SOURCE: "Thomas Nashe and the Picaresque Novel," in Humanistic Studies in Honor of John Calvin Met-calf, University of Virginia, 1941, pp. 12-27.

In the following essay, Bowers analyzes The Unfortunate Traveller as a picaresque work, concluding that while imperfect, it does, nonetheless, qualify as the first English picaresque novel.

Whether Thomas Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller (1593) may accurately be classed as a picaresque novel has been variously debated. At one extreme stands Jusserand, who calls the work the best specimen of the picaresque in English anterior to Defoe;¹ at the opposite pole is McKerrow: "I see practically nothing in the work which can have been suggested by the picaresque type of romance, such as Lazarillo de Tormes. Indeed, it seems to me that the classing of it with such stories is hardly correct."² Various other critics have taken an interme diate position. Baker writes: "Nashe may have heard of Lazarillo de...