SOURCE: McGinn, Donald J. “Nashe's Place in English Literature.” In Thomas Nashe, pp. 163-70. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

In this essay, McGinn reports on contemporary and later responses to Nashe's work, including his reputation as an anti-Martinist pamphleteer. The critic asserts that Nashe's work has been misunderstood and underrated in modern times because scholars have failed to recognize the aims of his writing. McGinn suggests that Nashe is better appreciated as a journalist or satirist whose writing was for the moment rather than for posterity.

I. Nashe's Reputation in His Own Time

During the years immediately following his death Nashe was regarded somewhat differently from the brilliant journalist described in the preceding chapters. Of course the average Elizabethan reader probably read his pamphlets at the time of their publication for the same reason that we today read our newspapers, namely, for information and entertainment. But the literary critics of...