About the author

Thomas Nashe (bap. Nov 1567, d. c. 1601), a writer of polemical pamphlets, received a grounding in classical literature and a disdain of puritanism at Cambridge University. His time there also granted him access to the loosely affiliated group of university-educated writers then active in London, the so-called ‘university wits’.

About the text

Early in 1593 Nashe wrote his most enduringly popular book, The Unfortunate Traveller. With its fast-paced narrative, its Italian setting, and its waggish hero, the page-boy and dice-sharp Jack Wilton, it is often hailed as a prototypical English novel, though Nashe's description of it as a ‘chronicle’ is perhaps more accurate. He wrote it, he said, because certain ‘frends’ had urged him to try a ‘cleane different vaine from other my former courses of writing’. It is full of clever pastiche, baroque metaphors, and razor-sharp observation of dress and gesture. It was published in 1594 with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton, but there is no evidence of reciprocal favours.

The arts of memory

In this excerpt, Nashe demonstrates his knowledge of the classical history of memory arts, as well as the recent writings of German scholar Hermann von dem Busche, most noted for his defence of humanistic studies entitled Vallum humanitatis (1518). He does so comically, dismissing the memory arts alongside the experiential value of travel. Perhaps Nashe's writing of pamphlets, an ephemeral medium in early modern literature, gave him an ambivalent attitude towards memory, because he knew that he was producing ‘dung papers’, which would leave little cultural legacy. This reference implicitly evokes the hotly contested issue regarding artifice and nature, which percolates through the period's view of rhetoric, education and law. Nashe basically refers to one of the great criticisms of the memory arts in his discussion of travel.

Textual notes

Thomas Nashe, The vnfortunate traueller. Or, The life of Iacke Wilton (London, 1594), L3v–L4r.

The Unfortunate Traveller

The only precept that a traveller hath most use of, and shall find most ease in, is that of Epicharchus, Vigila & memor sis ne quid credas; Believe nothing, trust no man, yet seem thou as thou swallowed all, suspected none, but were easy to be gulled by every one. Multi fallere docuerunt, as Seneca sayeth, dum timent falli; many by showing their jealous suspect of deceit have made men seek more subtle means to deceive them.