SOURCE: “The Devil's Orator: Pierce Penniless,” in The Singularity of Thomas Nashe, University of Nebraska Press, 1986, pp. 62-89.

In the following excerpt, Hilliard examines why Thomas Nashe's 1592 pamphlet Pierce Penniless, with its satire of Elizabethan ideals, opened the author up to widespread criticism.

A suggestion of how Nashe's career appeared to his contemporaries exists in a fictionalized portrait in The Three Parnassus Plays, a sequence of comedies performed at Cambridge around the turn of the century. Ingenioso, who barely survives on the fees he collects from his printer John Danter (Nashe's printer), alternately fawns and rails at the misers to whom he dedicates his works and the fops for whom he ghostwrites erotic poems. He curses his bad fortune and his failure to find a liberal Maecenas, but he does not blame himself. He tells his companions:

Nay sighe not men, laughe at the foolish worlde: They have...