SOURCE: Berryman, John. “Thomas Nashe and The Unfortunate Traveller.” In The Freedom of the Poet, pp. 9-28. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.

In this essay, originally written in 1960 and reprinted in a posthumous collection of essays and stories, Berryman focuses on generic issues surrounding The Unfortunate Traveller and Nashe's strengths as a writer. The critic also discusses Nashe's public quarrel with Gabriel Harvey as providing instances of his best work.

Considering how little we know of his short restless life, and how little we read his work, Thomas Nashe makes an oddly distinct impression. One sees a small man, passionate, racy, sharp (“young Juvenal, that biting Satirist, that lastly with me together writ a comedy”—so Robert Greene at the point of death¹), Cambridge-trained, poor, writing like mad fantastic pamphlets, negligible plays, and parts of plays with Marlowe and perhaps others, one stunning lyric and a gay one...