To place Gabriel Harvey at the beginning of this part of the book is to assert his centrality to Elizabethan literary culture. This would be a large claim, but the argument that follows will show it to be closer to the truth than we might suspect for a writer whose work is unfamiliar today. To be sure, one part of Harvey’s writing has become well known again: his activity as a professional reader, or ‘facilitator’, thanks to the evidence of his marginalia found throughout his large and diverse library, a good part of which survives. These fragments of writing have attracted much attention in the last two decades; his vernacular literary writings have not.
Why is this? Harvey’s antagonists in his own time and beyond would propose a simple solution: his literary talent never equalled his self-importance. We can be a little more generous though and recognize that posterity has not been kind to the modes and genres that most interested him; Harvey is not unique in this. In most respects, the literary ‘kinds' in which he composed are remote from conventional understanding of what is truly significant about Elizabethan literature, especially when it is assumed to reach its quintessence at a late stage. Harvey did not write an Arcadia or a Faerie Queene; nor did he contribute to the extraordinary flowering of the public theatre in the 1590s. On the contrary, he was more likely to be the satirical subject of this last mode, especially if his identification as the original for Shakespeare’s tediously pedantic Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost (c.1594-5) is correct. Instead, he wrote poems in Latin eulogizing potential aristocratic patrons, letters about vernacular poetry which include examples of his own experiments with classical verse forms, semi-autobiographical prose fiction, lectures on rhetoric, and satirical pamphlets. Most of these forms are only of specialist interest, with the partial exception of the last. Unfortunately, even this promising choice had disastrous consequences for Harvey’s reputation.
Gabriel Harvey’s satirical writing was provoked by his clash with Thomas Nashe, a writer of astonishing originality. Though this squabble is not especially flattering to either party, it is Harvey who is left looking staid and cumbersome in contrast to his vivacious antagonist. Harvey’s first attack on Nashe and on Robert Greene in his Four Letters and Certain Sonnets (1592) is dismissed by C. S. Lewis as ‘worm’s work’, and his personality as ‘arrogant, unclubbable, unpopular, tactless, vindictive, laboriously jocose’ (1954: 354, 351). This is echoed half a century later by Neil Rhodes, who finds Harvey’s temperament ‘an oleaginous mixture of vanity, obsequiousness and pomposity’, and his writing as tediously academic (1992: 58,120). Nashe, in contrast, is admired by Lewis and Rhodes for his linguistic resourcefulness and originality. In contrast to Harvey, Nashe is seen to display the ‘qualities’ that are ‘celebrated in modernist and postmodernist texts’ (123). He is representative of a new generation of writers who had received a rhetorical education, yet who, unlike his opponent, had the ‘imaginative freedom to exploit and test’ the values of this (59).
These judgements make sense when we know a bit more about Harvey, the Cambridge don who worried about the damage his English writings might do to his academic reputation, and who was mocked as ‘Pedantius’ in a university comedy of the same name in 1580-1 (Sarah Knight 2006). On paper, he had a distinguished academic career with an appointment as lecturer in Greek at the University of Cambridge in 1573 and then as Praelector of Rhetoric from 1574 to 1576. In 1584, after concluding his study of the civil law at Cambridge, he accepted a medical fellowship at Pembroke College (Stern 1979: 74-5). But for all this, Harvey does not seem to have managed his career very well; he certainly seems to have lacked social skills, despite the fact that his manuscript letter-book represents a series of‘civil conversations’ in which he plays the ‘starring role’ (Katharine Wilson 2006: 43-51). In 1573 he fell out with the fellows of his college, Pembroke Hall, one of whom, Thomas Neville, tried to block his progression to the MA. The charges he levies against Harvey are obviously trumped up. Harvey is accused, among others things, of being ‘not familiar like a fellow’ as well as ‘a great and continual patron of paradoxis and a main defender of straung opinions’ (Harvey 1884: 4,10). However, his prickly self-defence, outlined in a letter to Dr John Young, Master of Pembroke Hall, goes some way to explain why he was regarded by his contemporaries and then much later by Lewis as ‘unclubbable’: ‘I was wunt to be as familiar, and as sociable and as gud a fellow too, as ani,’ he insists. ‘Marri so, that at usual and convenient times, as after dinner and supper, at commenti fiers, yea and at other times too, if the lest occasion were offrid, I continuid as long as ani, and was as fellowli as the best. [...] I have bene merri in cumpani: I have bene ful hardly drawn out of cumpani’ (4).
Outside the university, Harvey did not fare much better. In the late 1570s he was employed as a professional reader in the household of the Earl of Leicester, advising, among others, his nephew Philip Sidney before his embassy to the Holy Roman
Emperor, Rudolph II, in 1577 (Grafton and Jardine 1990:37), but there is no evidence of this as long-term employment. In Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596), Nashe implies that the Earl of Leicester ‘sent for another Secretarie to Oxford’ after realizing that Harvey was ‘more meete to make sport with, than anie way deeply to be employd’ (Nashe 1596: M4r). While in the 1580s, after his inception as a Doctor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford in 1585, he pursued a brief and undistinguished legal career in the Court of Arches in London. When the quarrel with Nashe broke out in the 1590s, he was in his early forties, and had returned to London probably only to settle the estate of his recently deceased brother John (Stern 1979:100). In contrast, at the start of the 1590s Nashe was in his early twenties, fresh from Cambridge, and eager to eke out a living as a writer. At the end of the 1580s he had made enough of a reputation to be employed by Bishop Bancroft, alongside Robert Greene and John Lyly, to answer in kind the popular anti-episcopal satires of the anonymous ‘Martin Marprelate’ (1588-9).
This is not a personality contest, of course. Nashe is valued by literary scholars not because he seems more ‘clubbable’, far from it, but because he represents a break with the rhetorical tradition that shaped mid-Tudor and early Elizabethan literary culture, defining its moral purpose as service to the commonwealth. As Lorna Hutson argues so compellingly in Chapter 43 in this volume, Nashe’s originality rests on his parody of this educational aspiration. His mature writings expose the moral bankruptcy of a print culture directed solely to ‘serving the interest of those who held religious and political office’. Early writings like ‘To the Gentleman Students of Both Universities’ (Oxford and Cambridge), Nashe’s dazzling debut in print included as part of the prefatory material to Robert Greene’s prose fiction Menaphon (1589), may well have been written for just such an end, advertising his wish to use ‘his pen in some suitable commonwealth cause’. This publication may even have helped him to secure employment as an anti-Martinist. However, after 1592, when it was much harder for him to gain patronage, Nashe turned his attention instead to subverting these aspirations: the ironic persona of Pierce Penniless (1592) ‘can’t climb aboard the gravy train of profitable moral propaganda’, Hutson reminds us, ‘without addressing the devil’ (see Hutson 1989; and Chapter 43 in this volume).
Even in early work like his Preface to Menaphon, though, we can discover the basis of Nashe’s later discontent. In this letter, Nashe honours the achievements of the early humanists Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More and their mid-Tudor successors John Cheke et al., who had recovered the value and place of rhetoric at the centre of the curriculum. But Nashe also laments the decline of this project, its failure to invigorate a national literature. His letter offers a scathing attack on contemporaries who borrow too heavily from classical and Italian literatures and the ‘idiote art-masters’ who have encouraged them in this. Particular scorn is reserved for the ‘machanicall mate’ who ‘abhorres the english he was borne too’, borrowing his words from the ‘inkhorne’ (1589: 2*1r). Such a writer, Nashe complains, fails to digest his reading; he fails to discriminate what is worth imitating, and like a greedy diner he spews forth his ‘cholerick incumbrances’ in prose and verse (2*1r). This is a moral-political as well as a literary judgement. According to Nashe, this training makes men neither eloquent nor virtuous. On the contrary, it leaves them unbalanced, spluttering forth like irascible men dominated by the fiery humour of choler (see Figure 39.1). Like a good Galenic physician, Nashe prescribes a ‘remedie of contraries’ to bring ‘moderation in a matter of follie’: writers who are ‘surfetted unawares with the sweete sacietie of eloquence’ are advised to study the prose of simpletons, ‘our Gothamists barbarisme’ (i*2r).
This bold letter seems to have sparked the Harvey-Nashe quarrel, although it was Richard Harvey, Gabriel’s clergyman brother, who responded at first. Gabriel Harvey is not included in Nashe’s attack; on the contrary, his Latin verse is commended in this letter (Air). Nonetheless, Richard took umbrage at Nashe’s presumption in publishing his literary judgements in the Preface to a series of sermons, A Theological Discourse of the Lamb of God and his Enemies (1590). Nashe is not the subject of these sermons, which aim to moderate religious debate, tempering satirists like Martin Marprelate who are ‘girded and wrapped in with splene and brought up cheefly in the chapters De contradicentibus (Harvey 1590: Q3r). But Richard made the mistake of excoriating Nashe in his Preface for ‘peremptorily censoring his betters at pleasure’ in his letter ‘To the Gentlemen Students’ (A2v). In printing this letter, he argues, Nashe has behaved as insolently in the civil realm as Martin in the religious.
Richard made the mistake of excoriating Nashe publicly in a treatise which defends the importance of moderate debate. The irony of this was not lost on Nashe and Greene: to them Richard must have seemed no better than the splenetic ‘Martin’. The intemperance of his Preface drew upon all of the Harvey brothers the scorn of Greene, who mocked them as the upwardly mobile sons of a Saffron Walden rope-maker in his estates satire A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592). It also made Richard the object of Nashe’s derision in Pierce Penniless’s Supplication to the Devil (1592), where he is personified as the Vice Wrath and denounced as an infamous ‘ideot’ and ‘tyred Jade’ who has accused this author, Nashe, ‘of want of learning’, ‘upbraiding’ him ‘for reviving’ the ‘reverend memorie’ of More, Cheke, and others, ‘as if they were no meate but for his Masterships mouth’ (Nashe 1592: F2v). Yet, unlike Richard, Nashe is careful not to replicate the Vice he reprehends. ‘I would not have you thinke that all this that is set downe here, is in good earnest,’ his knowing persona Pierce Penilesse teases Richard. ‘[A]m I subject to the sinne of Wrath I write against or no, in whetting my penne on this block?’, he asks after ‘Spurgalling’ this ‘Asse’ (F4r).
Nashe’s spat with Richard Harvey pales in comparison with the quarrel that erupted between him and Gabriel, however. Greene died in 1592, just after the printing of A Quip, and Harvey’s harping on about the destitution of his final days seemed egregiously vitriolic and foolish, given Nashe’s brilliant response to Richard’s own intemperate moralizing. ‘Howe unlike Tullies sweete Offices,’ Harvey complains pompously of Greene’s and Nashe’s writing in Four Letters (1592: D2v). They have failed to imbibe the moral philosophy of this Roman orator, whose study of social duties was a core text of the Tudor grammar school; their writing is neither decorous (honest) nor useful to the commonwealth. In response, Nashe would dismiss this as feeble nostalgia, decrying Harvey as a ‘stale soker at Tullies Offices’ and an ‘Ape of Tully’ (1593: G4v, F2v). He exposes Harvey’s moralizing as both dated and
Fig. 39.1 Diagram of the four humours. Choler (bottom right) is gendered masculine. Leonard Thurneisser zum Thurn, Quinta essentia (1574), O3v.
Platitudinous and cuts through his rhetoric of‘Humanity’ to reveal its more insidious implications. Harvey insists that his moral values and his practice of debate support an orderly commonwealth. But Nashe exposes this as hypocritical. Like his brother Richard, Harvey fails to represent the moderation he espouses. This ‘indigested Chaos of Doctourship’ (1592: G4v), Nashe complains, may repeat moral sayings, but this does not mean that he understands them. He may castigate invective, yet he was still a ‘Libeller before I was borne’ (I4r). With this criticism Nashe makes a tentative step towards the defence of invective as essential to the health of the commonwealth, a cure for choleric writers like Harvey.
The nimble and quick-witted Nashe is an effective critic and his skilful demystification of Harvey’s ‘Humanity’ seems more modern than his antagonist’s ponderous emphasis on moderation and limitation: ‘better an hundred Guides were banished’, Harvey argues rather alarmingly in Four Letters, ‘then the state of Augustus endangered, or a soveraigne Empire infected’ (1592: D3r). While in Pierce’s Supererogation (1593), Harvey will ally himself explicitly with an older culture of ‘confutation’, the decline of which is blamed on satirists like Nashe. Erasmus and Thomas More ‘were supposed fine, and pleasant Confuters in their time’ (1593: B3v), Harvey recalls. So too were Cheke and Ascham. But these scholars have been overtaken by a new generation who argue for the sake of argument, and who relish a ‘dominiering Eloquence’ instead of the ‘smooth, and clenly, and neate, and fine elegancy’ that was valued ‘before’ (C1r).
Nonetheless, my purpose in returning to this quarrel is not to reinforce our sense of Nashe as ‘modern’ and Harvey as behind the times, but to point to the difficulty of reading the latter’s moral-political idiom of moderation and to reflect on what is lost with its rejection. The spirit of Nashe commends itself to current critical sympathy for a ‘newer’ intellectual and literary culture, whereby speech or writing that is explicitly irreverent, demystifying, and seemingly ‘popular’ connotes in itself a step towards a more disputative ‘public sphere’. This preference makes it hard for us to see both why moderation mattered in the late Tudor commonwealth, or indeed in any commonwealth, but also the different ways in which this complex virtue was understood. It also makes it hard for us to judge the innovation of Harvey’s literary writings and his ongoing attempt to limit a ‘dominiering Eloquence’. But before tackling these issues I want first to recognize why it is so hard to sympathize with someone recommending ‘moderation’ as insistently as Harvey does.
World History
