Ovid and the 'free play with signs' in Thomas Nashe's "The Unfortunate Traveller"

Abstract

Thomas Nashe (1567-1600) is famous for his bizarre prose style--full of neologisms and disjointed periods, and run together with all manner of 'high' and 'low' language--racy, eloquent, slangy, and wildly ironical. Much of this stylistic gallimaufry is part of a broader 'dislocatedness', the function of which is often to express a social or intellectual alienation. In "The Unfortunate Traveller," his most famous work, Nashe develops this play of style with a new technique--the distortion of sign-functions. This is manifested in his awry chronology, his descriptions of symbolic communication, and most of all in his use of quotations of the classical poet Ovid. It is this semiotic abandon, with the function of satirizing fundamental modes of late Renaissance thought, that best characterizes Nashe's literary technique in the novel.