Aretino and the Harvey-Nashe Quarrel

PMLA ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 84 (6) ◽  
pp. 1551-1559 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. McPherson
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
Gabriel Harvey ◽  
Pietro Aretino ◽  
Prevailing View

Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe disagreed violently about Pietro Aretino, the Italian polemicist and pornographer (1492-1556), and their differences about him help to explain why Nashe was able to make a laughingstock of Harvey in their literary quarrel. During Harvey's youth (in the 1570's), he held the then prevailing view that Aretino was a gifted polemicist and politician (only in the 1590's did English writers begin to think of the Italian almost exclusively as a pornographer). In 1592 Harvey attacked Aretino just as violently as he had earlier praised him. His change of opinion must have occurred because he had had his fingers burned writing satire in 1580 and because Nashe, now his opponent, was praising Aretino extravagantly as the Scourge of Princes. Harvey, because of his distaste for Aretino and indeed for all satirists, was now writing as a man of reason above scurrility. Nashe, with Aretino as one of his models, cultivated an opposite pose, that of the lashing modern prose satirist, long on hyperbole and short on sober seriousness. Harvey, with his ponderous irony, was no match for Nashe, the “true English Aretine.“ (DCMcP)

Thomas Nashe On and Off the Page

2019 ◽  
pp. 230-282
Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards
Keyword(s):  
Material Objects ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Role Performance ◽  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
Direct Address ◽  
Gabriel Harvey ◽  
The University ◽  
Last Will And Testament

This chapter shifts attention from the literariness of Thomas Nashe’s style to its performability. It recalls the role performance played in his education, and his links to the theatre. It considers what was so meaningful about live performance that he tried to recreate its effect in printed prose. It explores the theatricality of his prose: his use of the rhetorical sentence to represent live thinking; his use of direct address in Summers last will and testament and The Unfortunate Traveller; and his imitation of the university play Pedantius in Have with you to Saffron Walden. Nashe’s attempt to bring the flat page to life with thought, wit, and emotion explains his criticism of Gabriel Harvey, whose pamphlets he represents as material objects that can be reduced to their constituent parts with no loss.

Harvey’s 1593 ‘To Be and Not To Be’

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 87-100
Author(s):  
Dennis McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Title Page ◽  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
Gabriel Harvey

Ever since the discovery of the first quarto of Hamlet (Q1) in 1823, it has generated fierce debate among scholars about its origin. Recently, Terri Bourus has written a powerful book-length argument that Q1 was indeed by Shakespeare, as its title page states, and that he wrote it by 1589. The present article bolsters Bourus’s conclusion with a careful look at its title page claims as well as the literary satires of Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Harvey and Ben Jonson. Specifically, Q1’s title page and apparent allusions to Hamlet in the early 1590s pamphlet war of Nashe and Harvey independently confirm an earlier chronology for the tragedy. Jonson also attributes a line exclusive to Q1 to his caricature of Shakespeare in Every Man Out of His Humor (1600). The evidence suggests Shakespeare had written Q1 much earlier than conventionally assumed and that there was no ‘lost Hamlet’.

Spenser, Raleigh, Harvey, and Nashe on Empire

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (261) ◽  
pp. 143-161
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Gabriel Harvey ◽  
Sir Walter Raleigh ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Richard Hakluyt

Abstract This article explores the responses to early modern colonial enterprises in the writings of four major English writers: Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe. The article shows how diverse responses to such undertakings were and that there was as much hostility and indifference as there was enthusiasm, not only for political and/or moral reasons but also because expensive overseas ventures were sometimes thought of as a needless waste of money and lives. In doing so the article aims to contribute towards recent calls to ‘decolonize’ the university and the curriculum, showing that responses to colonialism in colonising societies were never monolithic and that it is important that this historical reality is recognised if we are to engage seriously with the impact of colonialism and imperialism. Harvey and Raleigh were enthusiastic proponents of the benefits of colonial settlements, and took their cue from reading Richard Hakluyt the Younger’s Principal Navigations (1589), which suggested that the English had always thrived when they had ventured overseas and expanded their dominions. Spenser was much more ambivalent, despite his status as a colonist in Ireland after 1580, and Nashe was scornful of the purpose of such grand plans. For Nashe, partly inspired by his vitriolic quarrel with Harvey, it was much more important to concentrate on the locality of England itself and he accuses others of failing to see what surrounds them because they have been misled by the prospect of plunder and profit from exotic lands.

scholarly journals Underemployed Elizabethans: Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe in the Parnassus Plays

Early Theatre ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
P. B. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Gabriel Harvey

The Parnassus comedies appeared at Cambridge University between 1598 and 1601. Since they make multiple allusions to topical events, texts, and personalities, scholars have conventionally read them as personal satire, with characters representing luminaries such as the recent Cambridge graduate Thomas Nashe. This article, however, demonstrates that speeches given to several characters in the last two plays are previously untraced quotations from another Cambridge alumnus, Nashe’s antagonist Gabriel Harvey. While the plays evoke Harvey and Nashe, they do this because the two men’s post-Cambridge experiences illustrate the plays’ theme, the struggles of the scholar in the late-Elizabethan world.

‘Maymd soldiours or poore schollers’

2018 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-73
Author(s):  
Per Sivefors
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Gabriel Harvey ◽  
War Metaphor

The present article suggests that war and peace are explored in the works of Thomas Nashe as figures for the condition of the writer. Throughout his career, including his troubles with the authorities and his conflict with Gabriel Harvey, Nashe makes use of the war metaphor in order to elaborate on the condition of authorship. However, war is also a literal presence in Nashe’s texts, which frequently reference events like the Spanish Armada or the campaign in Ireland. Thus, the article examines the complex interplay between social reality and self-referential metaphor that characterizes Nashe’s use and descriptions of warfare.

Stephen Vallenger (1541–1591)

1962 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 248-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Petti
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
Life Imprisonment ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Gabriel Harvey ◽  
The Many

Of the many topicalities which fill the writings of the Elizabethan pamphleteers, Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, two concern the now almost unknown recusant poet and Cambridge tutor, Stephen Vallenger. In each allusion, as the subject of a long standing esoteric joke, he is referred to with obvious irony as “noble.” In Catholic eyes, at least, he merited the title, for he risked life imprisonment, if not worse, in an attempt to vindicate the cause for which Edmund Campion died, and when arrested, shielded his associates, taking full punishment upon himself.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

The Hydra of Tyranny, The Fall of Robespierre and the Early Demise of Robert Southey's Revolutionary Enthusiasm

Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Later Life ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
Principled Explanation ◽  
Closet Drama ◽  
Prevailing View

This article explores Robert Southey's pessimistic re-appropriation of the popular revolutionary symbol of the hydra in the closet drama The Fall of Robespierre (1794). Challenging the prevailing view that Southey was an enthusiastic revolutionary throughout the 1790s, the study progresses from an exploration of the hydra's ubiquitous use in revolutionary and loyalist propaganda to an account of Southey's damning re-appropriation of the monster as a symbol for recurrences of tyranny in France's revolutionary governments. Analyses of The Fall of Robespierre, Southey's closet drama Wat Tyler (1794) and epic Joan of Arc (1796) demonstrate that Southey acquired an early conviction that tyranny was a recurrent obstacle to democracy, which rendered revolution futile. Arguing that Southey's revolutionary zeal had largely abated by 1793, I contend that his youthful incredulity about the plausibility of establishing a republic informed, and constitutes a principled explanation for, his notorious apostasy and conservatism in later life.

Transportation and the Environment

2017 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 37-61
Author(s):  
Douglas R. Littlefield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
San Joaquin Valley ◽  
Eastern United States ◽  
Major Health ◽  
San Joaquin River ◽  
Natural Wetlands ◽  
Prevailing View

Some histories of California describe nineteenth-century efforts to reclaim the extensive swamplands and shallow lakes in the southern part of California's San Joaquin Valley – then the largest natural wetlands habitat west of the Mississippi River – as a herculean venture to tame a boggy wilderness and turn the region into an agricultural paradise. Yet an 1850s proposition for draining those marshes and lakes primarily was a scheme to improve the state's transportation. Swampland reclamation was a secondary goal. Transport around the time of statehood in 1850 was severely lacking in California. Only a handful of steamboats plied a few of the state's larger rivers, and compared to the eastern United States, roads and railroads were nearly non-existent. Few of these modes of transportation reached into the isolated San Joaquin Valley. As a result, in 1857 the California legislature granted an exclusive franchise to the Tulare Canal and Land Company (sometimes known as the Montgomery franchise, after two of the firm's founders). The company's purpose was to connect navigable canals from the southern San Joaquin Valley to the San Joaquin River, which entered from the Sierra Nevada about half way up the valley. That stream, in turn, joined with San Francisco Bay, and thus the canals would open the entire San Joaquin Valley to world-wide commerce. In exchange for building the canals, the Montgomery franchise could collect tolls for twenty years and sell half the drained swamplands (the other half was to be sold by the state). Land sales were contingent upon the Montgomery franchise reclaiming the marshes. Wetlands in the mid-nineteenth century were not viewed as they are today as fragile wildlife habitats but instead as impediments to advancing American ideals and homesteads across the continent. Moreover, marshy areas were seen as major health menaces, with the prevailing view being that swampy regions’ air carried infectious diseases.

Critical philology and Dante’s Commedia: A couple of thoughts and a few examples

2021 ◽  
pp. 001458582110225
Author(s):  
Paolo Trovato
Keyword(s):  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Torquato Tasso ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Textual Editing ◽  
Textual Transmission ◽  
Pietro Aretino

Not only literary students, but also well-known scholars share the idea that the reconstruction of a text is a routine job which leaves little room for creativity. After some 40 years during which I have edited or prepared the edition of works of Machiavelli ( Discorso intorno alla nostra lingua), Pietro Aretino ( Cortegiana) and Torquato Tasso ( Aminta), and 17 years devoted to the textual transmission and the text of Dante’s  Commedia, I think that, except for the first phases of the job, textual editing requires almost constant critical thought and interpretation. I shall present a little series of examples, mostly from Dante’s Commedia, with cases ranging from decisions in the realm of accidentals to rather complicated choices among competing substantial readings and to the risky enterprise of emendation against all the witnesses of the work. While these examples can give an idea of the novelty of some solutions of my forthcoming edition (the introduction and  Inferno will appear in the summer of 2021), in my view, they seem to confirm the opinion of the great classical philologist Giorgio Pasquali, for whom textual criticism isn’t mechanical; it is methodical.

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