“Who Feeds Revenge Hath Found an Endless Muse”: Nashe, Satire, and the Poetics of Vengeance

Abstract

This article tells a new story about how satire and revenge tragedy cross-pollinated in the late Elizabethan period. Though widely acknowledged as a genius of prose satire, Thomas Nashe is not a figure we much associate with revenge tragedy. I argue, however, that Nashe was in fact one of that genre’s most provocative contributors and theorists, a role he came to in the pamphlets of the Nashe-Harvey quarrel and The Unfortunate Traveller. These works leverage a structural analogy between literary flyting and revenge feuds noted by Edward Coke, one that enables Nashe to translate revenge from stage to page. Between 1592 and 1596, Nashe and those in his orbit borrow tropes, forms, and rhetoric from contemporaneous revenge tragedy to model the enmities and alliances their collective milieu and to fashion for satire an explicit poetics—an equation of revenge with writing that Nashe celebrates as a potentially “endless Muse.” Read in this context, Nashe’s most inscrutable and anomalous work becomes newly legible. In the final section I argue that The Unfortunate Traveller is a deconstructed revenge tragedy, racked by newfound doubt as to the sustainability of its author’s project.