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The Allegory of the ‘Beare’ and the ‘Foxe’ in Nashe's Pierce Penilesse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The gossipy, semi-journalistic style of Nashe's Pierce Penilesse made it an immediate best-seller. Between 1592 and 1595, according to Nashe himself, it passed through “at the least … sixe Impressions.” But the author's joy at his sudden success seems to have been somewhat dimmed as the result of a literary indiscretion that plagued him all the rest of his life. In this remarkable pamphlet, for the purpose of illustrating the deadly sin of hypocrisy, he introduces an extended fable or allegory satirizing men in high places. Since he himself considered his “tale of a Battle-dore,” as he facetiously calls it, to be a digression from the main theme of Pierce Penilesse, and hence a unit in itself, it may be treated without reference to its context.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1946
References
1 The Works of Thomas Nashe ed. by R. B. McKerrow (London, 1904-10), iii, 35. Though McKerrow is able to trace only five of these, the instant popularity of the pamphlet is shown by the fact that the first three editions came out between August 8, 1592, the date of entry in the Stationers' Registers, and the end of the same year. The next year the fourth edition appeared, and two years later the fifth.
2 Ibid., i, 221-226.
3 Ibid., i, 221.
4 Ibid., i, 154.
5 Ibid., i, 154-155.
6 Ibid., i, 259-261. Except for the proper names and the Latin quotation the italics are mine. The passages which I have placed in italics imply that Nashe has his own “fable” in mind.
7 Ibid., i, 320. Harvey's efforts therein must have been oral, for he makes no reference to the allegory until the writing of Pierces Supererogation, which followed Strange Newes. Here, as if in answer to Nashe's accusation, he pretends to disdain identifying the various beasts, but he suggests that an identification would involve the Court: “Though I be not greatly employed, yet my leisure will scarcely serve, to moralize Fables of Beares, Apes, and Foxes: (for some men can give a shrewd gesse at a courtly allegory)”—The Works of Gabriel Harvey ed. by A. B. Grosart, ii, 54. (The italics are mine.)
8 The evidence for Nashe's authorship of An Almond is presented in my article “Nashe's Share in the Marprelate Controversy,” PMLA, lix (1944), 952-984.
9 McKerrow, op. cit., i, 320-321. (Except for the proper name the italics are mine.)
10 Ibid., iii, 213. (The italics are mine.)
11 Ibid., iii, 213-214. (Except for the Latin the italics are mine.)
12 Ibid., iii, 216.
13 Ibid., iv, 139. Perhaps Leicester's relatives and friends may have been responsible for Nashe's troubles with the law.
14 Ibid., iv, 139-140. McKerrow adds, “It is possible that the general idea of the fable was suggested to Nashe by Spenser's Mother Hubberd's Tale, as Harvey hinted.”
15 In “The Real Martin Marprelate,” PMLA, lviii (1943), 83-107, I have presented the evidence for identifying John Penry as Martin Marprelate.
16 History of Queen Elizabeth Amy Robsart and the Earl of Leicester: Being a Reprint of “Leycesters Commonwealth” 1641 ed. by Frank J. Burgoyne (London, 1904), pp. vii-viii.
17 After Sir Walter Scott's refreshing it for the reader of Kenilworth, not all the efforts of modern biographers and romantic novelists can quite remove the stain of villainy from Leicester's character. Mr. Frederick Chamberlin, the Earl's most recent biographer and the only one who seriously labors to restore his reputation, frequently finds it difficult to reconcile his evident ruthlessness with humanity. For example, though Chamberlin excuses Leicester's betrayal of the Duke of Norfolk on the grounds of expediency, somewhat colored by patriotism, he has to call the attempt on the life of Mary Stuart nothing less than “cold-blooded” murder—Elizabeth and Leycester (New York, 1939), pp. 181-182.
18 McKerrow, op. cit., i, 321.
19 “Leicesters Ghost,” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, xviii (1935), 271. Leicester's Ghost, as Williams point out, is a long narrative poem containing the chief portions of the Common-wealth. For a brief account of the author, Thomas Rogers, see Williams' study “Thomas Rogers of Bryanston, an Elizabethan Gentleman of Letters,” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, xvi (1934), 253-267.
20 “Nashe's Share in the Marprelate Controversy,” op. cit., pp. 976 ff.
21 McKerrow, op. cit., i, 220.
22 For example, the allusion to Stubbes' Anatomie of Abuses: “Other mens furie, who make the Presse the dunghill whether they carry all the muck of their mellancholicke imaginations, pretending forsooth to anatomize abuses and stubbe vp sin by the rootes”—ibid., i, 19-20. Also the allusion to Kyd's Hamlet: “English Seneca read by Candle-light yeelds many good sentences … and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, hee will affoord you whole Hamlets… . Seneca, let blood line by line and page by page, at length must needes die to our Stage; which makes his famished followers to imitate the Kid in Æsop—ibid., iii, 315-316.
23 Op. cit., pp. 63 ff.
24 Ibid., p. 82.
25 Ibid., p. 94.
26 Ibid., p. 237.
27 Ibid., p. 127.
28 Ibid., p. 21. (The italics are mine.)
29 Ibid., p. 208. (The italics are mine.)
30 Ibid., p. 236. (The italics are mine.)
31 Ibid., p. 238. (The italics are mine.)
32 Ibid., p. 29. (The italics are mine.)
33 Ibid., p. 119. (Except for the proper name the italics are mine.) The resemblance to Nashe's allegory is purely verbal, however, for here the “Fox” is Leicester whereas in Pierce Penilesse, as will be demonstrated, the “Foxe” stands for an entirely different person.
34 Ibid., pp. 68-69. J. E. Neale quotes Cecil's criticism of Leicester's determination “to enhance his own particular friends to wealth, to office, to lands, and to offend others”— Queen Elizabeth (New York, 1934), p. 143.
35 Common-wealth, p. 86.
36 Ibid., p. 48.
37 Ibid., pp. 204-205. (Except for the proper name the italics are mine.)
38 Perhaps in order to avoid confusion with the royal Lion or else merely to keep the reader guessing, Nashe substituted the Arundel “horse” for the Norfolk “lion.” His substitution further emphasizes his debt to the Common-wealth, where the allusion to the Horse is associated with Leicester's mistreatment of Norfolk.
39 Neale, op. cit., pp. 118 ff; Chamberlin, op. cit., pp. 100 ff; G. Brenan and E. P. Statham, The House of Howard (London, 1907), ii, 449; Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Robert Dudley, Thomas Howard.
40 Op. cit., p. 200.
41 Ibid., p. 201. According to Neale, Leicester was responsible for Norfolk's failure to go to the Queen and make a clean breast of the whole affair: “These precious conspirators … dared none of them face her, and Leicester, as ready with excuses as promises, kept waiting ‘for the opportune time’.” And Norfolk, “leaning on the hollow Leicester, and afraid to take Cecil's advice and confess … let time pass in compromising silence”—op. cit., p. 182.
42 Common-wealth, p. 202. (The italics are mine.) Strengthening the connection between the Leicester of the Common-wealth and Nashe's Machiavellian “Beare,” the author of the Common-wealth concludes as follows: “And herein you see also the same subtile and Machivilian sleight, which I mentioned before, of driving men to attempt somewhat, whereby they may incurre danger, or remaine in perpetuall suspition or disgrace”—ibid., p. 202. Cf. Nashe's definition of “Machiauilisme” as “outward gloasing with a mans enemie, and protesting friendship to him that I hate and meane to harme”—McKerrow, op. cit., i, 220.
43 Concerning Throckmorton's connection with the projected marriage between Mary Stuart and Norfolk see Howell's State Trials (London, 1809), i, 998.
44 McKerrow, op. cit., i, 220.
45 Op. cit., pp. 38-39.
46 Ibid., pp. 52-55.
47 Ibid., pp. 71-72. (The italics are mine.)
48 Ibid., pp. 70-71. (The italics are mine.)
49 Ibid., p. 234.
50 Ibid., pp. 55-56.
51 The Devereux family traced its ancestry to the Norman Conquest—Devereux Papers ed. by H. E. Malden in the Camden Miscellany, vm (London, 1923), vii. In Cockayne's Peerage Devereux is named “one of the few peers of the old blood”—v, 140.
52 Op. cit., pp. 39-40.
53 Ibid., pp. 37-42.
54 W. B. Devereux, Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of Essex (London, 1853), i (frontispiece).
55 Devereux Papers, p. viii. In a letter to Richard Broughton, “man of business” both to Essex and to his son Robert, the Earl expresses his suspicion that he had been given poisoned wine—ibid., pp. v, 4.
56 Ibid., p. 12.
57 Ibid., p. 14. W. B. Devereux refers to the account of Essex' death, prefixed to Camden's Annals and supposedly written by Edward Waterhouse, “who returned to Ireland with his friend and patron, who faithfully attended him in his last illness, closed his eyes, and accompanied his remains to their last resting-place”—Lives and Letters of the Devereux, i, 138. Waterhouse—if indeed he was the author—mentions the Earl's premonition of death. But since the first edition of Camden's Annals did not appear until 1615, it is impossible to state that Nashe had read this particular account.
58 Hyder E. Rollins points out that not until the edition of 1585 was the Earl's name definitely connected with this “song.” In this edition in the title of the poem it is “said to be sung by Essex”—The Paradise of Dainty Devices (Cambridge, 1927), p. 1.
59 McKerrow, op. cit., i, 227 ff., 369 ff.
60 Op. cit., p. 125.
61 Ibid., pp. 44-45.
62 Ibid., pp. 182 ff.
63 Ibid., pp. 194 ff.
64 McKerrow, op. cit., iii, 368.
65 Ibid., i, 222.
66 The Works of John Whitgift ed. for the Parker Society by Rev. John Ayre (Cambridge, 1853), iii, 28 ff.
67 McKerrow, op. cit., ii, 357, 362, 364.
68 Church and State: Political Aspects of Sixteenth Century Puritanism (Cambridge, 1928), p. 119. (The italics are mine.)
69 Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism (Oxford, 1925), pp. 265-267.
70 Note cancelled.
71 Op. cit., p. 44.
72 Pearson, Church and State, p. 139.
73 Thomas Cartwright, pp. 293-294. (The italics are mine.)
74 McKerrow, op. cit., iii, 356.
75 Ibid., iii, 360.
76 Ibid., iii, 362. (Except for the proper name the italics are mine.)
77 The use of Kings in this passage may be intended to suggest Leicester's ambitions for the throne just as, according to McKerrow, the “somewhat odd use” of husband in the opening sentence of the allegory may be “an allusion to his hopes of Elizabeth's hand”— ibid., iv, 139. This sentence runs as follows: “The Beare on a time, beeing chiefe Burgomaster of all the Beasts vnder the Lyon gan thinke with himselfe how hee might … best husband his Authoritie to enlarge his delight and contentment”—ibid., i, 221.
78 Ibid., i, 224. (The italics are mine.)
79 Ibid., iii, 354.
80 Ibid., iv, 63.
81 “The Real Martin Marprelate,” op. cit., p. 83.
82 “Nashe's Share in the Marprelate Controversy,” op. cit., pp. 958 ff.
83 The Marprelate Tracts 1588, 1589 ed. by William Pierce (London, 1911), p. 216 n.
84 Ibid., pp. 99, 146, 365-366, 372.
85 McKerrow, op. cit., iii, 358. (The italics are mine.)
86 Ibid., iii, 359. (Except for the proper names the italics are mine.)
87 Since Nashe rightly regarded Leicester as Cartwright's patron, “male-conted melancholy,” with whom Singularity consults, might well be the Earl of Leicester, to whom Nashe himself in his allegory refers as the “melancholie” Beare.—ibid., i, 226.
88 Ibid., iii, 344. (The italics are mine.)
89 Ibid., iii, 345. (The italics are mine.)
90 Ibid., iii, 345. (The italics are mine.)
91 Ibid., iii, 361.
92 The Works of John Whitgift, iii, 1 ff.
93 Ibid., iii, 314 ff.
94 McKerrow, op. cit., i, 224-225. Nashe here may have in mind a passage from A Full and plaine declaration of Ecclesiasticall Discipline owt off the word off God/and off the declininge off the churche off England from the same (1574), which is an English translation, probably by Cartwright, of the Ecclesiasticæ Disciplinæ et anglicanæ Ecclesiæ ab illa aberationis, plena è verbo Dei, & dilucida explicatio (1574), probably by Walter Travers: “This only waie off readinge off Homelies can in no wise be sufficient to cure and to remedy all the sondry necessities off the churche. To be conninge in the profession off this kinde off physick a man had neede be perfite in his simples. He had need to knowe many kindes off herbes, floures, rotes.”—p. 149. (The italics are mine.)
95 Sig. A iii verso.
96 Sig. A viii verso.
97 Sig A vii recto-verso.
98 McKerrow, op. cit., iii, 360 ff.
99 McKerrow, op. cit., iii, 367-368. Similarly, in his preface to Greene's Menaphon Nashe deplores the speed with which the public picks up a pamphlet by “any durty mouthed Martin,” and adds, “I know not how the minde of the meanest is fedde with this folly, that they impute singularity to him that slaunders priuily, and count it a great peece of Art in an inkhorne man, in any tapsterly termes whatsoeuer to expose his superiours to enuy”—ibid., iii, 315.
100 The allusions to the Flye in the next two pamphlets of the Harvey-Nashe controversy strongly suggest that the Flye in the allegory was Nashe himself. In Foure Letters and Certaine Sonnets Gabriel Harvey, at the end of his commentary on Pierce Penilesse, affixes a sonnet entitled “The Miserable End of Wilful Desperatenesse,” satirizing Nashe's complaints of poverty. In this sonnet he refers to Nashe as “the jolly Fly”—The Works of Gabriel Harvey, i, 240. In this tract Harvey also puns on Nashe's name by calling him the “gnatt”—ibid., i, 223. Nashe in reply asserts that he supposes that some people will expect him to answer Harvey's verses “of the jolly Fly,” but he assures his reader that he already has fully answered his opponent—McKerrow, op. cit., i, 326. And in the same pamphlet, commenting on his allegory, he petulantly asks, “Who but a Foppe wil labour to anatomize a Flye?”—ibid., i, 260. Perhaps McKerrow had in mind these allusions to the Flye when, rejecting the possibility of Nashe's authorship of any of the anti-Martinist tracts, he suggests that instead Nashe “may have been employed simply to gather information and to direct the pursuivants”—ibid., v, 49.
101 Ibid., iii, 349, 369.