Shakespeare Yes, Thomas Nashe No

[banner] alas too horizontal crop of Webbe gun/gunner image

22 June 2025
· I direct my (f)ire at an imperfect conjecture ·
  • I do beseech you,
  • Though I perchance am vicious in my guess
  • (As I confess it is my Nature’s plague
  • To spy into abuses, and oft my jealousy
  • Shapes faults that are not) that your wisdom,
  • From one that so imperfectly conjects,
  • Would take no notice, nor build yourself a trouble
  • Out of his scattering and unsure observance

  • — Iago to Othello in Othello, Act 3 Scene 3

In late 1592 the young writer Thomas Nashe took up his pen to defend his friend Robert Greene, after Greene died and was libelled in his grave by Gabriel Harvey. More than four centuries later I take up my pen to defend Nashe, from something worse than libel that I know too well: erasure. It’s disappointing to feel it necessary to spell this out, but here we are.

De Vere’s de Vere, and Nashe is Nashe, and ever the twain discrete.

An imperfect conjecture has been receiving Oxfordian attention in recent months. It imperfectly conjects that Thomas Nashe never existed, and that everything with his name on it was written by me using that name as a pseudonym. The attention has included coverage by the organisations bearing my name on either side of the Atlantic, both by tradition bastions of careful scholarship. The Oxford-was-Nashe conjecture has become a meme, expanding in the small corner of the internet that advocates for my recognition as Shake-⁠Speare.

Wicked Witch of the West, melting, meltingI had hoped to see the meme fizzle like the witch in Oz, doused with a bucket of better thinking. Until now I felt that my book spoke clearly for me, that I didn’t need to say more. What book? (You must be new here.) Last October (2024) saw the publication of Saffron Walden Annotated, my adaptation of what I consider to be Thomas Nashe’s most entertaining work: Have With You to Saffron Walden, from 1596. As with everything Tom wrote in his short lifeBorn in late 1567, his published work spanned the years from 1589 to 1600. He died prior to the end of 1601., in Saffron Walden he is his own man from cover to cover. He lived closer to society’s margins than he deserved, but he was an insider in literary London. I served with Tom Nashe, I knew Tom Nashe, Tom Nashe was a friend of mine. Partisans, I was no Tom Nashe.

Let’s review. The early 1590s found me remarried and residing well north of the city in Stoke Newington (we didn’t move to Hackney until ’96). I found peace in the quiet. When I wasn’t cleaning up my previous work I wrote poetry for myself, not pamphlets for the public. My wife Eliza had our son HenryNot to be confused with my other significant Henry, the Third Earl of Southampton. Henry Wriothesley was twenty years older than Henry de Vere. in 1593. I had small reason and less desire to engage in a paper war with Gabriel Pedantius Harvey, DCL, more than a decade after the cur bit the hand that had been generous to him. My life had changed. I had changed. Harvey was water under the bridge.

back cover of Saffron Walden AnnotatedNashe had his own reasons for taking on the Doctor from Saffron Walden. These I summarised on the back cover of Saffron Walden Annotated as THE HARVEY–NASHE QUARREL, IN A NUTSHELL. Tom also had the proper weapon for the job: the deadly stoccado in his pen. Scotched and carbonadoed like a sausage on a spit, Doctor Vanderhulk never recovered.

Setting aside the question of anti-Harvetical incentive, I can’t see how anyone who has read enough of Tom’s work and mine to make a fair comparison can imagine me performing Nashean ventriloquism as a side gig after my day job. I couldn’t write the way Tom wrote if you held a pistol to my head and started counting. He was sui generis, a totally unique voice in English letters. If you haven’t read him at all, my book can help you fix that. Making his prose a little easier to parse and his jokes a lot easier to get is why I wrote over 1100 notes to go with his Saffron Walden text, and put them out together as Saffron Walden Annotated. Or read Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil from 1592, where the barely fictional protagonist rails against his penury and lack of prospects. Pierce the poet-scholar yearns for respect as well as for security, and he’s willing to treat with Seignior Beelzebub to get them. The artist is always revealed in the art.

Saffron Walden Annotated Nashe woodcut minus the leg ironsTom’s high-wire wit brought him a measure of renown but a mountain of troubles. He suffered in the unforgiving, increasingly puritanical years at the end of the century. (Oh how he contemned the Puritans, but that’s a different post.) There was no safety net beneath him, despite his Cambridge education and his brilliance with the language. His life was too unsettled, his pockets too empty, his arse too incarcerated, his end too soon. His death went unrecorded when it occurred. Even so, before he fell through the cracks, he left —⁠in addition to his words⁠— footprints that attest to portions of his path through life.

You can take my word for it, but you don’t have to.

Dr Ros Barber has been an early and fitting critic of the Oxford-was-Nashe meme and its publicity, at her Adventures in the Authorship Question site at Substack. Details and links follow the post. The hitch for me (and this is a general comment, not aimed at Ros) is that I hesitate before pointing to work that can’t be read without a subscription or payment. I don’t want to digress into an op-ed about paywalls where Authorship education is concerned, so let’s just say that after all these centuries I’ve retained a noble scribbler’s complicated view of writing for money.

I’m going to run a little ahead of myself here, but needs must and I’ll catch things up soon enough.

1585 Almanack by Gabriel's brother John HarveyAnd so I’ve waited for others to come to Tom’s defence, in words less anecdotal than mine and more accessible than Dr Barber’s. Scholars have little trouble locating evidence that disproves the meme, however working it into presentable shape takes some time, time that I sometimes suspect they measure by almanacs, not clocks. It has become important to me to get this broadside in front of everyone who hasn’t read my book (meaning, statistically, everyone), therefore I’ll follow up with another post when I have links to the scholarly work that’s on its way. For those not on my email list (see the sidebar) I will mention in my social media feeds| Bluesky | Mastodon | when I post the followup. In the meantime I’ve included books and sites of Nashean biography and criticism (below), all expert witnesses in the suit against the meme.

[3 July: The followup is up. Proof of (Nashe’s) Life.]

I’ve borrowed the printer Danter’s graphic and tweaked Tom’s description from page 10 of SWA:

Saffron Walden rect border for sigsPurposely that space I left, that as many as shall persuade the others that the Meme is a Pacheco, a Poldavy, and a Dringle, may set their hands to its definitive sentence, and with the clerk help to cry Amen to its eternal unhandsoming.

Interactive satire written in 1596, repurposed in 2025. Tom would enjoy the irony.

From the first utterance of the Oxford-was-Nashe meme, Thomas Nashe’s literary and literal identities have been mistaken and misrepresented. His erasure is as indefensible as it is incorrect. I close with another imperfect conjecture: Qui tacet consentire videtur. My silence never implied my consent, but now my silence has ended.

cannon after firing, no ball, no flames

Related posts

● One more plug for the book. Description and all purchase links: Saffron Walden Annotated: Nashe and Ned, posted 12 October 2024. If you’re too stretched or too cheap to part with £11 for a copy you can hold, you can read it here for nothing. I have my too generous for his own good reputation to live up to.

● More about Gabriel Harvey, and why he was so disliked by so many for so long: Emo Harvey Bros 1: Gabriel, posted 24 June 2024.

● Doctor Vanderhulk was one of thirty-six snarky nicknames Nashe gave to Harvey in Have With You to Saffron Walden. All of them are listed in Epithets, posted 2-12 October 2024. [jump return]

● The woodcut of the gunner and the gun are taken from Edvvard VVebbe’s Troublesome Travels, published in 1590. It was written for Gloriana herself, who had to visit the royal close-stool while reading it, from excessive laughing. Read about Master Gunner VVebbe at Much Noise No Nuts, Part 2, posted 23 April 2022, then read the travelogue at Most Wonderful: Webbe’s Travels, also posted that Shaxday. Might be the closest thing on this blog to Nashe-level satire, though Tom was unbeatable in sheer playfulness with words. Few know anything about this work, and even fewer get the joke. You’ve heard that story about my knightly challenge to all comers when I (supposedly) was in Sicily in 1575? This is where it began.

Sources and additional reading

● My gratitude to the ghost of Rudyard Kipling for the first line of his heptametrical Ballad of East and West, and to the ghost of US Senator Lloyd Bentsen for his Jack Kennedy quote.

● A meme in the word’s original sense is not a JPG with a funny caption. Look it up. Definition #1, though #5 also applies. [jump return]

trashbin with red arrow pointing into it● Dr Barber is spot on with these articles at her Substack site, Adventures in the Authorship Question (except for her non-specific Shakespeare, but never mind). The newer post criticises the meme and some of its uncritical publicity (see what goes into her trash bin at the link). The older one takes a look at Felon Tom’s connections to the Author. As noted, a subscription is required (£6/$8 per month) but there is a free 7-⁠⁠day trial if you’re willing to hazard your credit card number.

● It’s not as if there’s nothing else on Nashe out there. Most of these books are out of print but that doesn’t invalidate their contents, and they’re available at used-book sites (some are inexpensive, some are not). I’ve omitted works on the Martin Marprelate controversy, in which Tom was thoroughly involved. That’s a whole other list.

● The Almanacke, or Annuall Calender, with a Prognoſtication for the yeere of our Lord 1585 gave me a surprise chuckle. I was browsing for a photo of an almanac from back in my day, with nothing particular in mind. This one fit the bill so I snagged it without looking too closely. To rotate the image I had to blow it up, at which point I noticed that the author was Iohn Haruey, Maiſter of Artes, and Studente in Phiſicke. John was #3 of the four Harvey bros, a (medical) doctor who eloped with Justice Meade’s daughter Martha and died before he was thirty. Gabriel, Richard, and John all dabbled in Prognoſtication and almanac-writing.

● I debated whether or not to include these last two, but if you want to see the meme for yourself, copy and fix the links and have at ’em. Anything more you’ll have to burn your own precious time to find.

  • • Shakespeare’s CRAZY War of the Words!! Feat. Edward de Vere vs Gabriel Harvey
  • · youtube[dot]com/watch?v=nJvymeh9ZCQ
  • · Whoever purports to be Edward de Vere in this video (some of the images appear to have been changed since it was first posted, but that’s why God invented screencaps):

False Harvey, False Me (not my @username)

  •   he is an impostor, as that isn’t wasn’t my Xitter username (I am no longer there as of late 2025). In pre-Elmo days the dead did not qualify for blue ticks, but now that badges are bought rather than earned it may be possible for a corpse to get one. And in the ten years that I spent on that now-pernicious platform I never once saw Harvey there, not so much as a glimpse before blocking his insufferable arse. I doubt he’d have left me alone without quoting Speculum Tusculismi or some of his other dreadful English hexameters at me, so I suspect that this Harvey is also an impostor. The numbers below the tweet would be a joke, Harvey never had 10K people who liked him in the sum total of all his days. Even 10 without the K would have been a stretch.
  • • Oxford’s Voices
  • statue of Cain facepalming, Tuileries, Paris· oxfordsvoices[dot]com
  • · I don’t have the exact number of Elizabethan writers’ identities I am said to have created or assumed in the ingens opus for sale at this site. Perhaps 154, but I might be confusing the total with my Sonnets. In any case bullish Tom Nashe is merely one in a large herd of bulls. Hit me up, please, anyone who has the full list and cares to share it with me. I’d be curious to see everyone whose work I’ve been given credit for. How’s that for a switch.

VERO NIHIL VERIUS
VERITAS OMNIA VINCIT