|
|
|
The playwright Thomas Nashe in chains
|
 |
Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), dramatist, satirist, and pamphleteer, was notorious for his vitriolic satires. Along with Ben Jonson, Nashe wrote a lost play, The Isle of Dogs, in 1597 that the authorities thought was seditious. Jonson went to jail, and Nashe fled to the port city of Great Yarmouth whose dietary staple, the herring, was the subject of his last work, Nashes Lenten Stuffe.This, the only surviving "portrait" of Nashe, is a cheap woodcut from a hostile pamphlet printed in 1597, The Trimming of Thomas Nash Gentleman. It was the work of downmarket humorist Richard Lichfield, whose real job was barbering at a college in Cambridge (hence the "trimming" joke).
| |
|
|
