The balancing of ‘patrimony’ and ‘personage’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Fortune’, ‘person’ and
‘possessions’, and other elements of composition, suggests the delight taken in
pattern and parallelism, alliteration and artifice. The court took up the fashion, and
the style is still visible in the prose of John Milton, generations later. The recom-
mended rhetorical model was the style of Cicero, with a use of balanced tropes and
rhythms, but Renaissance Ciceronianism is far more artificial than Cicero. It runs to
playful excess, as, in the moral sphere, does the exemplary hero, Euphues.
It happened this young imp to arrive at Naples (a place of more pleasure than profit, and
yet of more profit than piety) the very walls and windows whereof shewed it rather to be
the Tabernacle of Venus, than the Temple of Vesta [goddess of chastity]. There was all
things necessary and in readiness that might either allure the mind to lust, or entice the
heart to folly, a court more meet for an atheist than for one of Athens, for Ovid than for
Aristotle, for a graceless lover than for a godly liver: more fitter for Paris than Hector,
and meeter for Flora [a fertility goddess] than Diana.
This antithetical style is parodied when Falstaff catechizes Prince Hal in
Shakespeare’s Henry IV. The part of the schoolmaster in the style-wars of this period
is shown by the pedants lovingly caricatured in Udall’s Rhombus and in Sir
Nathaniel in Love’s Labour’s Lost:‘T hou hast been at a great feast of languages and
stol’n away the scraps.’Thomas Nashe
Thomas Nashe(1567–1601) carries Marlowe’s undergraduate irreverence further.
His extravagance is suggested by his titles:Pierc e Penniless his Supplication to the
Divell(the complaint ofa poor writer),Christs Teares over Jerusalem(an apocalyp-
tic satire),The Terrors of the Night (a study of nightmares),The Unfortunate
Traveller.Or The Life of J acke Wilton(escapades abroad),Have with you to Saffron-
walden,Or Gabriel Harveys Hunt is up(a pamphlet controversy),The Isle of Dogs(a
lost play),Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe(a mock encomium of the red herring, including a
parody ofHero and Leander),and Summers Last Will and Testament(a comedy).
Pierce Penniless defends drama against Puritans:
Our players are not as the players beyond sea, a sort of squirting bawdy comedians, that
have whores and common courtesans to play women’s parts, and forbear no immodest
speech or unchaste action that may procure laughter; but ... honourable and full of
gallant resolution, not consisting like theirs of pantaloon, a whore, and a zany [stock
parts in the Italian Commedia dell’Arte].
In The Unfortunate TravellerNashe deplores Italian influence on the English visitor:
‘From thence he brings the arts of atheism, the art of epicurizing, the art of whor-
ing, the art of poisoning, the art of sodomitry.’ Despite his Sunday-newspaper censo-
riousness,Nashe was at war with puritans, especially Spenser’s friend Gabriel
Harvey. Such was his invective that the Church authorities ordered that ‘all Nashe’s
books and Doctor Harvey’s books be taken wheresoever they may be found and that
none of their books be ever printed hereafter’.Richard Hooker
Puritans had attacked the Church of England in the anonymous ‘Marprelate’ tracts
(pre late = bishop), taking their tone from prayers such as ‘Lord, crack their teeth’
(see p. 93). A better effort at loving his puritan neighbour was made by Richard
Hooker(1553–1600) in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a defence of the apostolic106 3 · TUDOR LITERATURE: 1500–1603