The Development of an Englishman: Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller

Abstract

Thomas Nashe’s 1594 fictional account of an Englishman abroad, The Unfortunate Traveller; or, the Life of Jack Wilton, brings to the forefront many of the prejudices present in Elizabethan society. The hero of the work, the irreverent page Jack Wilton, encounters an array of foreign figures grotesque and comical in his travels through Europe, which culminate in Jack’s confrontations with the dangers of a corrupt and degenerate Italy. The Unfortunate Traveller draws on many of the most popular genres of its time, as Nashe’s character recounts for his English audience the adventures he undergoes while outside the boundaries of a safer England. Alternating between serious and flippant tones, Jack describes locales he encounters in the style of current travelogues and provides commentary on the wild events he depicts. Throughout, Jack proves a narrator hardly to be trusted, a quality which he constantly points out to his audience with sarcastic asides. Ann Rosalind Jones notes that Nashe “plunges, one by one, into the oral and written forms of his time: humanist oration, Anglican sermon, jest-book anecdotes, urban journalism, satire, aristocratic lyric, revenge tragedy,” without committing to any one of these literary modes (“Inside the Outsider” 64). Although these various modes are held together by the forceful voice of Nashe’s character Jack Wilton, the book’s many elements have led to much critical argument over how the novel as a whole should be labeled.1