SOURCE: Lewis, C. S. “Prose in the ‘Golden’ Period.” In English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, pp. 394-465. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944.

In this excerpt, Lewis characterizes Nashe as one of the greatest prose humorists and pamphleteers of his time. The critic writes that Nashe was highly original and uniquely able to use coarse and grotesque language to his rhetorical advantage, comparing him to both Picasso and James Thurber in his mastery of dark and violent imagery, used primarily to comic effect.

Thomas Nashe¹ (1567-1601) is undoubtedly the greatest of the Elizabethan pamphleteers, the perfect literary showman, the juggler with words who can keep a crowd spell-bound by sheer virtuosity. The subject, in his sort of writing, is unimportant.

His highly individual style is still unformed in his earliest works. The Anatomy of Absurdity (1589) is a long, rambling, grumbling invective against women and (to adopt its own...