Satire, What Is It Good For?: Satire and War in Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker's Prose

Explorations in Renaissance Culture
48 (2022) 90–119
brill.com/erc
Satire, What Is It Good For?

Satire and War in Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker’s Prose
Emily Rowe | orcid: 0000-0002-2946-6563

University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
emily.rowe@manchester.ac.uk
Abstract
Satire and war have a longstanding literal and metaphoric relationship. Satire has
long been the medium to criticize war, while also being figured itself as literary ‘war-
fare.’ This essay examines the interplay between war and satire in two early mod-
ern English prose texts, Thomas Nashe’s The vnfortunate trauller (1594) and Thomas
Dekker’s Worke for armorours (1609). Both writers contributed satirical works to liter-
ary ‘wars’ of the period, but this essay moves away from their literary feuds and argues
that Nashe and Dekker’s prose employ sites of war as settings for social satire and to
explore how war, like satire, functions a force that disrupts as a means to correct social
abuses.
Keywords
Thomas Nashe – Thomas Dekker – satire – prose – war – military – violence –

early modern – social – The Unfortunate Traveller – Work for Armourers
1 Introduction
Edwin Starr asked in 1970, “war, what is it good for?” before answering his
own question: “absolutely nothing.” War has, however, been good for satire.
From Aristophanes’ The Acharnians to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, satire is the
long-favored literary medium for commenting on war. Attempts to define
satire have often focused on its warlike violence—from Northrop Frye’s
description of satire as “militant irony” to William R. Jones’s stance that
“Satire was, and remains, a weapon,” satire is frequently figured as war-
© emily rowe, 2022 | doi:10.1163/23526963-04801005 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

via Open Access. This is an open access article distributed under the terms
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by 4.0 license. of the CC BY 4.0 license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
satire, what is it good for? 91
fare.1 This essay considers how war and satire interacted in two early mod-
ern prose texts, Thomas Nashe’s The vnfortunate traueller (1594) and Thomas
Dekker’s Worke for armorours (1609). In both texts, war is the foundation of the
narrative and a backdrop for serious arguments about social conflict. Nashe’s
narrator Jack Wilton begins his unfortunate travels across early sixteenth-
century Europe in the military camp of Henry viii before flying “like a crow
that still followes aloofe where there is carrion” between battles across the con-
tinent.2 While Nashe depicts historical warfare, Dekker provides a war “likely
to happin this yeare”—an allegorical battle between the queens of Money and
Poverty, in which the armies, advisors, and strategies of each queen are care-
fully laid out.3
Despite its integrality to the narrative, war is not the target of Nashe and
Dekker’s satire. Instead, I argue that Nashe and Dekker’s use of war interacts
with satire in two ways. The first is that sites of war, both literal and textual,
function as vehicles for social satire—for Nashe this is located in the military
camp and the body-strewn battlefield while for Dekker social satire is found
in his allegorical warfare. The social satire presented by both writers targets
a readership anxious about foreign belligerents by forcing them to recognize
the enemy within as both texts see members of English society in conflict
and allude to civil unrest. Second, war also functions in these texts as a for-
mal re-enactment of the genre of satire, specifically Juvenalian farrago, or
“mish-mash” and the suspension of social hierarchy associated with the car-
nivalesque. In Jones’ analysis of Elizabethan satire as an “activistic” and often
reformative art, he argues that satire often used the “paradoxical, Carnival
power to promote chaos in order to bring about order.”4 Satire is socially dis-
ruptive in order to be corrective. This essay argues that in Nashe and Dekker’s
prose, war and satire intersect as both disrupt social cohesion as a means to
correct social abuses.
1 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 224.
William R. Jones, Satire in the Elizabethan Era: An Activistic Art (New York: Routledge, 2017),
9.
2 Thomas Nashe, The vnfortunate traueller (London: Thomas Scarlet for Cuthbert Burby, 1594),
Sig. D2v, stc (2nd ed.) 18380, available at Early English Books Online (hereafter eebo).
3 Thomas Dekker, Worke for armorours (London: Nicholas Okes for Nathaniel Butter, 1609), Sig.
A2r, stc (2nd ed.) 6536, eebo.
4 Jones, Satire in the Elizabethan Era, 141.
Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Explorations in Renaissance Culture 48 (2022) 90–119 of the CC BY 4.0 license.
92 rowe
2 War in Early Modern England
Before we can understand how war functioned as a vehicle for social satire and,
like satire, as a disruptive yet corrective force in Nashe and Dekker’s prose, we
need to understand how it functioned literally in the society they were writ-
ing in. Warfare was a near-constant backdrop for early modern English writers.
Jack S. Levy suggests that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the
most “warlike” period of European history, noting that there were ongoing wars
ninety-five percent of the time during these two centuries.5 The summer of
1593, when Nashe wrote The vnfortunate traueller, marked the beginning of the
Nine Years’ War in Ireland, conflict in Spain continued in the Low Countries,
and the threat of a second Armada loomed. Paul E.J. Hammer describes the
period of 1589–94 as “deep war,” a period “when no end to the fighting seemed
in sight and Elizabeth’s regime could only seek to endure, as new threats and
commitments mounted up on all sides.”6 Even when foreign enemies were kept
at bay, 1590s London was often a place of civil strife as economic and food riots
plagued the decade.7
Dekker was writing at a markedly different moment. Worke for armorours
first appeared at the end of Dekker’s The seuen deadly sinnes of London (1606)
under a separate section titled “Warres” and was republished separately in 1609.
Two years before The seuen deadly sinnes was published, James i signed the
Treaty of London, bringing an end to the nineteen-year conflict with Spain.
Dekker was writing in the relief of peace after the period of “deep war” and
uncertainty attached to the end of Elizabeth’s reign. But wars of religion and
other conflicts still raged on the continent and the English appetite for news
of war was insatiable, even in times of peace. Writing upon his return from
Bohemia in 1620, where the Bohemian Revolt was taking place, the poet John
Taylor complains about the discussions of battles in English taverns:
And as for newes of battells, or of War,

Were England from Bohemia thrice as far:
Yet we do know (or seeme to know) more heere
Then was, is, or will euer be knowne there.
5 Jack S. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975 (Lexington: University of Ken-
tucky Press, 1983), 140.
6 Paul E.J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604
(Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003), 175.
7 Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward, London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750, (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 277.

Explorations in Renaissance Culture 48 of(2022) 90–119
the CC BY 4.0 license.
At Ordinaries, and at Barbers shopps,

There tydings vented are, as thick as hopps,
How many thousands such a day were slaine,
What men of note were in the battell ta’ne,
When, where, and how the bloody fight begun,
And how such sconces, and such townes were won;
How so and so the armies brauely met,
And which side glorious victory did get:
The month, the weeke, the day, the very houre8
As Taylor suggests here, Londoners discussed the intricacies of recent battles

at “Ordinaries” (inns and taverns) and at “Barbers shopps”—so much so, he
remarks, that they seem to know more of the battle than those who had been
there. Here, Taylor refers to oral war reportage. But the details of battles were
also printed in pamphlets. David Randall suggests that “Military news was a
spur to the production of news in general: an explosion of news pamphlets fol-
lowed England’s entry into the war with Spain in 1585,” adding that even outside
of periods of open war, “English readers expressed continuous interest in mil-
itary news throughout this period, and associated it with the constant context
of international religious strife.”9 Even in a time of peace such as when Dekker
published Worke for armorours, news of wars abroad continued.
Taylor’s comments remind us that war was entertainment as often as it was
news, but in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean debates on the purpose of war-
fare, war could also be remedial. Writing in 1601, William Cornwallis echoed a
typical viewpoint on the necessity of war as a “remedy” for the abuses associ-
ated with peace, despite the risk of death and dissolution:
Warre is the remedy for a State surfetted with peace, it is a medicine for
Common-wealths sicke of too much ease and tranquilitie, but that it carri-
eth a reforming nature, and is a part of iustice; yet is it better knowen then
vsed, better to keepe in awe then to punish; for it can hardly bee taken
vp or pacified, since it begets in Generals the two dangerous humours
of reuenge and ambition; in the limmes obeying this head, dissolutenes
and riot: betweene which, and the heate of contention, the innocent
8 John Taylor, Taylor his trauels (London: Nicholas Okes for Henrie Gosson, 1620), Sig. A4r, stc
(2nd ed.) 23802, eebo.
9 David Randall, Credibility in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Military News (Abingdon: Taylor &
Francis, 2008), 10.

94 rowe
perish aswell as the guiltie, and in stead of reforming nations, they depop-
ulate them.10
Cornwallis argues that war is remedial, reformative, and corrective, but adds
that the threat of war is better than its enactment, since real war brings with it
“dissolutenes and riot” and loss of life. Francis Bacon echoes Cornwallis’s sen-
timent that war is remedial, arguing that “No Body can be healthfull without
Exercise, neither Naturall Body, nor Politique: And certainly, to a Kingdome or
Estate, a Iust and Honourable Warre, is the true Exercise. A Ciuill Warre, indeed,
is like the Heat of a Feauer; But a Forraine Warre, is like the Heat of Exercise,
and serueth to keepe the Body in Health: For in a Slothfull Peace, both Courages
will effeminate, and Manners Corrupt.”11 In their medical metaphors for the
value and purpose of warfare, both Cornwallis and Bacon suggest that peace
can become a sickness akin to sloth, corruption, and effeminate excess—and
war is the cure. At their most literal, these sentiments, Paul A. Jorgensen argues,
reflect the Elizabethan practice of using conscription as a means to remove
“economic misfits” to wars abroad.12 Elizabeth i had no standing army. Instead,
England had militias made up of volunteers and conscripts. Many of the lat-
ter were prisoners, rogues, and vagabonds. Barnabe Rich, a professional soldier
and writer, explains the process of musterers in London who “scoure their pris-
ons of théeues, or their streates of roges and vagabondes … so they may haue
them good cheape.”13 Rich complains that this practice leads to poor soldiering,
but it was a cheap way to muster soldiers while also removing deviants from
London. This is echoed by Nashe, who writes in 1593 that “There is a certaine
waste of the people for whome there no vse, but warre: and these men must
haue some employment to cut them off … If they haue no seruice abroad, they
will make mutinies at home.”14 If the “dissolutenes and riot” that Cornwallis
warns of are inevitable, better they take place in the “exercise” of foreign wars
10 William Cornwallis, Discourses vpon Seneca the tragedian (London, 1601), Sigs. H1r-v, stc
(2nd ed.) 5774, eebo. On perceptions of warfare in late Elizabethan England, see Paul
A. Jorgensen, “Theoretical Views of War in Elizabethan England,” Journal of the History
of Ideas 13, No. 4 (1952): 469–481, jstor. Alexandra Gadja, “Debating War and Peace in
Late Elizabethan England,” The Historical Journal 52, no. 4 (2009): 851–878, ProQuest.
11 Francis Bacon, “Of the true Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates,” The essayes (London,
1625), Sigs. Aa3r-v, stc (2nd ed.) 1148, eebo.
12 Jorgensen, “Theoretical Views of War in Elizabethan England,” 476.
13 Barnabe Rich, Allarme to England (London: Henrie Middleton for Christopher Barker,
1578), Sig. K3r, stc (2nd ed.) 20979, eebo.
14 Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (London: Abel Jeffes for John Busby 1592), Sig. F3r, stc
(2nd ed.) 18373, eebo.

rather than the “Feauer” of civil wars. And by relocating potentially rebellious
portions of English society to foreign battlefields, hierarchy and order could be
more easily maintained at home.
Despite the professed socially corrective function of war, the reality of war
and its aftermath in early modern England paints a different picture. An under-
standing of contemporary anxieties surrounding the destabilizing effect of
gunpowder on the field and the presence of veteran soldiers at home in Eng-
land shows us that war could be just as socially disruptive as it was corrective.
The widespread use of gunpowder transformed the early modern battlefield.
In his 1598 military treatise, Robert Barret writes, “then was then, and now is
now; the wars are much altered since the fierie weapons first came vp: the
Cannon, the Musket, the Caliuer and Pistoll.”15 Aside from its effect on the phys-
ical reality of wars, many writers of the period displayed anxiety surrounding
gunpowder’s destabilizing effect on the social order of the battlefield. In Don
Quixote (1605), Miguel de Cervantes, who was permanently crippled by a bullet
wound, laments the rise of gunpowder and guns,
Happy were those blessed times that lacked the horrifying fury of the dia-
bolical instruments of artillery, whose inventor, in my opinion, is in hell,
receiving the reward for his accursed invention, which allows an ignoble
and cowardly hand to take the life of a valiant knight.16
The “valiant knight,” trained in swordsmanship and filled with courage, once
held superiority on the battlefield, but this changed with the arrival of artillery.
Now, even the bravest knight can be killed by a “stray shot” fired by an “igno-
ble” coward. Cervantes not only laments the brutality of modern warfare, but
also complains of the loss of hierarchy on the field. Gunpowder, and the new
forms of warfare that came with it, was a leveler. This anxiety was felt acutely
by English writers upon Philip Sidney’s death from a bullet wound in the Low
Countries in 1586. In his elegy for Sidney, Angel Day describes the “Dulket shot,”
which rose from the battlefield, “leuelling iust against the worthie knight.”17
Day, like Cervantes, bemoans the loss of hierarchy on the field that gunpowder
and the gradual erasure of hand-to-hand combat create. These concerns were
15 Robert Barret, The theorike and practike of moderne warres (London: Richard Field for
William Ponsonby, 1598), Sig. A1v, stc (2nd ed.) 1500, eebo.
16 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins Pub-
lishers, 2003), 332–33.
17 Angel Day, Vpon the life and death of the most worthy, and thrise renowmed knight, Sir Phillip
Sidney (London: Robert Walgrave, 1586), Sig. B1v, stc (2nd ed.) 6409, eebo.

96 rowe
felt in practical and literary military texts of the period. Analyzing the popular-
ity of the chivalric romance in the early modern period, a genre tied to Sidney
that often prized individualized acts of heroism over the massy anonymity of
gunpowder-fuelled warfare, Sheila J. Nayar asks, “how did one assert knightly
courage in the face of the proverbial “meaner” sort with a loaded musket?”18
Day’s and Cervantes’s complaints reflect a wider concern that the changing
military landscape and the increased use of gunpowder disrupted the social
hierarchy of the battlefield.
Warfare caused disruption to social order at home in England too. As
A.L. Beier shows, “no occupational groups increased as much as sailors and sol-
diers among vagrants from 1560 to 1640,” especially since, as discussed above,
many had already been recruited from “the poor and criminal classes.”19 If,
at best, they had been conscripted from honest jobs, it was still unlikely that
employment would be waiting for them upon their return, especially for those
disabled from battle injuries.20 These soldiers’s training in military violence
coupled with the difficulty of reintegrating them into society meant many
turned to crime to support themselves.21 Poor, disabled, and potentially danger-
ous, an underclass of impoverished veterans was present in early modern Lon-
don. With them came the threat of social unrest. Despite Cornwallis’s, Bacon’s,
and Nashe’s claims that war could temper social abuses at home, largely by pre-
venting civil unrest, early modern war was rife with social disruption which was
felt as much by those at home as by those on the battlefield.
Early modern war was regarded as both disruptive and corrective, a para-
dox found in theorizations of satire in this period too. Cornwallis’s and Bacon’s
medical metaphors for war’s remedial capabilities are mirrored in contempo-
rary discussions of satire’s similarly corrective function. As John Dryden writes
in 1681:
18 Sheila J. Nayar, “Arms or the Man i: Gunpowder Technology and the Early Modern
Romance,” Studies in Philology 114, no. 3 (2017): 521, jstor.
19 A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England (London: Methuen, 1985),
93–4.
20 C.G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 26.
21 Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 210. Linda Bradley Salamon, “Vagabond Veterans,”
in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, eds. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 261–93. Linda Woodbridge, “The Neglected Sol-
dier as Vagrant, Revenger, Tyrant Slayer in Early Modern England,” in Cast Out: Vagrancy
and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective, eds. A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 64–87.

The true end of Satyre, is the amendment of Vices by correction; And he

who writes honestly, is no more an enemy to the Offender, than the Physi-
tian to the Patient, when he prescribes harsh Remedies to an inveterate
Disease … If the Body Politick have any Analogy to the Natural, in my
weak judgment, an Act of Oblivion were as necessary in a Hot, distem-
per’d State, as an Opiate would be in a raging Fever.22
Dryden was writing much later than Nashe and Dekker, but his metaphor
comes, as Mary Claire Randolph has shown, from a long-standing early modern
tradition of likening satire’s corrective function to medical treatment.23 What
Dryden, Cornwallis, and Bacon’s metaphors also share is the “harsh,” “raging,”
and feverish properties of war and satire’s remedies, suggesting that in order to
correct disorder and disruption, further disorder and disruption is needed. This
paradox has been recognized in Jones’ study of the employment of the carni-
valesque in Elizabethan satire, which also disrupts social order as a means to
correct it.24
There is a tension in these suggestions that war and satire can be both dis-
ruptive and corrective. As argued by Cornwallis, the potential of war is better
than the reality of it, since war “can hardly bee taken vp or pacified.”25 How do
war and satire disrupt and correct social abuses and, once the disruption has
begun, can it be stopped? This tension is explored by Nashe and Dekker, who
both use war as a vehicle for social satire in their prose while meditating on the
remedial possibilities of both war and satire.
3 Thomas Nashe
War drives the narrative of the first half of The vnfortunate traueller. Nashe’s
narrator, Jack Wilton, moves across military camps, famous battles, and joust-
ing tournaments in a fictionalized account of a journey across early sixteenth-
century Europe. The satiric vein of these scenes has often been located in
Nashe’s textual parodies—Wilton’s narration mimics historical chronicles,
22 John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (Dublin, 1681), Sig. A2r, Wing D2214, ebbo.
23 Mary Claire Randolph, “The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory:
Its Possible Relationships and Implications,” Studies in Philology 38, no. 2 (1941): 125–57,
jstor.
24 Jones, Satire in the Elizabethan Era, 141.
25 Cornwallis, Discourses vpon Seneca, Sig. H1r.

98 rowe
travel narratives, and chivalric romance.26 This generic “medley” is linked by

Ann Rosalind Jones to the Bakhtinian “comic reversals of carnival, and the
juxtaposition of serious and comic modes in Menippean satire.”27 But the tar-
gets of Nashe’s satire are not solely literary. Closer inspection of the military
components of The vnfortunate traueller show war to be a vehicle for social
satire, in which the reader is confronted by conflict between compatriots rather
than foreign belligerents. The social warfare that takes place disrupts and con-
fuses social hierarchies, creating a mingling of persons akin to the “mingling
of forms” and “mish-mash” associated with satire as well as the temporary sus-
pension of hierarchy found in the carnivalesque.28 Ultimately, as Jones argues,
“carnivalesque mockery of social orthodoxies is allowable only in the service
of supporting, rather than undermining, those orthodoxies.”29 Nashe employs
both satire and war as two disruptive forces that upend social order with the
intention to correct it.
The locus of Nashe’s social satire, where social order can be undermined
with ease, is a space that should be one of compatriotism and strict hierarchy—
the English military camp. With almost all of Wilton’s experiences as an “unfor-
tunate traveler” taking place abroad, critics have often read Nashe’s work as
foregrounding the threat of “foreignness” compared to the safety of “English-
ness.”30 But in the camp, Wilton is surrounded by the English and the “enemy”
is often found within as compatriots, including Wilton, feud and undermine
each other, disrupting the social hierarchy.
Hierarchy and enclosure were key components of the early modern military
camp. Nina Taunton’s study of camp diagrams in military treatises in this period
shows us that camps were minutely designed to be both securely enclosed and
26 Alex Davis, Renaissance Historical Fiction: Sidney, Deloney, Nashe (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
2011), 189–230. Allyna E. Ward, “An Outlandish Travel Chronicle: Farce, History, and Fic-
tion in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller,” The Yearbook of English Studies 41,
no. 1 (2011): 84–98, jstor. Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Nashe and Sidney: The Tourna-
ment in The Unfortunate Traveller,” The Modern Language Review 63, no. 1 (1968): 3–6,
jstor.
27 Ann Rosalind Jones, “Inside the Outsider: Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller and Bakhtin’s Poly-
phonic Novel,” elh 50, no. 1 (1983): 67, jstor.
28 Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: The University Press of Ken-
tucky, 1994), 40.
29 Jones, Satire in the Elizabethan Era, 140–142.
30 Ward, “An Outlandish Travel Chronicle,” 84–98. Laura Scavuzzo Wheeler, “The Develop-
ment of an Englishman: Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller,” in Historicizing Chris-
tian Encounters with the Other, ed. John C. Hawley (New York: New York University Press,
1998), 56–73.

“to enable the effective exercise of power.”31 Camps were organized according
to rank, and the maintenance of civil order was an essential part of governing a
camp. Early modern military writers often compared the inner structure of the
military camp to a city, such as in one 1589 treatise, which states that the camp
should:
shew like a little Citie, equally deuided, and aptly distributed, aswell for
the lodgings, as for the publike places, so that to liken it wholly vnto a
Citie, there would be no other difference, but that the stuffe whereof the
walles and houses are built would bee different, for the one is mooueable,
and the others do not sturre from their place, for in the other points they
haue many things alike: and also a campe must be gouerned by lawes as
a Citie is.32
Not only should military camps be structured like cities, they should be gov-
erned accordingly. And it was not only soldiers that needed to be governed in
these mobile cities. The early modern military camp was, as Geoffrey Parker
and Angela Parker explain, a “vast moving city with its own community life” and
with its own “shops, services and families.”33 As well as soldiers, there were sut-
lers, servants, women, and children in the military camp, known as the “baggage
train,” which, at times, could outnumber the size of the actual army.34 Popu-
lated by shops, taverns, and civilians, the military camp had much in common
with city life. Despite being a temporary structure built abroad, society within
the military camp was a reflection of urban society at home.
The comparison between the camp and the city is readily made by Wilton as
well. Wilton explains that “Whosoeuer is acquainted with the state of a campe,
vnderstands that in it be many quarters, & yet not so many as on London
bridge.”35 The comparison between London and the military camp alerts read-
31 Nina Taunton, “Aspects of Watchfulness and Command in the 1590s Military Camp and
Shakespeare’s Henry v,” eese (1998): para. 5.
32 Raimond de Fourquevaux, Instructions for the warres, trans. Paul Ive (London: Thomas
Orwin for Thomas Man and Tobie Cooke, 1589) Sig. D7v, stc (2nd ed.) 1708.5, eebo.
33 Geoffrey Parker and Angela Parker, European Soldiers, 1550–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 34.
34 Mary Elizabeth Ailes, “Camp Followers, Sutlers, and Soldiers’ Wives: Women in Early Mod-
ern Armies (c. 1450–c. 1650),” in A Companion to Women’s Military History, edited by Barton
Hacker and Margaret Vining. (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 78. Klára Andresová, “Military Camps in
Military Manuals,” in Negotiating Conflict and Controversy in the Early Modern Book World,
edited by Alexander Samuel Wilkinson and Graeme Kemp. (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 176–7.
35 Nashe, The vnfortunate traueller, Sig. B1v.

100 rowe
ers that although the military camp is located in France, it should be read as a
microcosm of London. As John Twyning suggests, London was an increasingly
cramped social space in which poverty and wealth existed “cheek-by-jowl.”36
The camp is smaller than London and so, we might imagine, is even more con-
fined. The “quarters” that designate social standing, be they the soldier’s huts
or the king’s tent, are physically adjoined. In The vnfortunate traueller, the sup-
posedly strict hierarchical boundaries of the structure of the camp are shown
to be porous, as social spaces collapse into each other.
The merging of social spaces is made clear in the opening paragraph of The
vnfortunate traueller. Wilton tells readers that he follows two spaces in his trav-
els: the court and the camp. This pairing offers a useful frame for understanding
how Nashe uses the military camp as a space in which social hierarchies are
mangled and disrupted. Wilton tells his audience that he “followed the campe
or the court, or the court & the camp.”37 In the first instance, the court and the
camp define the binary structure of the text: Wilton begins at the “camp” as he
follows great battles around Europe for the first half of the text before heading
to the “court” when he travels across Italy with the English courtier, the Earl of
Surrey, on the earl’s mission to woo his lover. But the “court” and the “camp” are
also repeatedly collapsed in The vnfortunate traueller, specifically within the
military camp. Wilton’s initial mention of these spaces begins by separating
the supposedly opposed spaces of the lowly battle camp and high king’s court
with “or” but quickly merges them together with an ampersand. The “court &
the camp” is a space that is at once opposed and elided, resulting in a satiric
space where social order is often upended. Nashe’s choice of the military camp,
where the court and camp were physically adjoined—the king and his advisors
are within walking distance of the lowly soldiers—is a deliberate starting point
for this narrative.
In the confined space of the military camp, the social divide between the
court and the camp is less clearly defined. Wilton tells us that, “In those quar-
ters [of the camp] are many companies: Much companie, much knauerie, as
true as that olde adage, Much curtesie, much subtiltie” (Sig. B1v). “Companie”
refers to the soldiers of the camp, who perform “knauerie” and these are par-
alleled against the “curtesie” of the court and its “subtiltie.”38 Wilton’s use of
36 John Twyning, London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), 3.
37 Nashe, The vnfortunate traueller, Sig. B1r.
38 On “companie” as a reference to a group of soldiers in this context, see Andrew Hadfield,
The Unfortunate Traveller, in A New Critical Edition of the Works of Thomas Nashe, eds.
Joseph Black, et.al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), notes.

“knauerie” and “subtiltie” marks a social difference between the actions of those
at the camp versus those at the court but ultimately suggests that both engage
in acts of deception. And the military camp and court, despite existing on the
peripheries of the ‘real’ battles, are shown to be rife with conflict as well.
Much of this social conflict is initiated by Wilton himself. Wilton is, to follow
Samuel Fallon’s definition, a satiric persona, much in the way that Nashe’s other
“reflexive author figure” often is—Pierce Penilesse.39 Fallon defines satiric per-
sonae as characters that “arise along boundaries, as characters that point
beyond themselves, to a world outside of any particular text—and that, in the
process, invite others to reimagine them” (7). As a literal and textual hanger-
on, an “appendix or page” in Wilton’s own words, Wilton embodies the type
of peripheral, highly mobile satiric persona common in prose in this period.40
Wilton’s function as a satiric persona is coupled with his function in the camp
as the embodiment of both war and satire, since he also disrupts social order
at the camp as a way to remedy it.
Wilton manipulates the social melting pot of the military camp first to enact
a carnivalesque reversal of social hierarchy. He positions himself as “sole king
of the cans and black iackes, prince of the pigmeis, countie pallaine of cleane
strawe and prouant, and to conclude, Lord high regent of rashers of the coles
and red herring cobs” (Sig. B1r). Merging positions of status—king, prince,
county palatine, and “Lord high regent”—with the quotidian parts of the battle
camp he rules over—drink, food, straw, and “pigmeis” (small people)—Wilton
becomes, as Mihoko Suzuki argues, an “alternative authority” in the camp.41
This continues when Wilton describes his relationship to the other soldiers:
the prince could but command men spend theyr bloud in his seruice, I
coulde make them spend all the monie they had for my pleasure … I was
prince of their purses, and exacted of my vnthrift subiects, as much liquid
allegeance as anie keisar in the world could do.42
Wilton’s claiming of authority in the camp also provides social satire. His link-
ing of his position over the soldiers of the camp with that of the king highlights
the parasitic nature of both of these relationships. The king extracts blood from
39 Samuel Fallon, Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 7.
41 Mihoko Suzuki, “‘Signiorie Ouer the Pages’: The Crisis of Authority in Nashe’s The Unfor-
tunate Traveller,” Studies in Philology 81, no. 3 (1984): 356.
42 Nashe, The vnfortunate traueller, Sig. B1v.

102 rowe
his subjects; Wilton extracts money—both forms of “liquid allegeance.” The

metaphor also suggests that monetary exchange in the military camp is akin to
the “exchange” of blood on the battlefield, in effect revealing a different kind of
warfare in England, as lords and subjects prey on each other. Extracting blood
for military service and money for “pleasure” are two forms of such behavior,
only differing in that the former is enacted by the “court” and the latter by the
“camp.” Either way, the figures who are leeching, stealing from, and attacking
those around them are not the foreign enemies but fellow compatriots.
Wilton’s actions at the camp further emphasize that the driving conflicts are
not those initiated by warring belligerents on the battlefield but by members
of society. Wilton’s function as a satiric persona means he enacts the “vilifica-
tion, ridicule or mockery” often associated with satire and he does so to target
English compatriots rather than foreign enemies.43 We see this when Wilton
gulls several members of the camp, which is made up of a collection of per-
sonae akin to the stock characters of Roman satires—braggart soldiers, money-
grabbing sutlers, and parasites. Wilton’s first target is a greedy sutler who runs
an alehouse. Wilton convinces him that the king believes him to be a spy and
that he should be “liberall” with his cider amongst the “poore souldiers” if he
wishes to win back the King’s affections. This gulling results in cheap drink for
all the common soldiers at the camp:
But the next daie I thinke we had a dole of syder, syder in houles, in scup-
pets, in helmets, & to conclude, if a man would haue fild his bootes full,
there hee might haue had it, prouant thrust it selfe into poore souldiers
pockets whether they would or no. We made fiue peals of shot into the
towne together, of nothing but spiggots and faussets of discarded emptie
barrels: euerie vnderfoote souldiour had a distenanted tunne, as Diogenes
had his tub to sléepe in. I my selfe got as many confiscated Tapsters aprons,
as made me a Tent, as bigge as any ordinarie commanders in the field.44
This scene transforms the military camp into a carnivalesque tavern. The sol-
diers’ armor, from their helmets to their boots, become drinking vessels and the
empty barrels are likened to shot being hurled into the nearby town. Wilton
even manages to acquire the tapster’s (the barman’s) apron and make a tent
out of it—one as big as a military commander’s tent. Wilton’s subversive posi-
tion as a “king” or “commander” at the camp is part of the wider confusion of
43 John N. King, “Traditions of Complaint and Satire,” in A Companion to English Renaissance

Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 368.
44 Nashe, The vnfortunate traueller, Sigs. B3v-4r.

high and low taking place. Members of the military camp are all grasping for
power, foregrounded when Wilton remarks that captaincies are only granted to
those with a “cappe in hand”—in other words, willing to beg to their superiors.
After tricking the alehouse keeper, Wilton’s next target is an “vgly mechanical
Captaine”—“mechanical” in reference to his status-seeking aspirations—by
manipulating his desperation for recognition (Sig B4v). Wilton tricks the cap-
tain into entering the enemy camp as a spy and pretending to be a defector.
The plan leads to the captain’s torture by both the French and the English, an
example of the “extreme” punishment commonly found in satire.45 The vio-
lence inflicted by both Wilton and the English on allies within the camp urges
readers to consider where the real enemy lies. The military camp is full of these
hangers-on, parasites, and ‘mechanical’ aspirants, and, as Wilton’s likening of
the camp to London suggests, these warring men exist in London as well.
In the satiric space of the military camp, Wilton’s gulling is often to fool and
humiliate those who seek to raise their station. The alehouse owner claims
to be from “an ancient house” and the “armes of his ancestrie” are “drawen
very amiably in chalke, on the in side of his tent doore.”46 The captain is a
mechanical aspirant, easily tricked into embarking on a foolhardy mission in
the hopes it will impress his superiors. Wilton’s claiming of an alternative and
disruptive authority in the camp is one that seeks to punish those who would
themselves disrupt the hierarchy of the camp and English society more broadly.
War and the camp may be shown to collapse social hierarchy in The vnfortunate
traueller, but Wilton’s gulling is a way to correct it.
The social confusion threatened in the camp and the violent means needed
to correct it come to fruition when Wilton and the readers move from the camp
to the battlefield. Leaving the relative safety of the camp to witness a real bat-
tle, the quashing of the Anabaptist rebellion, Wilton’s description tells us that
any remnants of social distinction apparent in the camp are blurred further in
the mass of bodies on the field:
all theyr weapons so slaying, empiercing, knocking downe, shooting

through, ouerthrowing, dissoule ioyned not halfe so many, as the hailing
thunder of their great ordenance: so ordinary at euerie footstep was the
imbrument of iron in bloud, that one could hardly discerne heads from
bullettes, or clottered haire from mangled flesh hung with gore.
p. E2v
45 Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967),
10.
46 Nashe, The vnfortunate traueller, Sigs. B1v-2r.

104 rowe
Despite his extended attack on the Anabaptists and eager support of their
impending doom in the pages preceding the battle, once the bloodshed begins
Wilton cannot tell the difference between victor and loser due to the confusion
of body parts and weaponry on the field. In The vnfortunate traueller, places,
bodies, and social roles are destabilized and “mangled” and on the battlefield
all distinction is lost. Like Wilton’s satirical gulling of ambitious members of
the military camp, war quashes disruption and rebellion by creating even more
discord.
The mangling enacted by war in The vnfortunate traueller is not only an
opportunity for Nashe’s satiric persona, Wilton, to gull stock characters in the
military camp or to revel in grotesque battle scenes, it is also analogous to satire
itself. The Roman satirist Juvenal, who Nashe was readily associated with by his
contemporaries, describes his satires as farrago—variously defined as “hotch-
potch,” “mish-mash,” “cattle-cake,” and “pigswill,” and even an allusion to the
genre’s etymological links with the Latin satura, meaning both verse satire and
a mixture or medley of food.47 In The vnfortunate traueller, the mish-mash of
food is exchanged for a mish-mash of bodies, alluding to the earlier confu-
sion of social bodies in the military camp where a hanger-on like Wilton can
become a king. Mangled bodies are not the only enactment of farrago in The
vnfortunate traueller. The chronology of the text is likewise a “mish-mash” of
historical episodes. The sieges of Thérouanne and Turney, where the narrative
starts, and the French-Swiss battle at Marignano that Wilton travels to next
both took place in 1513. The defeat of the Anabaptists in Münster, which Wilton
witnesses immediately after Marignano, took place in 1535. At the end of the
narrative, Wilton witnesses a royal summit between Henry viii and Francis i
of France, the Field of Cloth and Gold, which took place in 1520. In The vnfortu-
nate traueller, history itself becomes as mangled and indiscernible as the bodies
on the battlefield.
In The vnfortunate traueller, sites of war are vehicles for social satire that
also enact the genre itself, in which mingled forms, bodies, and persons dis-
rupt established hierarchies. But despite Wilton’s attempts to generate social
conflict in the camp as a means to remedy it, neither Wilton’s satiric disrup-
tion nor the literal confusion and dissolution of bodies on the battlefield offer
a cure. After his account of the battle at Münster, Wilton says, “This tale must
47 Maurice Hunt, “Thomas Nashe, The Vnfortvnate Traveller, and Love’s Labour’s Lost” Studies
in English Literature 1500–1900 54, no. 2 (2014): 298, Project muse. Victoria Rimell, “The
poor man’s feast: Juvenal,” in The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, edited by Kirk
Freudenburg. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 84–5.

at one time or other giue vp the ghost, and as good now as stay longer, I would
gladly rid my hands of it cleanly if I could tell how.”48 Wilton moralizes his own
account of the violence, switching between reveling in the grotesque details
of war and chastising his inability to “rid [his] hands of it.” Yet before Wilton
can pursue a line of thought that might remedy the horrors he has witnessed
and give both the war and this satirical text their didactic end, imagined ques-
tions from his listeners urge Wilton to continue with his grotesque accounts of
war:
What is there more as touching this tragedie that you would be resolued
of? saie quickly, for now my pen is got vpon his féet again: how I. Leiden
dide, is yt it? he dide like a dog, he was hanged and the halter paid for. For
his companions, do they trouble you? I can tel you they troubled some
men before, for they were all kild, and none escapt, no not so much as
one to tel the tale of the rainbow.
p. E2r
The battle scenes in The vnfortunate traueller are intentionally voyeuristic and
sensationalist, but Wilton’s suggestion that it is the probing reader that gets his
pen “vpon his féet again” places culpability in the reader’s desire for violence
over moralization. Despite contemporary assertions that war was remedial and
that satire could be reformative, Wilton’s comedic inability to resolve the chaos
surrounding him pessimistically exhausts the possibility that either may work
as a social corrective.
The target of Nashe’s satire shifts from a society at war, to the reader eagerly
consuming sensationalist conflict and biting satires under the guise of both
war’s and satire’s promised remedial and didactic ends. These themes are
repeated in Nashe’s earlier reflection on his satirical pamphlet ‘wars’ with
Gabriel Harvey, of which Nashe writes:
Were there no warres, poore men should haue no peace,

Vncessant warres with waspes and droanes I crie:
Hee that begins, oft knows not how to cease,
They haue begun, Ile follow till I die.
Ile heare no truce, wrong gets no graue in mee,
Abuse pell mell encounter with abuse:
48 Nashe, The vnfortunate traueller, Sig. E2v.

106 rowe
Write hee [Harvey] againe, Ile write eternally.

Who feedes reuenge hath found an endlesse Muse.49
War and satire are inseparable for Nashe as both encompass a ceaseless cycle of
conflict. Just as Cornwallis feared that war, even when used as a remedy, cannot
be pacified, Nashe connects his satirical pamphlet wars to literal wars through
his and Harvey’s inability to make peace. Later in his career, Nashe, like Wilton,
shifts culpability to his readers, as he writes that readers of his quarrel, “care
not how they set Haruey and mee on fire one against another, or wher vs on
to consume our selues.”50 Goaded by each other and their readers, Nashe and
Harvey are akin to belligerents in a war who are unwilling to retreat, feeding
the reading public’s insatiable hunger for war, both literal and literary.
The wars in The vnfortunate traueller are often literary, metaphorical, or take
place in a historic England already distant enough to be the “true subiect of
Chronicles,” but in Nashe’s “war” with Harvey, the only shots fired are paper bul-
lets.51 Still, real wars weighed heavily on the minds of many subjects in 1590s
England. Not only was this a period, as Hammer suggests, of “deep war” with
the constant threat of foreign invasion, it was also one marked by the threat
of civil strife, as economic riots plagued 1590s England. Though Nashe’s use of
“Vncessant warres” in Strange newes refers to his literary feud with Harvey, it
also points to Nashe’s broader satirization of the incessant warfare, both for-
eign and civil, felt by Elizabethan subjects at this time. Nashe’s satirization of
war and satire in The vnfortunate traueller and during his feud with Harvey may
present it as cyclical, inevitable, and even productive, but the mangled bod-
ies on the battlefield and Nashe’s remark that he and Harvey would consume
themselves in fire before making peace present the hollow aftermath of war-
fare.
Responding to Nashe and Harvey’s pamphlet war in 1606, Thomas Dekker
described Nashe as one “from whose aboundant pen, hony flow’d to thy friends,
and mortall Aconite to thy enemies: thou that madest the Doctor [Harvey] a
flat Dunce, and beat’st him at two sundry tall Weapons, Poetrie, and Orato-
rie.”52 The “two sundry tall Weapons” are a reference to the pike and long gun,
49 Thomas Nashe, Strange newes (London: John Danter for William Barley, 1593), Sig. M2v,
stc (2nd ed.) 18378, eebo.
50 Thomas Nashe, Haue with you to Saffron-walden (London: John Danter, 1596), Sig. E3r, stc
(2nd ed.) 18369, eebo.
52 Thomas Dekker, Newes from hell (London: R. Blower, S. Stafford, and Valentine Simmes,
1606), Sig. A3r, stc (2nd ed.) 6514, eebo.

placing Nashe and Harvey’s literary war on the early modern battlefield. With
a writing career that spanned the end of Elizabeth’s life and the entirety of
James i’s reign, Dekker often responded to ongoing wars abroad, civil unrest
in London, and conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. As far as we know,
Dekker never served in the military. He spent his life in London, working as a
playwright and pamphleteer who, given his seven-year stint in debtor’s prison,
was more likely to be bearing the brunt of civil law rather than serving it. But
Dekker often situated his writing in the realm of warfare. He wrote in 1608 that
pen and ink were more dangerous weapons than guns and powder, suggesting
instead that “The Pen is the Piece that shootes, Inck is the powder that carries,
and Wordes are the Bullets that kill.”53 And Dekker did not only inherit this
conception of writing-as-warfare from Nashe; he was a keen satirist too. For
Dekker, war offered an opportunity to satirize conflicts between the rich and
poor in London and further comment on war and satire’s shared properties of
disruption and correction.
4 Thomas Dekker
While Nashe exposes social warfare through a satiric mingling of forms and
the failed remedial powers of incessant war, Dekker uses social conflict as the
foundation of his narrative in Worke for armorours (1609). In this allegorical war
between Money and Poverty, social groups mingle and divide in unexpected
ways as both literal war and social war damage social cohesion. As discussed
earlier, Dekker’s two printings of this prose text came at renewed times of
peace. James i’s accession in 1603 had been more peaceful than expected. In
1604, England made peace with Spain and began to withdraw from the war in
the Low Countries, the Dutch Revolt, and in 1609 a ceasefire between the Low
Countries and Spain ended the forty-year conflict.54 As we have seen, peace
abroad could be a catalyst for social unrest at home. Dekker addresses his text
directly to the soldiers who fought in the Dutch Revolt, but he does not cele-
brate their return:
You haue for a long time scarce made sauing voyages into the Field: So far
as the Red Sea (of bloud) haue you venturde, and yet instead of Purchas-
53 Thomas Dekker, The dead tearme (London: William Jaggard, 1608), Sig. F1r, stc (2nd ed.)
6496, eebo.
54 Hugh Dunthorne, Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 1560–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2013), xxi–xxii.

108 rowe
ing Glory, haue brought home nothing but Contempt and Beggary, or at
least little or no money. The Hollander and the Spaniard haue bene (and
I thinke still are) your best Lords and Maisters: If euer Captaines did pray,
they haue prayed for them onely. Cutlers and Armorers, haue got more by
them within these few yeares, then by any fowre Nation (besides them) in
Christendome all their whole liues … Yet euen those Dutch warres, haue
bene vnto you that seru’d in them, but as wares in these dead times are to
Merchants and Tradsemen: you were the richer for hauing them in your
hands.55
The returning soldier should be greeted with glory and respect, but Dekker
highlights how, more often, they return to “Contempt and Beggary,” signaling
the ongoing poverty and vagrancy amongst veterans. The subtitle of Worke
for armorours is The peace is broken[:] Open warres likely to happin this yeare
1609. Referencing the recent peace achieved in Europe, Dekker’s text func-
tions as both a battle report, and as an almanac—a prediction of what is
to come. Dekker published a satirical almanac in the same year, The ravens
almanacke (1609), which predicts several civil wars, one between “Lawyers
and their clyants, and Westminster-hall is the field where it shall be fought,”
another between players, and, finally, an uprising against the “Merces, Silke-
mens and Gold-smithes” of Cheapside.56 Almanacs were a genre of cheap print
that Dekker could adopt as a vehicle for social satire. Worke for armorours, from
its dedication to soldiers to its detailed battle report, combines the almanac
form with that of the military text. In both works, Dekker leverages cultural anx-
ieties surrounding civil unrest and clashes between the rich and poor by using
established textual forms, almanacs and military books, and a satiric authorial
persona that slides between mock battle reporter and social satirist. But it is
in Worke for armorours that the predicted social war comes to a head as the
queens of Money and of Poverty battle one another.
Dekker does not state in the opening paratexts that the “war” in Worke for
armorours is an allegorical one between “Money” and “Poverty,” but he sets
up hostility between the two immediately in his address to soldiers. These
impoverished ex-soldiers are placed in opposition to those who benefit finan-
cially from war—“Cutlers and Armorers” and “Merchants and Tradsemen.” Here,
Dekker’s stance on war and the ex-soldier’s position in society marks a shift
from his earlier pamphlet The wonderfull yeare (1603), in which the peaceful
55 Dekker, Worke for armorours, Sigs. A4r-v.

56 Thomas Dekker, The ravens almanacke (London: Edward Allde and Nicholas Okes, 1609),
Sigs. D2v-3r, stc (2nd ed.) 6519.2, eebo.

ascension of James i is praised as Dekker writes, “by this time King James is
proclaimed … the Souldier now hangs up his armor, and is glad that he shall
feede upon the blessed fruites of peace.”57 In this instance, “the Souldier” refers
broadly to the military action of England, which acts as a collective soldier
returning from battle. England may collectively be enjoying the fruits of peace,
but as Dekker suggests in his direct address to soldiers, peacetime was not
so rewarding for individual military men. For many veterans, peace brought
poverty rather than “blessed fruites.”
The vagrant veteran, often disabled and living in poverty, was a common
sight on the streets of London. Dekker had already used the veteran character
in his dramatic works. In The shomakers holiday, Ralph, a conscripted soldier,
returns from France disabled—“lamde by the warres”—and discovers his wife
is to marry someone else.58 In the final act, the other shoemakers rescue Ralph’s
wife from her would-be husband, Hammon; a moment Linda Woodbridge
argues “must have brought cheers from public theater audiences.”59 Though
the plight of the impoverished ex-soldier elicits audience sympathy here, these
men were a source of anxiety for many. As outlined above, given their previ-
ous work, ex-soldiers were thought more prone to violence than other sorts of
vagrants. They were trained in handling weapons and had been known to incite
civil unrest throughout the sixteenth century.60 But in 1609, Dekker predicts
work for these soldiers, ending his address, “But be of good courage, the wind
shifts his point … For in this present yeare of 1609 drummes will be strucke
vp, and cullors spread, vnder which you may all fight, and all haue good pay.”61
Sending veterans, vagrants, and criminals to war was a long-standing method
used to clear the prisons and streets of undesirables in early modern England,
but it was necessary that these wars be abroad. Dekker’s promise of work for
soldiers becomes increasingly anxiety-inducing when it becomes apparent that
this war could be taking place at home, in England.
The location of the war “likely to happin this yeare” in Worke for armorours
is never specified, but when Dekker’s main text opens with a reflection on vari-
ous metaphorical wars taking place in plague-time London, the English reader
57 Thomas Dekker, The wonderfull yeare (London: Thomas Creede, 1603), C2v, stc (2nd ed.)
6535, eebo.
58 Thomas Dekker, The shomakers holiday (London: Valentine Simmes, 1600) I1r, stc (2nd
ed.) 6523, eebo.
59 Woodbridge, “The Neglected Soldier as Vagrant,” 69.
60 Beier, Masterless Men, 94; 105. Phillip Thomas, “Military Mayhem in Elizabethan Chester:
The Privy Council’s Response to Vagrant Soldiers,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical
Research 76, no. 308 (1998): 226–47, jstor.
61 Dekker, Worke for armorours, Sig. A4v.

110 rowe
can easily situate it at home. The first “war” is the plague, which is “still mark-
ing the people of this Cittie, (euery weeke) by hundreds for the graue,” caus-
ing the citizens and the city itself to become “mourners” and “their cheekes
(like cowardly Souldiers) [to] haue lost their colours” (Sig. B1r). In search of
entertainment, Dekker visits London’s Beargarden and encounters a second
metaphorical domestic war where the animals “play their Tragi-Comaedies as
liuely as euer they did” (Sig. B1v). Continuing his theme from his address to sol-
diers of pitting the poor against the wealthy, Dekker likens their conflict to the
battles between the dogs and beasts in the Beargarden—“for the Beares, or the
Buls fighting with the dogs, was a liuely representation (me thought) of poore
men going to lawe with the rich and mightie” (Sig. B2r). The dogs represent the
poor because they have “nothing” and are so often crushed by their stronger
adversaries—the rich. But Dekker then shifts the plight of the poor onto the
bear itself, which he likens to the “leading of poore starued wretches to the
whipping posts in London (when they had more neede to be reléeued with
foode)” (Sig. B2r). The following scene at the Beargarden, in which a clothed ape
enters riding a donkey, calls to mind for Dekker, “the infortunate condition of
Soldiers,” whom he likens to the donkey that is forced to carry “apish beastly and
ridiculous vices” of those proclaimed “great”—the powerful instigators of war
(Sig. B2v). The impoverished ex-soldiers, economic inequality, and even food
shortages that were pervasive in London at this time all unfold in this scene as
Dekker observes the conflict between the poor and rich theatrically played out
in a mock-civil-war between the animals and their baiters.
Worke for armorours sets up its allegorical war between Money and Poverty
by portraying an early modern London at war with itself, with baiters and ani-
mals dramatizing tensions between the rich and poor in the cramped, plague-
ridden city. After wearying of these mock wars, Dekker returns home and sits at
his window reading “Histories”—tales of battles that he can witness “without
danger to [his] selfe” (Sig. B2v). This reading is interrupted when the metaphor-
ical wars that Dekker witnessed in London are manifested: “on a suddaine all
the aire was filled with noise … But at the last drummes were heard to thun-
der, and trumpets to sound alarums, murmure ran vp & downe euery streete,
and confusion did beate at the gates of euery City” (Sig. B3r). The text shifts
from plague-time London to the promised war, one that Dekker puts in the con-
text of civil wars when he compares it to the War of the Roses, “The showers of
bloud which once rained downe vpon the heads of the two kingly families in
England, neuer drowned more people” (Sig. B4v). The war that Dekker goes on
to describe may be allegorical, but his extended treatment of plague-time Lon-
don as a space full of conflict between rich and poor and the lack of a boundary
between Dekker reading by his window and the outbreak of civil strife on the

streets urges readers to understand this war as taking place at home, rather
than at a safe enough distance to be observed “without danger.”
Dekker’s description of the two sides of this allegorical war also allows him
to use war as a vehicle for social satire. The two warring queens, Money and
Poverty, and their councils made up of allegorical figures, including Discon-
tent, Hunger, Sloth, Industry, and Despair for Poverty and Covetousness, Deceit,
and Usury for Money, evoke the personification of abstract qualities found in
medieval allegory, but along with his initial urban setting, Dekker’s descriptions
of these warring armies repeatedly reminds readers that this war should be
understood in an English, civil context (Sigs. C2v-D3r). Anna Bayman suggests
that “Sly references to the characters of Elizabeth’s councillors lurk in Dekker’s
descriptions of Poverty’s advisers” while James i’s court is mirrored in Money’s
court.62 Money’s court is certainly tied to excess and idleness—we are told
that her councilors ask her to refrain from her usual “reuellings, maskes, and
other Court-pleasures” during war. These activities are not unlike the abuses
of peacetime that Cornwallis and Bacon suggest must be remedied with war,
and link a peaceful, yet idle, Jacobean court to Money’s revelry. This link sug-
gests that both James i’s and Money’s courts need the fevered exercise of war
to correct their excesses.
Another catalyst for the war in Worke for armorours is the widened gap
between rich and poor created by “the golden mines of the west & east Indies,”
which have inflated Money’s pride and greed.63 As a result, Money banishes the
subjects of Poverty from her cities and instructs her subjects to exclude them:
[Money] on the soddaine, (most treacherously and most tyrannously)

laboured by all possible courses, not onely to driue the subiects of Pouerty
from hauing commerce in any of her rich & so populous Cities … Here-
upon strict proclamation went thundring, vp and downe her dominions,
charging her wealthy subiects, not to negotiate any longer with those beg-
gers, that flocke dayly to her kingdome, strong guards were planted at
euery gate, to barre their entrance into Cities.
p. C1r
In an act that reverses the social “mish-mash” of both early modern London and
the scenes in Nashe’s military camp, Money resorts to an extreme form of social
62 Anna Bayman, Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 134.
63 Dekker, Worke for armorours, C1r.

112 rowe
stratification that forcibly divides social classes. If war and satire enact nec-
essary disruptions of social hierarchies with an aim to correct them, Money’s
desire to widen the divide between rich and poor to the point of physically bar-
ring Poverty’s subjects from entering her cities is a rejection of this restorative
process. The response to this rejection is swift as rather than running in fear,
Poverty’s subjects:
grew desperate, and sticking closely, (like Prentises vpon Shrouetuesday

one to another, they vowed (come death, come diuels) to stand against
whole bands of browne rusty bille men, though for their labours they were
sure to be knockt downe like Oxen for the slaughter; but a number of Iack-
strawes being amongst them, and opening whole Cades of councell in a
cause so dangerous, they were all turned to dry powder, took fire of reso-
lution, and so went off with this thundring noise, that they would dy like
men, though they were but poore knaues, and counted the stinkards and
scum of the world: and yet as rash as they were, they would not run head-
long vpon the mouth of the Canon.
p. C2v
Although Money and Poverty are presented as two different nations, Dekker
invokes a range of anxieties about civil uprising and social disruption at home
in England. Poverty’s subjects are linked to gunpowder, as their rashness and
eagerness to fight makes their constitution akin to quick-burning gunpowder
as they turned to “dry powder,” “took fire,” and “went off with this thundring
noise.” Gunpowder’s socially disruptive potential is embodied by Poverty’s sub-
jects. This passage also evokes real civil uprisings that were prominent in the
English early modern cultural imagination. Dekker first likens Poverty’s sub-
jects to “Prentises vpon Shrouetuesday,” a reminder of the regular apprentice
riots during Shrovetide and other periods of carnival festivity.64 The ignition
of the rebellious spark, we are told, is a “number of Iack-strawes” amongst the
poor who opened “whole Cades of councell.” A jackstraw is a term for a “worth-
less, insignificant, or contemptible man,” and it is these men that open “cades,”
or barrels (another reference to gunpowder), of counsel to their compatriots to
encourage them to fight.65 Dekker’s use of “Jack,” “Straw,” and “Cade” have addi-
tional cultural resonances, since they conjure in the minds of English readers
the names of Jack Straw, one of the leaders of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, and
64 Paul S. Seaver, “Apprentice Riots in Early Modern London,” in Violence, Politics, and Gender
in Early Modern England, ed. Joseph P. Ward (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 17–20.
65 “jackstraw, n.,” oed.

Jack Cade, the leader of the eponymous 1450 popular revolt. These nods again
remind readers that this war is taking place at home in England, and is rooted
in civil discord rather than foreign conflict. Money’s attempts to peaceably
enforce social hierarchy has generated not just disruption, but a civil uprising.
The allegorical battle of Worke for armorours ends in a ceasefire and a neces-
sary return to the status quo. The divide between poverty and wealth continues
as Dekker concludes, “Shop-keepers fell to their old, What doe you lacke: The
rich men feast one another (as they were wont) and the poore were kept poore
still in pollicy, because they should doe no more hurt.”66 The conflict has ended
in a fashion unusual to satire—with an anti-climactic ceasefire in which nei-
ther side is punished. Yet Dekker also adds that following the truce, Money and
Poverty formed “two Nations so mighty and so mingled together, and so dis-
persed into all parts of the world, that it was impossible to seuer them” (G3r).
The status quo that is returned to is one of “mingled” civil union, in which con-
fusion and conflict between rich and poor are as necessary as order and peace.
Merridee L. Bailey argues that Dekker takes the reader “from emotional and
social harmony before the war (although importantly, the world before these
events does not contain moral harmony or fairness), to imbalance during the
war, and back to harmony (but again no moral fairness) after the truce.”67 For
Dekker, the cyclical nature of war and peace as a means to maintain social bal-
ance and order is key, and his social satire ameliorates conflict. Whereas Nashe
pessimistically satirizes his readers for their desire for “incessant warres” and
incessant satire without any remedial, corrective function, Dekker offers an
optimistic scenario whereby both war and satire have the power both to dis-
rupt and, in turn, restore social cohesion.
This essay has argued that literal and literary wars not only act as vehicles for
social satire, but that they also mirror satire’s function as a force that is both dis-
ruptive and corrective. Nashe and Dekker each explore these forces, but come
to different conclusions. Nashe satirizes his readers’ desire for entertainment,
whether it comes in the form of war or satire, and finds little remedy or peace in
incessant cycles of real, social, and literary warfare. The ensuing “mish-mash”
is just that, a chaotic mess of social and political disorder, one Nashe satirically
enacts throughout his works. Although Dekker also engages in these ongoing
wars, he writes at a time of renewed peace. Disruption is reframed as a neces-
sary reshuffling aimed to mock social disorder, but also to express its potential.
66 Dekker, Worke for armorours, G3v.

67 Merridee L. Bailey, “The Importance of Equilibrium in Thomas Dekker’s A Worke For
Armourers (1609),” English Studies 99, no. 2 (2018): 125–6, Taylor & Francis.

114 rowe
By linking the satirical mode’s penchant for metaphorical violence, mingling

destructive and corrective rhetorical strategies with invocations of early mod-
ern warfare, Nashe and Dekker satirize their respective historical moments of
civil unrest as they probe the question as to what constitutes civility writ large.
Through their shared deployment of war as a rhetorical vehicle, both ask not
only: “war, what is it good for?” but also: “satire, what is it good for?”68
Works Cited
Ailes, Mary Elizabeth. “Camp Followers, Sutlers, and Soldiers’ Wives: Women in Early
Modern Armies (c. 1450–c. 1650).” In A Companion to Women’s Military History,
edited by Barton Hacker and Margaret Vining, 61–91. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Andresová, Klára. “Military Camps in Military Manuals.” Negotiating Conflict and Con-
troversy in the Early Modern Book World, edited by Alexander Samuel Wilkinson and
Graeme Kemp, 163–177. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
Archer, Ian W. The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Bacon, Francis. The Essayes Or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall, of Francis Lo. Verulam,
Viscount St. Alban. London: Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625, stc (2nd ed.)
1148, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/essayes‑counsels‑ciuill‑morall‑franci
s‑lo‑verulam/docview/2248543034/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Bailey, Merridee L. “The Importance of Equilibrium in Thomas Dekker’s A Worke
For Armourers (1609).” English Studies 99, no. 2 (2018): 113–29, Taylor & Francis.
doi:10.1080/0013838X.2017.1418041.
Barret, Robert. The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Vvarres Discoursed in Dialogue
Vvise. VVherein is Declared the Neglect of Martiall Discipline: The Inconuenience
Thereof: The Imperfections of Manie Training Captaines: A Redresse by due Regard
had: The Fittest Weapons for our Moderne Vvarre: The Vse of the Same: The Parts of a
Perfect Souldier in Generall and in Particular: The Officers in Degrees, with their Seuer-
all Duties: The Imbattailing of Men in Formes Now most in Vse: With Figures and Tables
to the Same: With Sundrie Other Martiall Points. VVritten by Robert Barret. Compre-
hended in Sixe Bookes. London: Richard Field for William Posonby, 1598, stc (2nd
68 Many thanks to Jennifer Richards, Jake Phipps, and the anonymous reader at Explorations
in Renaissance Culture for your valuable feedback on earlier versions of this essay and
thank you as well Kristen Abbott Bennett for your thoughtful editing and support. I am
grateful too to Andrew Hadfield for sharing a draft of his editorial notes for The Unfortu-
nate Traveller from the forthcoming A New Critical Edition of the Works of Thomas Nashe,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ed.) 1500, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/theorike‑practike‑moderne‑vvar

res‑discoursed/docview/2248571419/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Bayman, Anna. Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern Lon-
don. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
Beier, A.L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England. London: Methuen, 1985.
Bucholz, Robert O. and Joseph P. Ward. London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Harper
Collins Publishers, 2003.
Cornwallis, William. Discourses Vpon Seneca the Tragedian. by Sir William Cornwal-
leys, Knight. London: S. Stafford for Edmund Mattes, 1601, stc (2nd ed.) 5774. eebo.
https://www.proquest.com/books/discourses‑vpon‑seneca‑tragedian‑sir‑william/d
ocview/2240872420/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Cruickshank, C.G. Elizabeth’s Army. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.
Davis, Alex. Renaissance Historical Fiction: Sidney, Deloney, Nashe. Cambridge: D.S.
Brewer, 2011.
Day, Angel. Vpon the Life and Death of the most Worthy, and Thrise Renowmed Knight,
Sir Phillip Sidney a Commemoration of His Worthines, Contayning a Briefe Recapitu-
lation, of His Valiant Vsage and Death Taken, in Her Maiesties Seruices of the Warres
in the Low-Countries of Flaunders. London: Robert Walde-graue, 1586, stc (2nd ed.)
6409, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/vpon‑life‑death‑most‑worthy‑thrise
‑renowmed/docview/2240862986/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Dekker, Thomas. The Shomakers Holiday. Or the Gentle Craft VVith the Humorous Life of
Simon Eyre, Shoomaker, and Lord Maior of London. as it was Acted before the Queenes
most Excellent Maiestie on New-Yeares Day at Night Last, by the Right Honourable the
Earle of Notingham, Lord High Admirall of England, His Seruants. London: Valen-
tine Sim[me]s, 1600, stc (2nd ed.) 6523, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/
shomakers‑holiday‑gentle‑craft‑vvith‑humorous/docview/2240897080/se‑2?accou
ntid=163371.
Dekker, Thomas. The Vvonderfull Yeare. 1603 Wherein is Shewed the Picture of London,
Lying Sicke of the Plague. at the Ende of all (Like a Mery Epilogue to a Dull Play) Cer-
taine Tales are Cut Out in Sundry Fashions, of Purpose to Shorten the Liues of Long
Winters Nights, that Lye Watching in the Darke for Vs. London: Thomas Creede, 1603,
stc (2nd ed.) 6535, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/vvonderfull‑yeare‑1603
‑wherein‑is‑shewed‑picture/docview/2240866461/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Dekker, Thomas. Nevves from Hell Brought by the Diuells Carrier. Tho: Dekker. London:
R. Blower, S. Stafford, and Valentine Simmes, 1606, stc (2nd ed.) 6514, eebo. https://
www.proquest.com/books/nevves‑hell‑brought‑diuells‑carrier‑tho‑dekker/docvie
w/2240858464/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Dekker, Thomas. The Dead Tearme. Or, VVestminsters Complaint for Long Vacations and

116 rowe
Short Termes Written in Manner of a Dialogue Betweene the Two Cityes London and
Westminster. the Contentes of this Discourse is in the Page Following. by T. Dekker. Lon-
don: William Jaggard, 1608, stc (2nd ed.) 6496. eebo. https://www.proquest.com/
books/dead‑tearme‑vvestminsters‑complaint‑long/docview/2248568283/se‑2?acco
untid=163371.
Dekker, Thomas. The Raueuens [Sic] Almanacke Foretelling of a Plague, Famine. and
Ciuill Warre. that Shall Happen this Present Yeare 1609. Not Only within this Kingdome
of Great Brittaine, but also in France, Germany, Spayne, & Other Parts of Christen-
dome. with Certanie [Sic] Remedies, Rules, and Receipts, how to Preuent Or at Least to
Abate the Edge of these Vniuersall Calamities. London: Edward Allde and Nicholas
Okes, 1609, stc (2nd ed.) 6519.2, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/raueuens
‑sic‑almanacke‑foretelling‑plague‑famine/docview/2248568304/se‑2?accountid=16
3371.
Dekker, Thomas. VVorke for armorours: Or, the peace is broken open warres likely to hap-
pin this yeare 1609: Written by thomas dekker. London: Nicholas Okes for Nathaniel
Butter, 1609, stc (2nd ed.) 6536, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/vvorke
‑armorours‑peace‑is‑broken‑open‑warres/docview/2240853081/se‑2?accountid=16
3371.
Dryden, John. Absalom and Achitophel a Poem. Dublin, 1681, Wing D2214, ebbo. https://
www.proquest.com/books/absalom‑achitophel‑poem/docview/2240977523/se‑2?a
ccountid=163371.
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Nashe and Sidney: The Tournament in The Unfortunate
Traveller.” The Modern Language Review 63, no. 1 (1968): 3–6, jstor. doi:10.2307/3722
637.
Dunthorne, Hugh. Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 1560–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2013.
Fallon, Samuel. Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Fourquevaux, Raimond de. Instructions for the Warres Amply, Learnedly, and Politiquely,
Discoursing the Method of Militarie Discipline. Originally Written in French by that
Rare and Worthy Generall, Monsieur William De Bellay, Lord of Langey, Knight of the
Order of Fraunce, and the Kings Lieutenant in Thurin. Translated by Paule Iue, Gent.
London: Thomas Orwin for Thomas Man and Tobie Cooke, 1589, stc (2nd ed.) 1708.5,
eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/instructions‑warres‑amply‑learnedly‑poli
tiquely/docview/2264206677/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Gadja, Alexandra. “Debating War and Peace in Late Elizabethan England.” The Histori-
cal Journal 52, no. 4 (2009): 851–878, ProQuest. doi:10.1017/S0018246X09990331.
Griffin, Dustin. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: The University Press of Ken-
tucky, 1994.

Hammer, Paul E.J. Elizabeth’s Wars:War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544–
1604. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003.
Hunt, Maurice. “Thomas Nashe, The Vnfortvnate Traveller, and Love’s Labour’s Lost.”
sel Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 54, no. 2 (2014): 297–314, Project muse.
doi:10.1353/sel.2014.0017.
“jackstraw, n.” oed Online. Last modified December 2021, https://www.oed.com/view/
Entry/100541?redirectedFrom=jack+straw.
Jones, William R. Satire in the Elizabethan Era: An Activistic Art. New York: Routledge,
2017.
Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Inside the Outsider: Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller and Bakhtin’s
Polyphonic Novel.” elh 50, no. 1 (1983): 61–81, jstor. doi.org:10.2307/2872768.
Jorgensen, Paul A. “Theoretical Views of War in Elizabethan England.” Journal of the
History of Ideas 13, No. 4 (1952): 469–481, jstor. doi.org/10.2307/2707713.
King, John N. “Traditions of Complaint and Satire.” A Companion to English Renaissance
Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Hattaway, 367–377. Hoboken: Blackwell
Publishing, 2003.
Levy, Jack S. War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975. Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1983.
Nashe, Thomas. Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Diuell. Written by Tho. Nash, Gent,
London: Abel Jeffes for John Busby, 1592, stc (2nd ed.) 18373, eebo. https://www
.proquest.com/books/pierce‑penilesse‑his‑supplication‑diuell‑written/docview/22
40906488/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Nashe, Thomas. The Apologie of Pierce Pennilesse. Or Strange Newes, of the Intercepting
Certaine Letters, and a Conuoy of Verses, as they were Going Priuilie to Victuall the
Lowe Countries. by Tho. Nashe Gentleman. London: John Danter for William Barley,
stc (2nd ed.) 18378, 1593, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/apologie‑pierce
‑pennilesse‑strange‑newes/docview/2240929108/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Nashe, Thomas. The Vnfortunate Traueller. Or, the Life of Iacke Wilton Newly Corrected
and Augmented. London: Thomas Scarlet for Cuthbert Burby, 1594, stc (2nd ed.)
18380, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/vnfortunate‑traueller‑life‑iacke‑wil
ton‑newly/docview/2248584501/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveler. Edited by Andrew Hadfield, In A New Criti-
cal Edition of the Works of Thomas Nashe, edited by Joseph Black, Andrew Hadfield,
Jennifer Richards, and Cathy Shrank. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming,
notes.
Nashe, Thomas. Haue Vvith You to Saffron-Vvalden. Or, Gabriell Harueys Hunt is Vp Con-
taining a Full Answere to the Eldest Sonne of the Halter-Maker. Or, Nashe His Con-
futation of the Sinfull Doctor. the Mott Or Posie, in Stead of Omne Tulit Punctum: Pacis
Fiducia Nunquam. as Much to Say, as I Sayd I would Speake with Him. London: John
Danter, 1596. stc (2nd ed.) 18369, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/haue

118 rowe
‑vvith‑you‑saffron‑vvalden‑gabriell‑harueys/docview/2240929529/se‑2?accountid=
163371.
Nayar, Sheila J. “Arms or the Man i: Gunpowder Technology and the Early Modern
Romance.” Studies in Philology 114, no. 3 (2017): 517–560, jstor. https://www.jstor.org
/stable/90011223.
Parker, Geoffrey and Angela Parker. European Soldiers, 1550–1650. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1977.
Paulson, Ronald. The Fictions of Satire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.
Randall, David. Credibility in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Military News. Abingdon: Tay-
lor & Francis, 2008.
Randolph, Mary Claire. “The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory:
Its Possible Relationships and Implications.” Studies in Philology 38, no. 2 (1941): 125–
57. jstor, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4172521.
Rich, Barnabe. Allarme to England Foreshewing what Perilles are Procured, Where the
People Liue without Regarde of Martiall Lawe. with a Short Discourse Conteyning
the Decay of Warlike Discipline, Conuenient to be Perused by Gentlemen, such as are
Desirous by Seruice, to Seeke their Owne Deserued Prayse, and the Preseruation of their
Countrey. Newly Deuised and Written by Barnabe Riche Gentleman. London: Henrie
Middleton for Christopher Barker, 1578, stc (2nd ed.) 20979, eebo. https://www
.proquest.com/books/allarme‑england‑foreshewing‑what‑perilles‑are/docview/22
48541458/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Rimell, Victoria. “The poor man’s feast: Juvenal.” In The Cambridge Companion to Roman
Satire, edited by Kirk Freudenburg, 81–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005.
Seaver, Paul S. “Apprentice Riots in Early Modern London.” In Violence, Politics, and Gen-
der in Early Modern England, edited by Joseph P. Ward, pp. 17–40. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008.
Salamon, Linda Bradley. “Vagabond Veterans.” In Rogues and Early Modern English Cul-
ture, edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, 261–93. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2004.
Suzuki, Mihoko. “‘Signiorie Ouer the Pages’: The Crisis of Authority in Nashe’s The
Unfortunate Traveller.” Studies in Philology 81, no. 3 (1984): 348–371, jstor. http://
www.jstor.org/stable/4174180.
Taunton, Nina. “Aspects of Watchfulness and Command in the 1590s Military Camp
and Shakespeare’s Henry v,” eese (1998), http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/
artic98/taunton/6_98.html#funo24.
Taylor, John. Taylor His Trauels: From the Citty of London in England, to the Citty of
Prague in Bohemia the Manner of His Abode there Three Weekes, His Obseruations
there, and His Returne from Thence: How He Past 600 Miles Downe the Riuer of Elue,
through Bohemia, Saxony, Anhalt, the Bishoprick of Madeberge, Brandenberge, Ham-

burgh, and so to England. with Many Relations Worthy of Note. by Iohn Taylor. London:
Nicholas Okes for Henry Gosson, 1620, stc (2nd ed.) 23802, eebo. https://www
.proquest.com/books/taylor‑his‑trauels‑citty‑london‑england‑prague/docview/224
8559852/se‑2?accountid=163371.
Thomas, Phillip. “Military Mayhem in Elizabethan Chester: The Privy Council’s Re-
sponse to Vagrant Soldiers.” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 76,
no. 308 (1998): 226–47, jstor. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44230157.
Twyning, John. London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern
City. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998.
Ward, Allyna E. “An Outlandish Travel Chronicle: Farce, History, and Fiction in Thomas
Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller.” The Yearbook of English Studies 41, no. 1, (2011):
84–98, jstor. doi:10.5699/yearenglstud.41.1.0084.
Wheeler, Laura Scavuzzo. “The Development of an Englishman: Thomas Nashe’s The
Unfortunate Traveller.” In Historicizing Christian Encounters with the Other, edited
by John C. Hawley, 56–73. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Woodbridge, Linda. “The Neglected Soldier as Vagrant, Revenger, Tyrant Slayer in Early
Modern England.” In Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical
Perspective, edited by A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock, 64–87. Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2008.


Satire, What Is It Good For?: Satire and War in Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker's Prose

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Satire, What Is It Good For?: Satire and War in Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker's Prose

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Explorations in Renaissance Culture

Satire, What Is It Good For?

Emily Rowe | orcid: 0000-0002-2946-6563

Thomas Nashe – Thomas Dekker – satire – prose – war – military – violence –

© emily rowe, 2022 | doi:10.1163/23526963-04801005 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

2 War in Early Modern England

And as for newes of battells, or of War,

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

At Ordinaries, and at Barbers shopps,

As Taylor suggests here, Londoners discussed the intricacies of recent battles

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

The true end of Satyre, is the amendment of Vices by correction; And he

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

travel narratives, and chivalric romance.26 This generic “medley” is linked by

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

his subjects; Wilton extracts money—both forms of “liquid allegeance.” The

43 John N. King, “Traditions of Complaint and Satire,” in A Companion to English Renaissance

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

all theyr weapons so slaying, empiercing, knocking downe, shooting

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Were there no warres, poore men should haue no peace,

48 Nashe, The vnfortunate traueller, Sig. E2v.

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Write hee [Harvey] againe, Ile write eternally.

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

55 Dekker, Worke for armorours, Sigs. A4r-v.

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

[Money] on the soddaine, (most treacherously and most tyrannously)

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

grew desperate, and sticking closely, (like Prentises vpon Shrouetuesday

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

66 Dekker, Worke for armorours, G3v.

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

By linking the satirical mode’s penchant for metaphorical violence, mingling

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

ed.) 1500, eebo. https://www.proquest.com/books/theorike‑practike‑moderne‑vvar

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/10/2024 10:03:53AM

You might also like