Commodifying the Author: The Mediation of Aretino’s Fame in the Harvey-Nashe Pamphlet War

Abstract

This essay considers the ways in which one of the key literary events of the 1590s, the Harvey-Nashe pamphlet war, was influenced by the posthumous reputation of the controversial Italian author Pietro Aretino. This literary quarrel was important not only in defining the more aggressive tone of English satire in the 1590s, but also because it marked a key development in conceptions of authorial identity. Aretino was known as the prototypical professional author, having garnered fame and wealth through publication. However, by the time of the Nashe-Harvey debate he had become a symbol of Italianate vice in the minds of most English commentators. This essay suggests that the transformation of Aretino’s posthumous reputation was enacted by a process of ‘vanished mediation’ and will argue that a eulogy to Aretino from The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) displays Nashe’s acute awareness of the ways in which Aretino’s literary history had been rewritten by his detractors. The example of the posthumous treatment of Aretino’s reputation informed Nashe’s concerns over the reliability of print to preserve his own literary fame, an uneasiness he expressed most fully in Have with you to Saffron-Walden (1596). [K.D.]