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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
THE GENERATION OF SHAME
History has been hard on Gabriel Harvey. For all his intellectual gifts, the Elizabethan academic and commentator never quite managed to master the rituals of courtly sophistication, and a series of social blunders eventually consigned him to the role of Elizabethan buffoon. What is more, Harvey took on Thomas Nashe in a highly public quarrel in the early 1590s and, while it is unlikely that any Elizabethan could have emerged with dignity from an encounter with Nashe, Harvey's contribution to the quarrel only served to consolidate his image as a pompous pedant. Yet Harvey was an astute critic of Elizabethan culture, and in Pierce's Supererogation (1593) he not only turns a skeptical eye on Nashe, but on his own contribution to the quarrel. For Harvey, the danger for both writers lies in the fact that their dispute generates its own rhetorical momentum, forcing both of them to produce impure, ephemeral, vacuous rubbish, as they spawn words about words:
What fonder businesse then to troble the Printe with Pamphlets, that cannot possibly live whiles the Basiliske hisseth death? Was I woont to jest at Eldertons ballatinge, Gascoignes sonnettinge, Greenes pamphletting, Martins libelling, Holinsheads engrosing, some-bodies abridging, and whatchicaltes translating, & shall I now become a scribling Creature with fragmentes of shame, that might long sethence have beene a fresh writer with discourses of applause? The very whole matter, what but a thinge of nothinge? the Methode, what but a hotch-pott for a gallymafry? by the one or other, what hope of publike use or private credite?
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