Reviewed by: The Age of Thomas Nashe: Text, Bodies and Trespasses of Authorship in Early Modern England ed. by Stephen Guy-Bray, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz Jason Scott-Warren (bio) Stephen Guy-Bray, Joan Pong Linton, and Steve Mentz, eds. The Age of Thomas Nashe: Text, Bodies and Trespasses of Authorship in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. viii + 201. $104.95. “Nashe scholars, it seems to me, feel the constant pressure to act as his defense team” (167). So writes Corey McEleney in the concluding essay of this collection, asking us to rise to the challenge of texts whose very point is their pointlessness, their refusal to fit in with both modern and early modern canons of usefulness. (Nashe’s is, according to McEleney, a “futilitarian style” [154], crafted as the ultimate response to those sixteenth-century humanists who inveighed against “unprofitable” romances and insisted that the delights of poetry were merely sugar-coating for the bitter pill of moral philosophy.) This claim inevitably casts its shadow back across the volume as a whole. What do we need Nashe for? What purposes does he serve? And are we really guilty of resisting his central purpose, the flaunting of linguistic pleasure for its own sake, as we dragoon his texts into our doggedly purposeful academic papers? These questions suggest that the job of writing about Nashe is by no means self-evident. While critical industries have long since grown up around many of his contemporaries, this author has remained something of a question mark, an invitation to anxious metacritical reflection. In his introduction to the collection, Steve Mentz proposes that Nashe offers a way into numerous areas of current critical concern, chief among them urban experience, print culture and authorship, early modern theater, religion, polemic, and pornography. Several of these interests coalesce in Georgia Brown’s essay, which opens proceedings by triangulating Nashe, Ovid, and Shakespeare as profoundly urban writers. In her analysis, Nashe picks up on Ovid’s simultaneous fascination with and disquiet at life in the city, where sex and poetry become marketable wares. His fundamental complicity in London’s perverse vitality can only be resolved through satire; Nashe bites the hand that feeds him, excoriating urban vice from a thoroughly compromised position. The railing, extemporal vein that he pioneers feeds into the early work of Shakespeare; The Taming of the Shrew is, in Brown’s view, a thoroughly Nashean work. To return to my question—what do we need Nashe for?—here it seems that he signifies a modernity that has long historical roots. He is a distinctive cultural agent who creates a certain mode of urban being, in the interstices between two indubitably canonical writers. Other essays in the collection take on different aspects of Nashe’s nascent modernity. Melissa Hull Geil focuses on print and the anxieties about reproduction that proliferated in print. While printed midwifery manuals devoted ever more space to abnormal or monstrous births, Nashe’s prose plays repeatedly with the idea of the “paper monster.” Whether Nashe is attacking the anti-episcopal writer John Penry, “this monster of Cracouia” (90), or Gabriel Harvey, conceived when “an Incubus in the likenes of an inke-bottle had carnall copulation with [End Page 444] his mother” (96), Geil finds Nashe linking monstrosity with the procreativity of print. Karen Kettnich argues that Nashe’s improvisatory wit was a property that he borrowed from the theaters, and in particular from the clown Richard Tarlton. Professional drama provided Nashe with a way of selling his prose, of rendering it marketable, but it also left him in something of a fix, confronting the problem of “how to write in a manner that is both extemporal and original” (112). John V. Nance detects another influence at work in Nashe’s writings, Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica. This prompts Nashe’s fascination with the science of anatomy—rendered most plain in the title of one of his earliest works, The Anatomie of Absurditie—and his interest in grotesquely broken bodies. (Nance’s arguments might be more convincing if he were capable of quoting accurately: a short passage on page 123 contains six errors; another, on page 127, seven...