Author Description

A new adaptation of Thomas Nashe’s original 1596 text, with a full set of explanatory notes written from an occasionally Oxfordian perspective. THE HARVEY-NASHE QUARREL, IN A NUTSHELL Tom Nashe and Gabriel Harvey didn’t like each other. Their personalities and worldviews were entirely incompatible. Their mutual disapproval became a war of words in ink beginning around 1590, when Gabriel’s younger brother Richard, ostensibly a clergyman, published his scornful opinions of the anti-Martin Marprelate writers (meaning John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Nashe) and of professional writers generally, especially young ones who didn’t properly respect their elders. Nashe was twenty-three, not long down from Cambridge. Nashe answered Richard in print, then Richard let Gabriel, a scholar of some repute and more ego, answer Nashe. Greene gave it back to the Harveys, then had the misfortune to die, repenting on his deathbed of his boisterous life. Gabriel laid viciously into Greene while the corpse was still warm, and wrote condescendingly of Nashe while he was at it. Nashe took umbrage on behalf of himself and his dead friend. A couple of rounds later, Harvey published Pierces Supererogation in late 1593, attacking Nashe after Nashe’s success the year before with his tale of Pierce Pennilesse. Nashe, smart as a whip but barely able to keep himself fed in late Elizabethan London, took a while to reply. Three years, in fact. Have With You to Saffron Walden was his reply. It was worth the wait. Unless you were Gabriel Harvey.