Wit and The Art of Memory in Nashe’sThe Unfortunate Traveller

Abstract

This essay explores the importance of the art of memory in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Nashe represents the art of memory not only as a rhetorical method (using places and images to construct a location for memory), but also as his own literary method. Nashe draws attention to his prose poetics of memory throughout the novella, particularly in its framing device: as the narrator Jack Wilton tells his tale at the local English pub, he constructs a memory theater of sorts, a building-cum-book of memory that recollects both his personal history and the history of the Renaissance. Jack delivers his story as though he is a courtier, an orator, and a poet-performer, roles linked in the mnemonic tradition—from Cicero’s On the Orator, to Castiglione’s The Courtier, to Sidney’s Apology for Poetry—that Nashe inherits and reforms. Beginning with Nashe’s earliest writing, I examine his career-long concern with the relationship of the art of memory to the art of concealing art, an expression of the ideal courtier’s wit, and an important concept in The Unfortunate Traveller. [R.H]