[A first version of this essay, 'Impotent Speech': Transgression and Abjection in Thomas Nashe's The

Unfortunate Traveller, was presented at a Conference on English Renaissance Prose at Purdue University, 11-12
October 1991, and (with alterations), as an invited lecture at the University of Alberta (22 November 1991), the
University of Oviedo, Spain (20 February 1992), and the University of Victoria (6 March 1992). A substantially
revised version, Bodies, Power, and the Gendering of Abjection in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, was
presented at the Conference on Comparative Critical Approaches to English Prose Fiction 1520-1640, Carleton
University, 8-11 May 1997. Rewritten once more during a period of residence in Spain, the essay was first
published in Critical Approaches to English Prose Fiction 1520-1640, ed. Donald Beecher (Ottawa: Dovehouse
Editions, 1998), pp. 183-218. Several typographical errors have been corrected in the present version, which
except for a sentence added to note 2 and a small change in the final sentence is otherwise unaltered.]

[Index: Thomas Nashe, Julia Kristeva, literary theory, abjection, Christopher Marlowe]
[Date: 1998]

Violence and Extremity: Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller

as an Anatomy of Abjection

Michael Keefer

Labrad, amigos,
de piedra y sueo, en el Alhambra,
un tmulo al poeta,
sobre une fuente donde llore et agua,
y eternamente diga:
el crimen fue en Granada, en su Granada!1

In these famous lines Antonio Machado, denouncing the murder of Federico

Garca Lorca by the fascist insurgents in 1936, calls upon his readers to build a tomb for
the poet in the Alhambra, a tomb of stone and dreams over a fountain whose weeping
waters eternally repeat: the crime was in Granada, in his Granada! (Admirers of Lorca's
poetry, or, more humbly, fans of Andy Garcia, who played Lorca in the recent film Death
in Granada, may be sorry to learn that while the name of Jos Antonio Primo de Rivera,
1 Antonio Machado, El crimen fue en Granada, in Flores 485-86.

founder of the Spanish Falange, remains engraved in letters a foot high on the south wall
of Granada's cathedral, after six decades the city still has no proper monument to its
greatest poet, unless in dreams alone.) 2 But what relevance can these lines of Machado be
said to have to Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller? Any link between one
Spanish poet's lament for another and this bizarrely comic fiction written some three and
a half centuries earlier must, in the nature of things, be tenuous at bestand yet I would
like to suggest that The Unfortunate Traveller does have Spanish connections that are
worth exploring.
My primary concern in this essay, however, will be to propose a modest realignment of our understanding of the generic orientation of this text; I want to argue that
insofar as Nashe's best-known work is amenable to generic description of any kind, it can
most conveniently be termed an anatomy. Nashe's first book, The Anatomy of Absurdity
(1589), was a preliminary venture into a genre the name of which, at least, had enjoyed a
vogue during the preceding decadewitness Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578),
Phillip Stubbes' Anatomy of Abuses (1583, twice reprinted by 1585), and Greene's
Arbasto (1584, which is subtitled Anatomie of Fortune. Nor was The Anatomy of
Absurdity Nashe's only venture in this genre: Pierce Pennilesse His Supplication to the
Divell (1592) is, in his own words, a most livelie anatomie of sinne (Nashe i. 306). 3 I
would like to propose that The Unfortunate Traveller is more completely and more
profoundly an anatomy than any of these.
But an anatomy of what? Since my title has already given away the answer, there
is no point in withholding the word: abjection. As I intend briefly to show, the
psychoanalytic theory of abjection developed by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An
Essay on Abjection has a startling relevance to Nashe's text. My argument will then
proceed to a consideration of the generic attachments of The Unfortunate Traveller, and
to a demonstration of the peculiar appropriateness of the genre of the anatomy to an
exploration of abjection. A rapid outline of the various forms of abjection anatomized in
2 I say proper to take into account the fact that there is a small park, which stands at some distance
from the centre of the city, named after the poet. [The poet is also now memorialized by a small
fountain, evidently inspired by Machado's lines, in one of the exterior courtyards of the Alhambra.]
3 The same generic marker recurs twice in Arthur F. Kinney's analysis of Pierce Pennilesse: it is an
anatomy of the prodigal (309); and it is More than an anatomy of Tudor customs ... one of the
significant declarations of humanist poetics (Kinney 309, 311). My thinking in this essay is much
indebted to Kinney's exemplary analysis of the development of what he calls the poetics of doubt and
despair in late sixteenth-century England, and of its connections both to the Second Sophistic and to
the ideals of early sixteenth-century humanism.

Nashe's fiction will lead to an analysis of the displacement and reinscription of abjection
that are among the most intriguing and the most disturbing features of this text. (It is
worth remembering that more than one-third of Kristeva's Powers of Horror is devoted to
analyzing the anti-semitic pamphlets of Louis-Ferdinand Cline; this section of my essay
will examine the displaced abjection that produces Nashe's less pathological, but still
vehement anti-semitism, and that is at the same time linked to what I have called the
text's Spanish connections.
What primal repression can be said to bear responsibility for the violent
displacements of Nashe's text? There is some reason to think that a psychoanalytic
answer to this question might not be adequate. This is not just because of a certain
distance between Kristeva's interpretive codes, which are semiotic, psychoanalytic and
literary-critical, and Nashe's, which are rhetorical, theological and historical. It is also the
case that The Unfortunate Traveller's obsessive concern with violence and abjection is
exceptional in Nashe's oeuvre. In the course of the work, as Philip Schwyzer has
observed,
human lives are disposed of wholesale by disease and warfare,
and Jack Wilton's tale concludes with a sensational murder
sandwiched between two graphic executions. The absence of
anything even approaching this level of brutality elsewhere in
Nashe's writings suggests that these recurring assaults on the
body are central to what he set out to do in this particular work.
(Schwyzer 588)
One may then suspect that some particular historical cause or occasion underlies
Nashe's turn in this text, not just to a rhetoric of abjection and to the literary genre best
fitted for such a rhetoric, but also to representations of abjection, whether direct or
displaced, in historical or pseudo-historical form. In the concluding sections of this essay
I will be proposing connections between Nashe's anatomizing of abjection and historical
events which go unmentioned in the narrative, and yet which might be said to resonate
within and through it: one of them the murder of a poet, and another a historical crime
linked to Lorca's city of Granada. Behind the rhetorical aggressions, the multiple
dismemberments and the fictive murders of The Unfortunate Traveller, I want to suggest,
lies the altogether historical corpse of a poet who was close enough to Nashe to be almost
an alter ego; and behind the text's displacements of abjection one can detect traces of the

abject displacement of real people.

I
Let us start with a reminder of the kind of narrative with which we are dealing. It
begins in the mode of the Renaissance jest-book, with a trickster-narrator who (not unlike
Mateo Alemn's picaro, Guzmn de Alfarache) perpetrates a series of nasty pranks while
participating in Henry VIII's sieges of Tournai and Trouanne. But The Unfortunate
Traveller quickly evolves into an oddly free-floating historical romance (or should one
say, anti-romance?), a text that manages to be at once carelessly impromptu and artfully
self-reflexive. Describing himself at the outset as a certain kind of appendix or page
(Nashe ii. 209) attached to the court of Henry VIII, Jack Wilton seems to be aware that as
the subject of the narrative he is also a textual artefact: his signiorie over the Pages (ii.
227) signifies his offhand mastery of the writer's medium as much as it does his
leadership of a gang of likeminded mischief-makers (see Ferguson, Suzuki, and Holbrook
81-85).
Historical romance, anti-romance, picaresque fiction, or anatomy though it may
be,4 Nashe's text makes only the most casual gestures in the direction of narrative or
historical continuity. Jacks early pranks at the sieges of Tournai and Trouanne (which
took place in 1513) are followed by a bizarrely comical account of the sweating sickness,
of which there were terrifying outbreaks intake your pick1518 and 1529. 5 Fleeing
4 Nicholl calls The Unfortunate Traveller a romance, and (rather strangely) the sunniest of all
[Nashe's] writings (Nicholl 154). A description of the work as the first of the anti-romances was
weighed and rejected by Ernest Baker, who preferred to call it an effort to present the romance of
actuality (Baker 168; qtd. in McGinn 98); however, Jonathan Crewe has since revived the term antiromance (Crewe 69). The most thorough account of the work's stylistic and formal resemblances to
writings in the Spanish picaresque tradition remains that of Fredson Bowers, who argued that in The
Unfortunate Traveller, even in a partly imperfect shape, Nashe produced the first English picaresque
novel (Bowers 27; see the astute rhetorical analysis of Nielson 109-17). Although she does not
describe The Unfortunate Traveller as an anatomy, Lorna Huston devotes a brilliant chapter to Nashe's
affinities with Menippean satire (for which anatomy in one sense is another term), and notes the
work's affiliation to the Lucianic confession or mock-testament (Hutson 127-51).
5 This disease, apparently caused by a virus that had for centuries been prevalent on the Continent in
milder form, and in England spread in an entirely susceptible community, is described by Zinsser as
probably the most important of those severe plagues that tormented mankind in brief and terrifying
visitations and then completely and inexplicably vanished (Zinsser 73, 70). The sweating sickness
struck down its victims with great rapidity, death often occurring within a day or even a few hours of
the first onset of symptoms. A first outbreak, in 1485, caused the postponement of Henry VII's
coronation; a second epidemic took place in 1507. The third, in 1518, was more severe, killing up to
one-half of the population in some cities. The fourth, in 1529, was still more disruptive, and the

from the epidemic with the intent of becoming a Martialist in earnest (ii. 231), Jack
witnesses the horrible carnage of the battle of Marignano (1515), where some threequarters of the nearly twenty thousand Swiss mercenaries were killed or wounded, and
where the French army that defeated them suffered almost as severely. Then, like a
Crowe that still followes aloofe where there is carrion (ii. 232), he moves on at once to
the city of Mnster, arriving in time to exercise his wit over the bloody massacre with
which the siege of the Mnster Anabaptists ended in 1535an event which Jack
conflates with the battle a decade earlier in which a peasant army led by the radical
reformer Thomas Mntzer had been slaughtered at Frankenhausen (see Cohn 234-51,
261-80).
Falling in with the Earl of Surrey (we must now be in the late 1530s or early
1540s, since Surrey was born in 1517 and executed for treason in 1547), Jack then sets
out for Venice, via Rotterdam and Wittenberg. As he readily confesses, this is scarcely the
most direct route to Italy. However, it permits him in the former city to encounter
Erasmus and Thomas More, who are engaged in composing the Praise of Folly and
Utopia (this catapults us back some thirty years, since these books were first printed in
1511 and 1516, respectively [see Screech 2-3, and Surtz xvi]). In Wittenberg Jack is able
to hear Luther debating with Carlstadt (we must therefore now be in 1522, at some time
between Luther's return from the Wartburg and Carlstadt's expulsion from Wittenberg);
while there Jack encounters that abundant scholler Cornelius Agrippa (Nashe ii. 252), a
humanist and magician whom Nashe knew to have been one prototype of Wittenberg's
legendary Doctor Faustus,6 and whose necromantic displaysthe shadows that
according to Marlowe's Faustus made all Europe honor him (Marlowe 1991, I. i. 11920)appear to be the most edifiing (Nashe ii. 255) of all Jack's experiences in
Germany.
Any reader so deluded as to hope for serious insights from these encounters would
be disappointed: but that is part of the game. 7 Of the Wittenberg debate, Jack says that
epidemic this time moved from England to the continent, where it swept through Germany and into
Switzerland and the Netherlands. Epidemic disease was of current concern in the early summer on
1593; according to John Stow's Annales, more than ten thousand Londoners died of bubonic plague in
1593 (Nicholl 163, 305 n.29); and Nashe himself claimed that in the spring and early summer of 1593
the period during which he wrote The Unfortunate Travellermore than one thousand six hundred
people were dying of plague every week (Nashe ii. 87).
6 Nashe's abundant use of Agrippa's two major works, De occulta philosophia and De vanitate, is
documented in McKerrow's edition. For indications of Agrippa's place in the development of the legend
of Faustus, see Marlowe 1991: xxxviii-xliii.
7 Nashe does interrupt Jack Wilton's account of the massacre of the Mnster Anabaptists with a serious

Luther had the louder voyce; Carolostadius went beyond him in beating and bounsing
with his fists. Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos: they uttered nothing to make a man laugh,
therefore I will leave them (ii. 250).
And yet the ideals with which the sixteenth century consoled itself are not
altogether scanted. In Rome (which Jack visits just before its catastrophic sack in 1527 by
the imperial army) he describes in lingering detail the soul-exalting splendours of a
banqueting house which imaged such a golden age, such a good age, such an honest
age as that it was the mervaile of the world, & could not be matcht except God should
make another paradise (ii. 285, 282).
But in Italy the narrative also takes a darker turn: its headlong violence, though
equally stylized and rhetorical, and no less grotesquely playful than before, is now no
longer distanced and impersonal; Jack is increasingly a victim rather than a witness. He is
perhaps more deliberately insolent than before in his challenges to and impersonations of
the power of authority figures. But whereas previously he was punished for some at least
of his pranks, he now becomes the object of other people's crimes, and faces
consequences that seem out of all proportion to his own transgressions. He is twice
imprisoned and threatened with imminent execution. On the second occasion he is
accused of a hyperbolically sadistic rape that was actually committed by the demonic
Esdras of Granada while Jack, locked into an adjoining room, was wringing his hands
over the abduction of his own mistress by the rapist's accompliceand over what
amounts, as Margaret Ferguson has noted, to his own symbolic rape: menaced with a
sword, he could only brandish an empty pistol in reply (Nashe ii. 287; Ferguson 180).
Jack is subsequently enslaved, sold to a Jewish doctor for anatomical dissection, and then
abducted by the Pope's mistress, for whom he becomes another kind of anatomical
specimen.
Rescued from this bondage by his own mistress (just as he had previously been
released from prison by the wealthy and influential writer Pietro Aretino and saved from
execution by an unnamed English earl), Jack is able to witness one final scene of torture
before bringing his story to a close. This consists of the execution and dismemberment of
one Cutwolfe, who had himself killed Esdras of Granada by terrifying him into a formal
argument against sects and schismes which he declares more appropriate to the decrepite Churches
in contention beyond sea than to English people(ii. 237). The insight s authorial, however, rather than
arising directly out of the event, and it is prefaced by an acknowledgment that in dilat[ing] a little more
gravely than the nature of this historie requires, or wilbe expected of yong a practitioner in divinity (ii.
234), Nashe is letting the mask of Wilton's autobiographical discourse slip.

abjuration of Christianity, and then, in his own words, shooting him full into the throat
with my pistoll ... so that he might never speake after, or repent him (ii. 326).
Is The Unfortunate Traveller beginning to sound rather like an exemplary new
historicist text? As Terry Eagleton has observed, mutilated bodies are de rigueur in new
historicist interpretations; moreover, the text's uneasy relations with established authority,
which it seems at once to mock and to reaffirm, may suggest that it could easily be
accommodated to a new historicist master-narrative of the containment of subversion by
power. It may indeed be the case that transgression is often in The Unfortunate Traveller
an effect of power, and even part of a process by means of which constituted authority
legitimizes and reproduces itself. It is by no means evident, however, that this kind of
recursive legitimation of power by transgression manages to absorb or to confine the
text's anarchic energies.
Nashe does impose upon the latter third of his narrative a complicatedly
providential plot, at the end of which Jack marries his courtesan, performs many
(unspecified) works of charity, and returns from the Sodom of Italy (ii. 327), if not to
England itself, at least to the camp of Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. But in
circling back thus to its point of origin, the narrative may remind us of an uncanny
similarity between the two agents who preside over its beginning and turn it towards its
close: King Henry, the ravisher of cities, to whom Turwin lost her maidenhead and
opened her gates to more than Jane Trosse did (ii. 209), and Esdras of Granada, the
demonic rapist of Heraclide and a hundred others. The reader may also quietly note the
fact that King Henry, the onely true subject of Chronicles (ii. 209), had long since been
silently dropped from this text by his ambiguously loyal subject, the out-landish
Chronicler (ii. 328) who has made his own fragmented subjectivity the true subject of
this tale.

II
As even such a skeletal summary as this may suffice to show, The Unfortunate
Traveller is in many respects an excessivewhich is also to say a transgressivetext.
These qualities have been linked by some critics to issues of authority. Mihoko Suzuki,
for example, relates the violence of The Unfortunate Traveller to a preoccupation with

the problem of ineffectual authority, not only in the political and hence the social realm,
but in the moral and religious realms as well (Suzuki 349); while Margaret Ferguson, in
a brilliant study of Nashe's (and Jack Wilton's) counterfeiting of authority, finds in the
text a powerful ambivalence about the apparent absence of any social or religious
authority strong enough to limit definitively the production of counterfeits (Ferguson
173). Jonathan Crewe, focussing more distinctly on Nashe's subversion of literary
authority, of the high conventions of Renaissance humanism, characterizes his
unredeemed rhetoric in terms of a simultaneous antagonism to and parasitism upon an
absent deal (Crewe 23). In a similar vein, Robert Weimann has linked The Unfortunate
Traveller to a crisis in narrative in the demarcation of discourses: this text, breaking
down barriers between different types of discourse ... thrives upon the depleted authority
of all these modes: the matire of chivalry, the mode of allegory, the manner of the jestbook, even the project of humanist poetics (Weimann 160-61).
Kiernan Ryan believes that these features of Nashe's text make it accessible to
recuperation as one of the founding texts of a liberating counter-canon. However, his
argument that the narrative polyphony of this defiantly decentred, heterogeneous and
unstable text serves an emancipative purpose which is the reverse of sheer negation of
self-cancelling nihilism (Ryan 51) rests upon an analysis that occludes the more violent
and excessive features of the narrative. Neil Rhodes, in contrast, insists that verbal
excess and rhetorical flamboyance cannot be assumed to be indicators of radical
intention. ... For it is not just that Nashe's writing is morally indifferent to violence; it is
in itself a language of violence. It travesties, yet at the same time revitalises, the humanist
values of copia, 'bravery' and rhetoric as power (Rhodes 31, 33). If, moreover, as Ann
Rosalind Jones has remarked, the final emphasis of this narrative is upon fantasies of
revenge, protection by the elite, and a rise to wealth and security, then Nashe can hardly
be said to have dissolved the hierarchies of his time into a free play of signs, a utopia of
discourses from which authority has been banished (Jones 74).
In its various disguises, then, authority is ineffectual, or equivocally absentor
present, perhaps, as a structure of constraints and limitations which the narrator (whose
subjectivity emerges, as David Theo Goldberg would say, at the point of convergence,
the bodily intersection, of multiple discourses [Goldberg 309]) at once mocks,
counterfeits, insults, and yet reaffirms. Could it be described, then, as a structure which, if
it does not actually provoke the challenges it would appear to foreclose, might

nonetheless be understood as both constituting and threatening to dissolve that subjected

subjectivity whose trajectory makes visible its own ambiguous outlines? But this is
perhaps too tidy a formulation.
With its diverse narrative strategies, its wild dilations and abrupt truncations, its
overflowing parodic energies, its extravagant range of vocal gestures and rhetorical
supplementarity and indirection, and most of all its gloating violence (in which C.S.
Lewis saw a ludicrous and sometimes frightful incoherence boiling up from a dark void
[Lewis 416]), The Unfortunate Traveller has tended to slip through the thematizing
enclosures constructed by its critics. Whether the problem is posed in terms of an
inexplicable themelessness (Lanham 202), or in terms of a nonsignifying excess of
violence that threatens to constitute a universal theater of cruelty rather than a theater
of God's judgments (Crewe 75), we appear to be faced with more or less elegant ways of
saying much the same thing. Perhaps Alexander Leggatt expressed the matter most
clearly when he concluded, while discovering a certain connectedness in the narrator's
obsession with the liquefaction and dissolution of human flesh (whether through disease,
battle, torture, sexual exhaustion, or terror), that The Unfortunate Traveller survives
chiefly as a grand, grotesque entertainment, alive with comedy and horror, with the
flamboyance of Hieronymus Bosch but without his concentration of purpose (Leggatt
46).
But in speaking in such terms as these, we are entering what Julia Kristeva defines
as the domain of abjection.
This is the domain neither of subject nor of object: The abject is not an ob-ject
facing me, which I name or imagine; all that it shares with the object is the quality of
being opposed to I (Kristeva 1). Associated in psychoanalytic terms with the fear and
compulsion of defilement, with the impossibility of definitively separating that which can
be cast awayexcrement, bodily fluids, corpsesfrom that which continues to constitute
the self, the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject (5). It therefore
does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens iton the contrary, abjection
acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger (9). In contrast to the object, which Kristeva
says settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, the abject,
the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward
the place where meaning collapses. A certain ego that merged
with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies

outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's
rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the
abject does not cease challenging its master. (Kristeva 1-2)
It is for this reason that There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts
of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or
inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable (1).
Abjection arises, according to Kristeva, out of disturbances to the patterns of
signification which sustain identity, system, order (4), and thereby contribute to the
demarcation of a border between self and other. The most powerful such disturbances are
prompted by corpses. For the body, once it ceases to participate in the system of
exchanges that, on the most basic level, sustain the living self (inhalation, ingestion,
exhalation, excretion), passes over into the category of that which it previously expelled,
cast downward, or cast off (ab-jectum). In his translation, dating from 1398, of
Bartholomeus de Glanville's De proprietatibus rerum, John of Trevisa wrote that
careyne [carrion] draws its other name of cadavare from cadere, to fallean
etymology that is repeated by Kristeva (OED, Cadaver; Kristeva 3). Once having
fallen, the cadaver itself becomes waste, joining the excrementa which, as George
Starkey wrote in Natures Explication and Helmont's Vindication (1657), are by the heat
of the body cadaverated, and cast forth (OED, Cadaverate).
One of the more obvious signs that The Unfortunate Traveller occupies the
domain of abjection as defined by Kristeva, is its fascination with the production of
cadaverswhether by warfare, disease, murder, suicide, or execution. Another might be
the manner in which Nashe's text flouts narrative logic and temporal sequentiality in its
movement across sixteenth-century Europe, rather as though (to quote Kristeva once
more) it were traversing a terrain in which
consciousness has not assumed its rights and transformed into
signifiers those fluid demarcations of yet unstable territories
where an I that is taking shape is ceaselessly straying. We are
no longer within the sphere of the unconscious but at the limit of
primal repression that, nevertheless, has discovered an
intrinsically corporeal and already signifying brand, symptom,
and sign: repugnance, disgust, abjection. (Kristeva 11)

III
Let us turn to the question of genre, and backtrack to the genre of the picaresque
which would seem the obvious place to look, if one were as interested in tracing The
Unfortunate Traveller's Spanish connections as I have professed to be, for picaresque
fiction is a Spanish invention. The genre came into being with Lazarillo de Tormes
(1554), and was memorably developed by writers such as Mateo Alemn, author of
Guzmn de Alfarache, and Francesco de Quevedo, whose many works in verse and prose
include La vida del Buscn llamado Don Pablos.
As it happens, there are intriguing stylistic similarities between La vida del
Buscn and The Unfortunate Traveller. Here, for example, is Quevedo's description of
the miserly schoolmaster Cabra:
His eyes, close neighbours in his head, seemed to be peering out
through wicker baskets, and were so sunk and shady that they
would have been a good place for a market stall. His nose,
having been eaten by rheumy pimples, was midway in shape
between Roman and French syphiliticbut not on account of
vice, for that costs money. His beard was pale from terror of his
mouth, which out of pure hunger seemed to be threatening to
devour it; he was missing I know not how many teeth, having
banished them, I suppose, as idlers and vagabonds.... Seen from
below, he looked with his long spindly legs like a fork or a pair
of compasses. He walked with deliberation, since if he tried to
go faster his bones rattled like St. Lazarus' clappers.8
This is recognizably of the same kind as Nashe's arias of dispraisethe derisive
sketches of Jack Wilton's own get-up as a page and John of Leiden's battledress, for
example, or Jack's mocking portrait of the scholar whom the burgers and dunsticall
8 Quevedo, 116-17: ... los ojos avecindados en el cogote, que pareci que miraba par cuvanos, tan
hundidos y escuros, que era buen sitio el suyo para tiendas de mercaderes; la nariz, entre Roma y
Francia, porque se haba comido de unas bas de resfriado, que aun no fueron de vicio porque cuestan
dinero; las barbas descoloridas de miedo de la boca vecina, que, de pura hambre, pareca que
amenazaba a comrselas; los dientes, le faltaban no s cuntos, y pienso que por holgazanes y
vagamundos se los haban desterrado.... Mirado de medio abajo, pareca tenedor o comps, con dos
piernas largas y flacas. Su andar muy espacioso; si se descompona algo, le sonaban los gesos como
tablillas de San Lazaro. The translation offered here is based on that of Gerald Brenan (263).

incorporationers of Wittenberg picked out to present the Duke of Saxony with an

oration:
A bursten belly inkhorn orator called Vanderhulke, ... [he] had a
sulpherous big swolne large face, like a Saracen, eyes lyke two
kentish oysters, a mouth that opened as wide every time he
spake, as one of those old knit trap doores, a beard as though it
had ben made of a birds neast pluckt in peeces, which consisteth
of strawe, haire, and durt mixt together. He was apparelled in
blacke leather new licourd, & a short gowne without anie
gathering in the backe, faced before and behinde with a
boistrous beare skin, and a red night-cap on his head. (Nashe ii.
247-48)
In both texts there is a tendency for periodic rhythms to collapse into paratactical
sequences,9 and, at the other end of the stylistic register, a movement towards what one
might call an anticipation of the full-blown baroque by its fly-blown comic inversion. But
beyond the probability that Nashe was in some way acquainted with Spanish writings in a
picaresque mode, there can be no question here of a closer intertextuality: Quevedo's
Vida del Buscn was first published in 1620, and I would want long odds on a bet that he
had read Thomas Nashe. Similarities in style and genre can more profitably be ascribed to
a parallel experience of social superfluity on the part of a whole class of educated men
(an experience masked to some degree by Nashe's upscale placing of his traveller, but
massively evident throughout his oeuvre). One might note, as well, a parallel
ambivalence with respect to the relations between authorial subjectivity and the forms of
power (including the seedy authority of a decayed humanist tradition) by which that
subjectivity has been shaped, but subjection to which it refuses, at least in passages such
as these.
There is, however, one very clear difference between Nashe's text and picaresque
narratives like those of Quevedo: Jack Wilton is as much a Forrest Gump as he is a
picaro. Since he supposedly witnesses many of the key events of the early sixteenth
century and meets some of its major cultural figures, his narrative amounts to a strangely
distorted tour through the cultural tensions and historical terrors of the age. Here we
encounter one of the senses in which The Unfortunate Traveller can be said to belong
9 For an analysis of this tendency in Nashe, see Kaula.

more distinctly to the genre of the anatomy than to that of the picaresque. For in setting
out to anatomize abjection, Nashe is also committing himself to anatomizing, in however
disjointed a manner, what Shakespeare's Hamlet would soon be calling the very age and
body of the time (Hamlet III. ii. 23-24).
Does this mean we should take seriously Nashe's promise, in his dedication of this
phantasticall Treatise to the Earl of Southampton, of some reasonable conveyance of
history (ii. 201)? Clearly not, if chronological sequence bulks larger in our sense of
history than the representation of subjectivitiesalthough the manner in which historical
materials are incorporated into the text should in any case be of serious interest to us. But
is there not a striking contradiction between history, which however we understand it
must involve some notion of process and temporality, and the root sense of anatomy?
This term, derived from ana temnein, to cut up, is evidently incompatible, on the object
side at least, with the temporality of living beings. Jack Wilton must be made to
daunc[e] in a hempen circle before his moral self-anatomy, a farewell ballad called
Wiltons wantonnes (ii. 295), can make its point; or else he must be bled to death before
Dr. Zacharie can make his body an anatomie (ii. 305). If history were to be anatomized
in a like manner, this could only be done from a position (which some contemporary
American celebrants of the triumph of neoliberalism believe themselves to have reached)
at the end of history. Another name for the anatomizing of history would therefore be
apocalypsea discourse, literally, of unveiling, which reveals the structures, causality
and purposes of human time in a manner analogous to that in which the anatomists's
flaying of a human corpse exposes the hidden structures, organs and functioning of the
human body.
But although The Unfortunate Traveller does contain travestied elements of the
genre of apocalypse (most notably in connection with Esdras of Granada), history
presents itself to Jack Wilton as an unintelligible sequence of violent events, as one
damnable thing after anotheras the means, that is to say, by which abjection is
produced, in himself and in others.10 Unsearchable is the book of our destinies, says
Jack at the end of his outlandish chronicle, after witnessing Cutwolfe's torture and
execution. One murder begetteth another: was never yet bloud-shed barren from the
beginning of the world to this daie. Mortifiedly abjected and danted was I with this
10 This is an interest that Nashe shared with his friend Christopher Marlowe; see my essay Producing
Abjection: Subjectivity and Enslavement in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, forthcoming in Essays in Theatre.

truculent tragedie of Cutwolfe and Esdras (ii. 327).11

I have suggested that Nashe's anatomizing is disjointed: the word can remind
us, not just of the text's narrative and historical discontinuities, but also of the manner in
which power, whether rhetorical or material, criminal or legitimate, human or divine, so
repeatedly manifests itself in The Unfortunate Traveller in terms of the disarticulation,
liquefaction and disjointing of human bodiesfrom the act of verbal disassembly which
reduces Vanderhulke's face to oysters, trap-door and a broken bird's nest (ii. 247), to the
operations of the sweating sickness, which melts an old woman's three chins to water,
leaving her nothing of a mouth but an upper chap (ii. 229), to those of the executioner
whom Jack Wilton describes with such horrible flippancy as drum[ming] on ...
Cutwolfes bones and lingeringly splinter[ing] in shivers all his limbs (ii. 327). There
is, I think, a connection between the text's structural disjointings and its thematizing of
disjointment.
In calling The Unfortunate Traveller an anatomy I do not mean to attribute to it
anything resembling an underlying consistency of intention. For anatomy, or Menippean
satire, is as much an anti-genre as a genre. As Hutson writes, it was characterized from
ancient times by its lack of generic integrity. ... It was a medley, an 'admixture of genres
and their reciprocals' in which critical awareness of one mode of expression was
encouraged by its incongruous juxtaposition with another (Hutson 125, quoting Babcock
100). This genre, or anti-genre, is distinguished by contradictory impulses: towards, on
the one hand, a totalizing desire for disclosure or unveiling, a revelation of structure and a
correction of its defects; and, on the other, towards a stance of Democritean mockery,
based on a conviction that the totality which is emerging into view is incorrigibly marked
by folly and wrong-doing, and that laughter is a more fitting response to this situation
than tears. We had need, Robert Burton writes in his Anatomy of Melancholy,
of some general visitor in our age, that should reform what is
amiss; a just army of Rosy-Cross men, for they will amend all
matters, (they say) religion, policy, manners, with arts, sciences,
&c.; another Attila, Tamerlane, Hercules, to strive with
11 Next to deception, truculence is the most frequently encountered expression of agency in the bookand
it is not just the enabling opposite of abjection, but also the most common means of its production. The
presence of tragedie in the same phrase appears to be a happy alliteration rather than a serious generic
cue: for the different forms of suffering that are the primary focus of this narrative result in abjection
rather than in ennoblement or a clarified understanding; a cathartic effect is therefore as much out of the
question for the reader as it is for the abjected and da[u]nted narrator.

Achelous, Augeae stabulum purgare, to subdue tyrants, as he did

Diomedes and Busiris: to expel thieves, as he did Cacus &
Lacinius: to vindicate poor captives, as he did Hesione: to pass
the Torid Zone, the deserts of Libya, and purge the world of
monsters and Centaurs. (Burton i. 107-08)
But these, he decides, are vain, absurd, and ridiculous wishes not to be hoped.
Because therefore it is a thing so difficult, impossible, and far
beyond Hercules' labours to be performed; ... let them be
barbarous as they are, let them tyrannize, epicurize, oppress,
luxuriate, consume themselves with factions, superstitions, lawsuits, wars and contentions, live in riot, poverty, want, misery;
rebel, wallow as so many swine in their own dung. (Burton i.
109)
Burton thus finds himself suspended between a desire to make an Utopia of my own, a
new Atlantis, a poetical Commonwealth of mine own, in which I will freely domineer (i.
109), and the thought that if one had
some rare perspective glass ... which would so multiply species,
that a man might hear and see all at once (as Martianus
Capella's Jupiter did in a spear which he held in his hand, which
did present unto him all that was daily done upon the face of the
earth), observe cuckolds' horns, forgeries of alchemists, the
philosopher's stone, new projectors, &c., and all those works of
darkness, foolish vows, hopes, fears, and wishes, what a deal of
laughter it would have afforded! (i. 74)12
The commonplace of the labours of Hercules with which Burton amuses himself
12 For the sake of clarity, it should be remarked that two distinct senses of anatomy are combined in
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. The long address of Democritus Junior to the Reader, from which I
have quoted, is Menippean satire, or anatomy in its topical sense. At the conclusion of this address
Burton exclaims (in the manner of a Menippean trickster): I have overshot myself, I have spoken
foolishly, rashly, unadvisedly, absurdly, I have anatomized mine own folly, and promises a more sober
discourse in my following treatise (i. 140). What follows, with its partitions, sections, members, and
subsections, is anatome in the sense used by Aristotle to speak of logical dissection or analysis.
Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism is an anatome in this latter senseeven though in its glossary
Frye defines anatomy as a form of prose fiction, traditionally known as the Menippean or Varronian
satire and represented by Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, characterized by a great variety of subjectmatter and a strong interest in ideas (Frye 365), and even though Frye's book is enlivened by flashes of
Democritean laughter. A work like Henricus Cornelius Agrippa's De vanitate straddles these two senses
of anatomy: it is encyclopedic, but unsystematic; it is a declamatio invectiva rather than a fiction, and
yet it establishes a strong and quirky authorial voice.

is explored at much greater length by an earlier Renaissance anatomist, Henricus

Cornelius Agrippa, whose declamation Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of all Artes and
Sciences (1530, English translation 1569) was, with Erasmus' Praise of Folly, one of the
most widely read essays in this genre, as well as one of Thomas Nashe's most frequently
pillaged sources (see Nashe v. 115, 118-26). In his prefatory address to the reader,
Agrippa imagines himself, in a manner almoste comparable to the attempts of
Hercules, ... tak[ing] up weapons against all that Giaunt force of Sciences and Artes
but then, in a breathless catalogue that continues for four pages, having to face the
violence of their responses:
The obstinate Logitioners, will caste againste me infinite dartes
of Sillogismes.... The wandringe Cosmographers will bannishe
me beyond Moscuvie and the frosen Sea.... The Fatal
Astrologers, wil threaten me to be hanged, and with the unstable
turninge of the Heavens will forbidde me Paradise.... The
monstrous Magitiens, wil transforme me, as it were another
Apulei[us] or Lucian, into an Asse, yet not of Golde, but
perchance of dyrte.... The Hooded Maskers, and spiteful
Hipocrites, will rayle against me out of the Pulpit.... The
perbrake Phisitians, will embrue me with Urine and Ordure....
The filthy Apothecaries, will sucke me drie with their Clisters.
The geldinge Chirurgians, will lie in wayte for my teethe and
stones. (Agrippa 6-9)
Like Nashe's Jack Wilton, Agrippa wants the reader to be aware of the risks he is
courting.
Lorna Hutson remarks that Nashe's familiarity with this genre would have gone
back to his days in school, where he and his contemporaries read Lucianic dialogues and
colloquies of Erasmus (Hutson 139). This may serve as a reminder that among the
discourses absorbed into The Unfortunate Traveller are elements of two of the most
famous of Erasmus' Adages: Dulce bellum inexpertis, a declamation against the barbarity
and degradation of war, and Spartam nactus es, hanc orna, which includes a passage that
might have served as the basis for one of the longest set speeches in Nashe's text, the
English earl's discourse on the evils of travel:
Is there so little business to do at home, that it must be sought

abroad? Everywhere there is the filthy sludge of crime, so many

acts of sacrilege, or robbery and violence, so much injury done
and affronts given, so much bribery of officials, so many laws
either formulated by tyrants or twisted to serve tyranny.
(Phillips 308)

IV
In what different forms does abjection appear in The Unfortunate Traveller? The
first two of Jack Wilton's pranks in the army of Henry VIII involve an interplay of
transgression and abjection in which Jack punishes transgressions of social class
boundaries. The victims of his trickery are a Lord of misrule (ii. 210), an aristocrat who
has debased himself by descending to the role of supplier of cider and sausages to the
English army, and an ugly mechanical Captain (ii. 217) whose officer's rank Jack
resents as being above his station. Persuaded by Jack that he has been denounced to the
king as a traitor, the aristocrat seeks to prove his loyalty by giving away his supplies to
the soldiers and the rest of his property to the king, before whom he grovels. The captain
is lured by Jack's sophistic rhetoric into a quite different course of action. He is beguiled
into thinking that the way to further advancement lies in pretending to desert to the
French, and once there assassinating the French king; the plan of course backfires,
resulting in scenes of abjection and torture, and Jack has the satisfaction of knowing that
his gull has rayl[ed] egregiously against the King of England (ii. 222-23) and confessed
to attempted regicide.
The sweating sickness, and the scenes of warfare to which Jack escapes from it,
present a more Kristevan form of abjection, one that has more to do with threats to the
boundaries of the self than with social boundaries. The disease, which Jack mockingly
claims was first engendered among the hayry excrements of old men's beards (ii. 230),
threatens to dissolve the bodies of its victims, while on the battlefield of Marignano the
half living are mixt with squeazed carcases long putrifide (ii. 231). At Mnster the
abjection of battlefield slaughter is a consequence of presumption at once social and
theological, and a reward for the Anabaptists' howling expostulations with God and the
violence of [their] long babling praiers (ii. 234).

In Wittenberg Jack witnesses a different interplay of abjection and aggression: the

Duke of Saxony is croucht unto extreamely by the scholars of the university, who
nonetheless express their extraordinarie good will towards him by having him stand in
the rain listening to the university orator until he is through wetafter which, through
the efforts of a miserable rablement of junior graduats, the Duke has [s]ome three
halfe penyworth of Latine ... throwen at his face like ragges gathered up from the
dunghill (ii. 246-47).
Something rather different is involved in the episodes featuring the Earl of Surrey.
One might perhaps call it the erotics of courtly abjection, as figured in the idiotically
excessive significations of the allegorical armour that he and his competitors wear for the
tournament in Florenceincluding Surrey's water-pot helmet,
Whereby he did import thus much, that the teares that issued
from his braines, as those artificiall distillations issued from the
well counterfeit water-pot on his head, watered and gave lyfe as
to his mistres disdaine (resembled to nettles and weeds) as
increase of glorie to her care-causing beauty (comprehended
under the lilies and roses). (ii. 271-72)
But if abjection is displaced in this scene into a particularly silly form of play,
another less amusing displacement of abjection becomes evident in the latter part of the
book. Jack speaks of his purgatorie as beginning (ii. 295) when he is accused by
Heraclide's revived husband of the rape which Jack has witnessed. He reaches a lower
level of abjection, however, when in searching for his concubine (from whom he was
separated by her abduction and his arrest), he passes over the unbarred cellar door of a
Jewes house caled Zadoch, and
over head and eares I fell into it, as a man falls in a shippe from
the oreloope into the hold, or as in an earth-quake the ground
should open, and a blind man come feeling pad pad over the
open Gulph with his staffe, should tumble on a sodaine into hell.
(ii. 303)
This kind of fall may be a recurring trope in anti-semitic narratives for the entry into the
society of Jews: in Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the protagonist steps
backward into an open cellar trapdoorand into a passionate affair with the Jewish
woman of the Andalusian face in whose shop the accident occurs (von Rezzori 106-

09). But Jack Wilton falls into enslavement and terror.

Shall we turn now to what I have called the Spanish connections of The
Unfortunate Traveller? The following remarks are prompted, in the first place, by a
name: that of the book's arch-villain, the rapist Esdras of Granada, who I would propose
is connected to what I have called a primal repression or crime.
This name possesses a quite definite, if also paradoxical, historical specificity. The
man is from Granado13 or Granada, a city which in 1492 was surrendered by Boabdil,
its last Nasrid king, to the Reyes Catlicos of Aragon and Castille, Ferdinand and
Isabella. Does this make our rapist a Spaniard? Perhaps, since by the teens or twenties of
the sixteenth centurythe period in which, for the most part, Nashe's fiction appears to
be setanyone identified as a Granadino might well be a son of Castilians who had
moved south with the reconquista. And that is what Jack Wilton calls him: a Spaniard, ...
a notable Bandetto, authorised by the pope because he had assisted him in some
murthers (ii. 287). But with a name like Esdras, he must more distinctly be a Jew.
The most celebrated bearer of the name, the prophet Ezra (or Esdras, as he is
called in the Vulgate bible), was a key figure in the constitution of a Judaean theocracy in
the period following the Babylonian captivity. The apocryphal Ezra Apocalypse (also
known as IV Esdrasor, in Protestant editions of the Apocrypha, as 2 Esdras)14 credits
him with having, under divine inspiration, restored the text of the Torah, thus making him
a second Moses (see 2 Esdras 14)15 This name recurs, much later, in connection with the
city of Granadaand in conjunction again with the name Moses (though the temporal
sequence of the two is now reversed). One of the three great Hebrew poets of medieval
Spain, along with Solomon ibn Gabirol and Judah Halevi, was Moses ibn Ezra of
Granada, a number of whose penitential prayers and hymns of deepest religious feeling
and melancholy beauty have found a permanent place in the liturgy of the synagogue
(Epstein 193).
13 This is the form in which the name appears in the two editions of 1594. I have assumed that Granado
must be an error for Granada.
14 In the Vulgate bible, I and II Esdras (known in Protestant bibles as the books of Ezra and Nehemiah) are
followed by two books defined by Protestants as apocryphal: III Esdras (known in Protestant
translations of the Apocrypha as Esdras or as 1 Esdras), and IV Esdras (known to Protestants as the
Ezra Apocalypse or as 2 Esdras).
15 According to the legend of 2 Esdras, the text of the Torah had been burned (2 Esdras 14:21); what we
now possess is therefore not the Mosaic text, but its inspired and therefore identical Ezraic restoration.
This sounds like a mythical way of stating what was no doubt the case: namely, that the text of the
Torah was stabilized in something close to its present form in the early sixth century B.C.E., shortly
after the end of the Babylonian captivity.

Oddly enough, this Moses ibn Ezra of Granada was himself an unfortunate
traveller, who in a number of his poems expresses his weariness at roaming about the
world, measuring its expanse (Diwan no. 175, l. 13; Baer i. 61). Forced in 1195 to flee
from Granada, which had fallen five years previously to the intolerant and puritanical
Almoravids, Moses ibn Ezra spent the last four decades of his life wandering among the
barbarians of Christian Castillea land which appears to share some of the features of
Jack Wilton's Italy:
Fortune has hurled me to a land where the lights of my
understanding dimmed
And the stars of my reason were beclouded with the murk of
faltering knowledge and stammering speech.
I have come to the iniquitous domain of a people scorned by
God and accursed by man,
Amongst savages who love corruption and set an ambush
for the blood of the righteous and innocent.
(Diwan no. 20, ll. 31-34; Baer i. 63)
The odds that Thomas Nashe had ever heard of this poet may seem slender. In his
preface to Greene's Menaphon, however, he sang the praises of his own Cambridge
college of St. John's, which before succumbing in our idle age to the doting practise of
our Divinitie dunces, had been a famous and fortunate Nurse of scholarship (iii. 31718). It had been, in effect, one of the places where the humanist project of a revival of
learning, involving at the highest level a study of Hebrew as well as of Latin and Greek,
had taken root. Thus, although Nashe's own learning is largely second- or third-hand, it is
not impossible that he could have known men, even in the Cambridge whose
contemporary decline he laments, whose acquaintance with Hebrew liturgy could have
given them some awareness of Moses of the family of Ezra (or, in Latinized form,
Esdras) of Granada. Nashe may then be playing an idly allusive trick in bestowing the
family name of a devotional Hebrew poet upon the most pathological of all his villains.
While any connection between the poet of Granada and the rapist must remain
mere speculation, one can propose with some confidence that Nashe made deliberate use
of Esdras the prophet in his narrative of Esdras the rapist and murdererfor there are
resonances between the apocalyptic prophecies of Esdras and the rape of Heraclide by
Esdras of Granada that can hardly be coincidental. God declares through the prophet

Esdras that
I will send plagues upon thee; widowhood, poverty, famine,
sword, and pestilence, to waste thy houses with destruction and
death....
Thou shalt be weakened as a poor woman with stripes, and
as one chastised with wounds, so that the mighty and lovers
shall not be able to receive thee....
The reward of thy whoredom shall be in thy bosom,
therefore shalt thou receive recompence. (2 Esdras 15: 49, 51,
55)
Heraclide, who has buried fourteene children in five daies (ii. 292), is assaulted in her
plague-stricken house over the corpse (so it appears) of her husband. Shaking her by the
throat as a mastiffe would shake a yong beare, Esdras the bandit drags her back and
forth across the room by her hair, and then rapes her, leaving her to fear that her
husband's pure deceased spirit will despise her for being tyrannously polluted (ii.
291-93). Believing herself to be damned (if predestinations opinions be true) that am
predestinate to this horrible abuse, Heraclide determines that no recompence is there
for me to redeeme my compelled offence, but with a rigorous compelled death (ii. 293).
In a penitential repetition of her violation, she commits suicide, making her sin-sowed
flesh the sheath for a dagger (ii. 293-95).
As Lorna Hutson has observed, this Esdras is associated with divine power,
arriving as he does in the plague, 'during this time of visitation' (ii. 287), but he is also a
legal figure 'authorized by the pope' (ii. 287) (Hutson 239). No recourse to law can touch
him, since as he tells Heraclide, the pope has countenanced and borne out his many
execrable murthers (ii. 288). Esdras seems equally immune both to the plague and to the
law of probability: he claims to have broken into eight score of plague-infested houses
without succumbing to the disease himself (ii. 288), and to have won more than a
hundred times in a Spanish dice game, the loser of which is sent off to the galleys as a
slave (ii. 290-91). Moreover, Hutson remarks, his victim's appeal to the higher authority
of divine justice ends farcically, with the menacing frown and overhanging sword of
divine retribution which Heraclide desperately invokes (ii. 289) travestied in the
unmoved figure of Esdras on his 'chaire of state' ... 'leaning his over-hanging gloomie eybrowes on the pommel of his unsheathed sword' (ii. 290) (Hutson 240).

Perhaps the words of Esdras the prophet can be used to explicate this scene:
Gird yourselves up with cloths of sack and hair, bewail your
children, and be sorry; for your destruction is at hand.
A sword is sent upon you, and who may turn it back? ...
Plagues are sent unto you, and what is he that may drive
them away? ...
The mighty Lord sendeth the plagues, and who is he that
can drive them away? ...
Even so in those days there shall be three or four left by
them that search their houses with the sword. (2 Esdras 16:2-3,
5, 8, 31)
Or should we not say, rather, that Nashe is writing a perverse midrash upon these
concluding chapters of 2 Esdrasand doing so in what must seem a full awareness of the
violent inversion that ensues when a rapist, bearing the same name as the deuteronomic
restorer of the Law, acts out the apocryphal Esdras's violent prophecies in the displaced
form of criminality?
But Heraclide's tormenter is not the only Jew among the villains of what Jack
Wilton calls the Sodom of Italy (ii. 327). In addition to Esdras the Rapist, we have the
Venetian courtesan Tabitha the Temptress (whose name is the only marker of her
ethnicity),16 as well as Zadoch the Whipper and his friend Dr. Zacharie, the Pope's
physician, whose intention it is to anatomize Jack in the most literal sense. Zacharie is so
single-mindedly devoted to this end that he refuses to sell Jack to the Pope's courtesan
(who has other equally instrumental plans for Jack's anatomy). This obstinacy leads,
through her manipulations, to the Pope's edict of banishmenta commandment that, as
Jack blithely puts it, all fore-skinne clippers, whether male or female, belonging to the
old Jurie [i.e. Jewrie], should depart and avoid upon pain of hanging, within twentie daies
after the date thereof (ii. 307). As a result, al the Albumazers, Rabisacks, Gedions,
Tebiths, Benhadads, Benrodans, Zedechiaes, Halies of them were banquerouts and turned
out of house and home (ii. 310).
It is important to be clear about the territory that Nashe's text is entering in this
sequence. A Christian youth is held captive by a Jew, who intends to bleed him to death
16 Tabitha is Aramaic for gazelle; a woman of this name is raised from the dead by St. Peter in Acts 9:
36-43. Nashe's sense of the Jewishness of this name is made explicit by its recurrence, in variant form
(Tebith), among the names of Jews expelled from Rome (ii. 310).

and then cut him up like a French summer dublet (ii. 305). 17 Although the motivation is
medical rather than religious, we are very close here to the blood libel: the legend of the
Christian child who (like St. Hugh of Lincoln) is abducted by Jews and butchered in
kosher fashion, and whose purported murder sparks off pogroms against the Jewish
population.
In this case, although there is no direct link between Jack's near-murder and the
expulsion of the Jews, the former effectively justifies the latter. A pitiless contempt for
the expelled Jewish population is promptly reinforced by what we are told of Zadoch.
This diamond Delphinicall drie leachour, who has digested his meate by subjecting
Diamante, Jack's courtesan, to a daily ritual of stripping and whipping (ii. 309-10), now
plots a hyperbolical revenge upon the whole city of Rome. In a rage that is likened to the
furie of Lucifer when he was turnde over heaven barre for a wrangler, he vows to poison
the springs & conduit heades from which the city draws its water; to entice as many
Christian children into his house as he can, and cutting their throates, barrell them up in
poudring beefe tubbes, and so send them to victuall the Popes gallies; and to have
scorpions oyle kneaded into the dough used in making hosts, so that in the zeale of
their superstitious religion the Christians will languish and droup like carrion (ii. 31011). To the blood libel is added well-poisoning and murderous blasphemy, a poisoning of
spiritual nourishment as well. Nashe is offering us something close to the full gamut of
anti-semitic incitements to violence (see Glassman, Hsia, and Trachtenberg).
But what of Esdras of Granado? If his place of origin reminds us of the conquest
of Granada in 1492 (which Federico Garca Lorca described as a disastrous event,
resulting in the loss of an admirable civilization, and a poetry, architecture and
sensitivity unique in the world [Gibson 439]), 18 the man's name and Spanish origin also
evoke memories of one of the other great catastrophes of the same yearnot Columbus's
17 The intention to bleed Jack to death is implicit both in Zacharie's administering to him plumporredge
of purgations ... one after another to clarifie my blood, that it should not lye cloddered in the flesh (ii.
305-06), and also in Jack's frightened (but nonetheless whimsical) meditation on what a kind of death
it might be, to bee let blood till a man die (ii. 308).
18 These words are from an interview Lorca gave to the liberal Madrid newspaper El Sol on June 10, 1936.
He was deliberately contradicting the dominant interpretation of Spanish history, according to which the
conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews made possible the establishment of a colonial empire
and the military and cultural triumphs of Spain's Golden Age. Lorca's declaration in this interview
that the conquest of Granada had produced an impoverished, cowed city, a 'miser's paradise' where the
worst middle class in Spain today is busy stirring things up (Gibson 439), was retrospectively verified
by the events of the succeeding months. Although there was no organized resistance in Granada to the
fascist seizure of power, more than 25,000 people (Lorca among them) were murdered during the
ensuing terrora level of repression unmatched elsewhere in Spain.

discovery of the New World, but the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and the
destruction of that culture of which the poet Moses son of Esdras of Granada had been
one of the finest representatives.19 No less than the Albumazers of Rome, the name of
Nashe's arch-villain evokes the Islamic-Jewish culture of Al-Andalus that was finally
shattered in 1492.
But Albumazar, as it happens, is not a Jewish name: this is the celebrated ninthcentury astrologer and astronomer of Baghdad, whose reputation as prophet of historical
and religious transformations ... made him, as Frederick de Armas writes, into the
epitome of the astrologer (de Armas 158). (It is in this light that Nashe refers to
Albumazar in Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem, attacking him for having provided a
naturalistic explanation of Moses' crossing of the Red Sea [Nashe ii. 116].)
Since Nashe doesn't bother to distinguish Jews from Arabs in his fictional account
of the expulsion of the Jews from Rome, should one then perhaps remember that Moors
as well as Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492? As a matter of fact, the forced exodus
of the Moorish population from what had been the kingdom of Granada was completed
during Nashe's own lifetime, after the crushing of the desperate Moorish revolt of the
Alpujarras in the late 1560s.
I am suggesting two things here. The first is that the names Albumazar and Esdras
evoke a level of metahistorical reflection that is of direct relevance to the disjointed
history of Nashe's narrative. Among the several works of Albumazar that were widely
available in Latin translation in the sixteenth century, the most influential was De magnis
coniunctionibus, which as de Armas writes incorporates past and future in a theology of
history (de Armas 157). In direct contrast to this astrological system of historical
explanation and prediction through the study of planetary conjunctions are the anxieties
expressed within the Ezra Apocalypse as to the power of humans to make sense of what
Jack Wilton calls the book of our destinies. It were better that we were not at all,
Esdras cries out, than that we should still live in wickedness, and to suffer, and not to
know wherefore (2 Esdras 4:12). When the angel Uriel tells him that corrupt human
minds cannot be expected to comprehend heavenly matters, he declares in response that
it was not my mind to be curious of the high things, but of such as pass by us daily,
namely, wherefore ... we pass away out of the world as grasshoppers, and our life is
19 Important accounts of this catastrophe include those of Baer, Gerber, Kedourie, Neuman, Paris, and
Roth.

astonishment and fear, and we are not worthy to obtain mercy (2 Esdras 4:23-24).
My second suggestion is that Nashe's text can be understood as containing
displaced allusions to historical crimes of banishment and expulsion, of at least one of
which we can say, in Machado's words, el crimen fue en Granadabut that Nashe has
carried out what I will call a reinscription of abjection, 20 in which the victims of
aggression are reconfigured as the aggressors, abjection is transformed into the truculence
by means of which the actual historical abjection was produced, and the victimized Jews
and Moors expelled from Spain are reinscribed as the Esdras of Granada and the Zadoch
and Zacharie of Rome whose murderous behaviour legitimizes the expulsion of their
people from Rome. This inversion, this reinscription of abjection, is to my mind one of
the most disturbing features of The Unfortunate Traveller. And if its primary occurrence
is on the level of race or ethnicity, something very similar is repeated on the level of
gender, where the grotesquely sadistic victimization of Heraclide is inverted in the
predatory aggressions of the courtesan Juliana. In the Heraclide episode, Jack is himself a
victim: his wrongful condemnation and narrowly averted execution testify to the
irrationality of justice. But he is also voyeuristically complicit in the economy of
masculine violence and symbolic exchange responsible for the crime which he narrates,
and is therefore aligned with the order of demonic transgression which the order of
justice seeks to revenge itself upon. In the Juliana episode, Jack is again imprisoned and
again faces death, this time in a sexualized version of what Zacharie planned for him.
Like the Jewish doctor, Juliana intends to drain him of his bodily fluids, though through
sexual intercourse rather than bleeding. Silently complicit in the rape of Heraclide, Jack
becomes unambiguously a victim of rape in the Juliana sequence.

V
The preceding paragraphs have sought to identify some of the more distinctive
figurations of abjection in The Unfortunate Traveller. I would like now to suggest that
Nashe's play with abjection can be related to more recent events, which include the
murder of a poet. In this case, el crimen fue en Londresor, more precisely, in nearby
20 I borrow the notion from Jonathan Dollimore's concept of the reinscription of transgression
(Dollimore 33-35, 279-325). The most useful exposition of the closely related concept of displaced
abjection is in Stallybrass and White 19, 53-56.

Deptford.
The Unfortunate Traveller was entered in the Stationers' Register on September
27th, 1593, and first printed in 1594; however, the text of the first edition concludes with
a date, June 27, 1393, which is presumably that of its completion. The text was therefore
written, or at least completed, very shortly after the violent deaths of two men with whose
careers Nashe's had been closely intertwined.21
John Penry, the Welsh evangelical who had a large part in the production of the
Marprelate tracts (and to whom Nashe might therefore be said to be indebted for the
flexible, seemingly spontaneous rhetoric that he made his trade mark), was hanged on
May 29th; in An Almond for a Parrrot (1590) Nashe had denounced Penry in these terms:
Predestination, that foresaw how crooked he should prove in his
waies, enjoyned incest to spawne him splay-footed. Eternitie,
that knew how aukward he shoulde looke to all honesty,
consulted with Conception to make him squint-eied, & the
devill, that discovered by the heavens disposition on his birthday, how great a lim of his kingdom was comming into the
world, provided a rustie superficies [a reference to Penry's red
hair] wherin to wrap him as soone as ever he was separated from
his mothers wombe.... (iii. 366)
Perhaps, as G.R. Hibbard suggests, the sheer nastiness of this passage is
palliated in some measure by the fantastic ingenuity of invention, by the perverted
poetry of Nashe's imagination (Hibbard 43). But let us listen, by way of contrast, to
Penry himself. I quote from the drafts of his appeals to Lord Burghley, written in the
spring of 1593, in which one can hear a half-strangled outcry against tyranny:
Wear it not my Lord for the hope of a better lyf, yt wear
better for us to bee Queen Elizabethes beastes then hir
subjectes.... For weer wee hir beastes going under hir mark the
proudest prelate in the land durst not attempt to tak us into ther
own handes....
Shall I not have justic? Will it hurt England to grant me
justic? ... I ame an innocent, it profiteth mee not....
21 My comments on the deaths of Penry and Marlowe include reworked material from several paragraphs
of the introduction to my edition of Doctor Faustus (see Marlowe 1991: xxvi-xxxi).

Are wee a free people under our naturall princ, or are we

held for slaves and bond-servantes under some cruell and unjust
tyrant[?] (Penry 59, 60-61, 68)
One may well wonder how Nashe would have responded to Penry's agonized and
yet stubborn pleas. In the same terms, quite possibly, in which he had taunted the fugitive
Penry three years previously in An Almond for a Parrot: Pen., J. Pen., welch Pen., Pen
the protestationer, demonstrationer, supplicationer, appellationerthe reference is to
texts of the late 1580s in which Penry had pleaded for a reform of church corruption, and
for religious tolerancePen., the father, Pen., the son, Pen Martin Junior, Martin
Martinus, Pen. the scholar of Oxford to his friend in Cambridge, Pen. totum in toto (iii.
347).
But the other death was one that must have touched Nashe differently. On May
30th, 1593, the day after Penry's execution, Christopher Marlowe died in Deptford, on the
outskirts of London, from a dagger-thrust to the eye. The fact that his ribald blasphemies
had come to the ear of the Privy Council, and the fact that his three companions on the
day of his death were all employed by or closely linked to the Elizabethan secret service,
have raised suspicions that Marlowe's death was also an act of statean execution. The
most sinister of these three companions was Robert Poley, a confidential messenger,
informer, and double agent who has been described as the very genius of the Elizabethan
underworld, a man whose like exudes an evil odour of fraud, crime, and double
dealing (Urry 68); his major accomplishment to date had been the entrapment and
betrayal of the Babington conspirators in 1586 (see Bakeless i. 171-80). Poley had left the
royal court at Croydon with letters for the Hague on May 8th, 1593; he reported back to
the royal palace of Nonesuch, near London, on June 8thand four days later received a
warrant of payment, signed by the Queen's Vicechamberlain, which very conveniently
specified that he had been in her majesties service all the aforesaid tyme (Boas 267).
Marlowe is a recurrent presence in The Unfortunate Traveller. Nashe quotes two
lines from his translation of Ovid's Amores (see Nashe ii. 238); and the most celebrated
conceit of Faustus's speech to Helen of TroySweet Helen, make me immortal with a
kiss; / Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies! (V i. 93-94)is weakly echoed by
Nashe's Earl of Surrey: If I must die, O, let me choose my death: / Suck out my soule
with kisses, cruell maide (Nashe ii. 262). In a similar manner, the language of Faustus's
despair resonates through Esdras of Granada's desperate and cowardly apostasy (ii. 322-

26).
Nashe and Kit Marlowe (to whose diviner muse Nashe pays tribute in a
burlesque re-telling of Hero and Leander in his Lenten Stuff [1599]) would seem to have
collaborated on at least one play: their names appear together on the title page of The
Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage (first printed in 1594), and it has been suggested
that Nashe may have been responsible for some of the comic action in Doctor Faustus
(see Marlowe 1990: xviii-xxi). But they were also collaborators in a different senseas
fellow-employees of the Elizabethan state and church in their war against subversion.
In June, 1587, the Privy Council (no less) intervened on Marlowe's behalf to
quash rumours that he was determined to have gone beyond seas to [the Catholic
seminary at] Reames, and to ensure that Cambridge granted him his M.A. degreefor
it was not her majestie's pleasure than anie one emploied as he had been in matters
touching the benefitt of his Countrie should be defamed by those that are ignorant in
th'affaires he went about (Bakeless i. 77). The rumours of intended defection would
suggest that Marlowe had been assigned the task of infiltrating recusant groups and
spying on them. Thus, while yet a student, he had been inducted, in the service of his
monarch and the defence of true religion, into a murky world of deceit, betrayal, and roleplaying, where the pretence of converting to the enemy's beliefs may have taught him
how easily interchangeable they were with the ones he was being paid to defend. The
name of Lightborne in Marlowe's Edward II, and his dissembling expressions of concern
(reminiscent, perhaps, of the handling of the Babington conspirators by Marlowe's
acquaintance Robert Poley), might be taken to suggest that the poet recognized the
similarly demonic character of those contemporary servants of the state whose double
role it was to incite subversion and to stand as its accuser. But the experience of acting in
a demonic role is scarcely conducive to faith in the benevolence of that sovereign will
(whether earthly or divine) whose agent one has been.
That wilfull striving against knowne truth of which Robert Greene (and
subsequently others) accused Marlowe was thus arguably conditioned by what he had
witnessed as an agent of the state in its war against political and religious subversion. In
this light it may seem significant that the key terms of Greene's chargepestilent
Machivilian pollicy and Diabolicall Atheisme (Maclure 30)were turned in a very
different direction by one Richard Chomley, who knew Marlowe and had himself been
imployed by some of her Majesties prevy Counsaile for the apprehension of Papistes,

and other daungerous men: Chomley reportedly spoke all evill of the Counsell; saying
that they are all Athiestes and Machiavillians (Boas 253-54).
A similar judgment may be implicit in John Penry's account of the manner in
which he was treated in 1587 by Archbishop Whitgift in the Court of High Commission.
Penry was threatned very bloodily, and reviled upon in a most unchristian sorte,
although he had broken no law, and indeed not even been indicted. But ere you depart
the court, Whitgift told him, we will finde sufficient matter to imprison you (Penry
xii-xiii).
Close encounters with the repressive apparatus of the Elizabethan state and
church, whether on the part of people like Penry who found themselves from the
beginning cast in an oppositional role, or on the part of those like Marlowe and Chomley
whose initial experiences were as agents of repressionappear to have produced
surprisingly similar responses. It seems significant that Marlowe, the agent whom the
Privy Council had helped to his M.A. degree, was subsequently accused of declaring that
he had as good a right to coin as did the Queen of England, and of disseminating the
view that St. Paul ... was a timerous fellow in bidding men to be subject to magistrates
against his Conscience (Maclure 37)and, more spectacularly, that in March 1593 a
warrant was issued for the arrest of Richard Chomley on the grounds that as the leader of
a band of sixty resolute murdering myndes he was plotting treason against the queen
(Boas 255).
I am suggesting, then, that the struggles of Christopher Marlowe, Richard
Chomley, and John Penry within and against a tyrannical and murderous structure of
authority provide an appropriate context in which to interpret The Unfortunate Traveller's
unstable combination of transgression and abjection. In concluding this essay, I would
like briefly to identify aspects of the text which simultaneously legitimize this choice of
context and are illuminated by it.
Consider, first, Nashe's dedication of the first edition of The Unfortunate
Traveller to the Earl of Southamptona dedication which manages, quite in the manner
of Vanderhulke, to be at once fulsome and insulting. As Louise Simons has remarked,
though it is [e]xtravagantly full of cringing praise, the dedication yet seems designed to
give offense (Simons 19). Ingenuous honorable Lord, Nashe begins, I know not what
blinde custome methodicall antiquity hath thrust upon us, to dedicate such books as we
publish to one great man or other. Blinde, methodicall, thrust, and one great man

or other: this is scarcely flattering. In what follows, one can almost hear a nervous
giggle behind Nashe's hyperboles: Incomprehensible is the heigth of your spirit both in
heroical resolution and matters of conceit. Unreprieveably perisheth that booke
whatsoever to wast paper, which on the diamond rocke of your judgement disasterly
chanceth to be shipwrecked (ii. 201). It would seem that Southampton was not deaf to
the mocking tones of this dedicationwhich does not appear in the second edition of
1594.
It is perhaps symptomatic that the writers whom Jack Wilton encounters in the
course of his travels include, most prominently, the Earl of Surrey, who was executed on
a charge of treason; Erasmus and More, who are described as pursuing their
discontented studies (ii. 246); Cornelius Agrippa, the great challenger of academic,
courtly, and religious authority;22 and finally, Pietro Aretino, of whom Jack says:
He was no timerous servile flatterer of the commonwealth
wherein he lived. His tongue & his invention were foreborne;
what they thought, they would confidently utter. Princes he
spard not, that in the least point transgrest. His life he
contemned in comparison of the libertie of speech. (ii. 265)23
Nashe does not dare himself to stand up in open condemnation of authority, but that part
of him which lauds Agrippa and Aretino might be said to be conducting a kind of guerilla
campaign within the text against the structures of authority which at the same time he has
internalized and fears.
It is in such terms as these that I would interpret that unstable combination of
transgressive impulses and abjection (direct and displaced, as well as what I have called
reinscribed abjection) which is evident throughout Nashe's text, and which animates its
scenes of voyeuristic sexual aggression and violent retribution, its rebellious insolence
and submission, those features which together make up what the text itself calls
impotent speech.
I am referring, of course, to the orificiall rethorike of Vanderhulke, the burstenbelly inkhorne orator who welcomes the Duke of Saxony to Wittenberg with a speech in
22 For a summary account of Agrippa, see my entry on him in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
forthcoming.
23 I do not share Nicholl's opinion that Nashe's comments on Aretino may be masked allusions to Marlowe
(Nashe was familiar with a number of Aretino's satiricl and devotional writings, and admired them), or
his speculation that the Heraclide episode contains fragmentary images of Marlowe's sudden end
(Nicholl 164).

which the grotesque excess, self-abasement, and teasing insult that also typify Jack
Wilton's encounters with authority are conspicuously present.
welcome, sayd I? O orificiall rethorike, wipe thy everlasting
mouth, and afoord me a more Indian metaphor than that, for the
brave princely bloud of a Saxon. Oratory, uncaske the bard
hutch of thy complements, and with the triumphantest trope in
thy treasure do trewage unto him. (Nashe ii. 248)
The triumphantest trope turns out to be a species of occupatio, in which from behind a
screen of dithering contradictions the public orator gives his prince the insult direct:
What impotent speech with his eight partes may not specifie,
this unestimable gift, holding his peace, shall as it were (with
teares I speak it) do wherby as it may seems or appeare to
manifest or declare, and yet it is, and yet it is not, and yet it may
be a diminutive oblation meritorious to your high pusillanimitie
and indignitie. (ii. 248)
Whyto borrow the words of Vanderhulke himselfwhy should Nashe's text
goe gadding and fisgigging in this manner after firking flantado amfibologies (ii.
248)? I would propose that the aggression which this impotent discourse may not
specify can be adequately understood only through a contextualizing analysis that would
seek to link the rhetorical obliquities, the narrative displacements, the anatomized
abjection, and the shameful reinscriptions of abjection that stand out in The Unfortunate
Traveller to Thomas Nashe's uneasy relations with the authorities which he had served
but which in the spring of 1593 had stopped the mouth of his most admired
contemporary, and not many years later, would silence Nashe himself.

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