Thomas Nashe is typically regarded as an urban author and a University wit, but his writings are inflected and shaped by regional travel, ‘non-literary’, non-elite works, and oral culture. The essays in this collection address Nashe’s use of the past, his engagement with the Elizabethan present, and his textual legacy.

A note on dating and spelling Introduction: Why Nashe? Why now? - Chloe Kathleen Preedy and Rachel Willie1 ‘Frisking… aloft’: The pneumatic spirits of Thomas Nashe’s ‘paper stage’ - Chloe Kathleen Preedy2 A flood in a furrow: Nashe, news, and monstrous topicality - Kirsty Rolfe3 Textual superficiality and surface reading in Nashe’s prose - Douglas Clark4 ‘When prints are set on work, with Greens & Nashes’: Nashe’s ‘popularity’ revisited – Lena Liapi5 Thomas Nashe and his terrors of the afterlife - Chris Salamone6 Thomas Nashe and the virtual community of English writers - Kate De Rycker 7 Thomas Nashe beyond the grave - Rachel WillieAfterword – Jennifer RichardsBibliographyIndex

Thomas Nashe is typically regarded as an urban author and a University wit, but his writings are inflected and shaped by regional travel, ‘non-literary’, non-elite works, and oral culture. The essays in this collection address Nashe’s use of the past, his engagement with the Elizabethan present, and his textual legacy.As an instigator of debate and a defender of tradition, a man of letters and a popular hack, a writer of erotica and a spokesman for bishops, an urbane metropolitan and a celebrant of local custom, the various textual performances of Nashe continue to provoke a range of contradictory reactions. Nashe’s often incongruous authorial characteristics suggest that, as a ‘King of Pages’, he not only courted controversy but also deliberately cultivated a variety of public personae, acquiring a reputation more slippery than the herrings he celebrated in print.This book questions early modern conceptions of authorship and textual transmission through assessing Nashe’s self-representation, authorial legacy, and literary celebrity. It traverses the mercurial way in which Nashe characterised himself as a messenger in print; addresses his denunciations of uncritical news-reading; examines Nashe’s engagement in the Marprelate controversy and assesses his ghostly influence on later writers.Collectively, the essays in this book illustrate how Nashe not only excelled at textual performance, but that his personae also became a contested site as readers actively participated in the reception of his image.