Shakespeare, Nashe, and the Famous Victories of Henry V

Abstract

THAT Shakespeare had a careful eye on what Thomas Nashe was writing cannot be denied, as the careful researches of J. J. M. Tobin have frequently argued in this journal.1 Some years ago Prof. Tobin contributed an insightful note on Nashe’s influence on Henry IV, Part One in which he argued that Pierce Pennilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592) had a particular influence on Shakespeare’s representation of Falstaff.2 The influence detected here is surely right: but, given how much writers in this period read each other’s works and entered into dialogue with each other, there is surely a lot more to say about Nashe and Shakespeare. Many years ago G. Blakemore Evans noted that there was an obvious connection between a passage in Nashe’s most sustained attack on Gabriel Harvey, Have With You To Saffron Walden (1596) and Henry IV, Part One.3 Evans cites a long passage from the start of the ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ outlining the variety of different ‘Dicks’ who need to be distinguished from the addressee, Richard Lichfield, the barber of Trinity College, Cambridge, to make his case