlet literature of the time possesses an enduring interest, if not for its intrinsic value, though that is not inconsiderable, then for historical reasons. This was the famous Martin Marprelate controversy, which was not the first example of an appeal to the people by the press on religious and political questions, for that had been done on the Continent by the Huguenots, but was the earliest effective instance among us. It grew out of the conflict between the Church, which was fighting for uniformity with the hearty support of the queen—at least from the day on which she found her power sufficiently established to allow her to disregard the Calvinist princes of the Continent—and a body of Englishmen who were desirous to adopt the Calvinist Presbyterian model.[84] According to our view the question was one to be argued peacefully, and those who could not believe the same things ought to have agreed to differ. That was not the opinion of any country, or of either side in the sixteenth century. The Puritans were as convinced of the need for uniformity as the Church or the Spanish Inquisition, and would have enforced it with no sparing hand if they had had the power. They complained quite as bitterly of the toleration which they alleged was shown to the Papists (who for their part cried out loudly of persecution), as of the severities exercised on themselves. As the power was with the bishops, those who would not conform were expelled from the universities and from their livings. The persecution to which they were subjected was enough to exasperate, but not to crush, and the embittered Puritans cast about for a weapon to use against their opponents. The pamphlet lay ready to their hand.[85]
Origin of the Marprelate Tracts.
The chief dates in the controversy were these. In 1587 Dr John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury, and afterwards Bishop of Oxford, published A Defence of the Government established in the Church of England for Ecclesiastical Matters, in answer to the Puritan controversialists Cartwright and Travers—a very long, well-meant, and learned, but lumbering book. Just at this time the Act of Uniformity was pressing heavily on the Puritans. There were two who were especially aggrieved,—John Udall, who had been expelled from his pulpit at Kingston because, as his friends alleged, he had denounced a local money-lender from whom the archdeacon of the diocese wanted to borrow £100; and John Penry, an able, honest, but headlong Welshman. In or about March 1587 Penry published at Oxford a tract with a long-winded title, which is called for short The Equity of a Humble Supplication. It was an address to Parliament representing the undeniably neglected state of the Welsh parishes. Unfortunately for Penry, it contained one passage which, with no more unfairness than was usual in State prosecutions, whether conducted for the king or the Long Parliament, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, might be represented to be treasonable. It insinuated plainly that the queen consented to leave Wales in religious ignorance and immorality. The press was then under censorship. Only two printers were allowed out of London—one at Oxford, another at Cambridge. In London the number was limited. No press could be held except by a member of the Stationers’ Company, and any one could be confiscated by the Warden, over whom the Bishop of London had general powers of control as censor. Penry’s treatise was suppressed, and he was in great peril.