SOURCE: "The Low Style in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler," in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter, 1966, pp. 43-57.

In this essay, Kaula offers a thorough analysis of several aspects of Nashe's style and suggests that Nashe's self-conscious use of literary technique provides a unity many critics find lacking in his works.

Thomas Nashe was aware that in The Unfortunate Traveller he had produced an unconventional work. In his dedicatory letter to the first edition, published in 1594, he claims that he had written it at the urging of certain friends, "it being a cleane different vaine from other my former courses of writing."¹ When he calls it a "phantasticall Treatise" and himself an "out-landish Chronicler" he implies that it is clean different also from anything attempted before by other authors. This estimation of his work is not surprising in an author who, at a time when...