Patrides Lecture: Thomas Nashe, Women, and Gender Slippage

When I first started working on the Thomas Nashe edition for Oxford UP eight years ago, I saw Nashe as a homosocial writer: his literary career developed in the segregated worlds of the grammar schools and university, and it was then shaped in the equally male-dominated worlds of the London book trade and theatres. Nashe is usually associated with the likes of Robert Greene, Gabriel Harvey, Henry Chettle, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson. His one play, Summers Last Will and Testament, written and performed while he lived in the household of Archbishop John Whitgift in Croydon, does not have a single female character, and his prose is peppered with misogynist clichés. We might add to this the fact that the venerable tradition of editing Nashe is also male, and that Nashe had a secure place only in the now abandoned male literary canon. But working on a collaborative edition, and with women editors, has changed my mind.

In this lecture I will be asking: what kind of women did Nashe know, from the wives of patrons to working women, and what might he have learned from them? I will explore the unstable dedications to male patrons, as well as the male readers Nashe imagines for his work. And I will explore ‘gender slippage’ in relation to contemporary representations of Nashe (encouraged by him), and the foregrounding of reading as impersonation, and the experience this creates for us.