The Vnfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton: With an Essay on the Life and Writings of Thomas Nash by Edmund Gosse
1594
The Vnfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton: With an Essay on the Life and Writings of Thomas Nash by Edmund Gosse
1594
Thomas Nash's 1594 picaresque novel pulses with the raw energy of a young writer determined to reinvent storytelling. Jack Wilton, a sharp-witted page boy in Henry VIII's camp before Tournai, launches himself into history with swagger and cunning, swindling soldiers, dodging execution, and tumbling through the brutal machinery of sixteenth-century Europe. The narrative careens from the siege of Tournai to the blood-soaked streets of Münster, where Nash watches the Anabaptist massacre with cold, algorithmic precision, using the carnage to dissect religious hypocrisy. When Jack crosses into Italy, the book transforms again: he swaps identities with the Earl of Surrey, entering a Venetian underworld of pimps, counterfeiters, and poets where the English tourists prove more dishonest than the locals they mock. Nash's prose crackles with satirical fury, mocking Petrarchan love poetry, courtly pretension, and the grotesque sweating sickness that drops men dead in the streets. This is rogue's literature, defiant and chaotic, a novel that refuses to settle into any single mode while predicting every trick the modern picaresque would later master.
Editions
X-Ray
“Grosse plodders they were all, that had some learning and reading, but no wit to make use of it.””
— Thomas Nash
“Some three halfe pennyworth of Latine here also had he throwen at his face, but it was choise stuffe I can tell you, as there is a choise euen amongest ragges gathered vp from the dunghill. At the townes end met him the burgers and dunstical incorporationers of Wittenberg in their distinguished liueries, their distinguished liuerie faces I mene, for they were most of them hot liuered dronkards, and had all the coate coulours of sanguin, purple, crimson, copper, carnation that were to be had in their countenaunces. Filthy knaues, no cost had they bestowed on the town for his welcome, sauing new painted their houghs & bousing houses, which commonly are built fayrer than their Churches, and ouer their gates set the town armes, which sounded gulping after this sort, Vanhotten, slotten, irk bloshen glotten gelderslike: what euer the wordes were, the sense was this, Good drinke is a medicine for all diseases. A””
— Thomas Nash
“If of a number of shreds of his sentences he can shape an oration, from all the world hee carries it awaie, although in truth it be no more than a fooles coat of many coulours. No inuention or matter haue they of theyr owne, but tacke vp a stile of his stale galimafries. The leaden headed Germanes first began this, and we Englishmen haue surfetted of their absurd imitation. I pittie Nizolius that had nothing to doe, but picke thrids ends out of an olde ouerworne garment.””
— Thomas Nash
“Why shoulde I goe gadding and fisgigging after firking flantado Amphibologies, wit is wit, and good will is good will.””
— Thomas Nash
“Danger will put wit into anie man. Architas made a wooden doue to flie: by which proportion I see no reason that the veryest blocke in the world should despayre of anie thing.””
— Thomas Nash
“Some courtiers to wearie out time woulde tell vs further tales of Cornelius Agrippa, and how when sir Thomas Moore our countrieman was there, hee shewed him the whole destruction of Troy in a dreame.””
— Thomas Nash
“where by the Orator of the vniuersitie, whose pickerdeuant was very plentifully besprinkled with rose water, a verie learned or rather ruthfull Oration was deliuered””
— Thomas Nash
“No remedie there was but I must helpe to furnish him with monie, I did so, as who wil not make his enemy a bridge of golde to flie by.””
— Thomas Nash
“Admit that you had neither wit nor capacitie, as sure in my iudgement there is none equall vnto you in idiotisme, yet if you haue simplicitie and secrecie, serpents themselues will thinke you a serpent, for what serpent is there but hydeth his sting: and yet whatsoeuer bee wanting, a good plausible alluring tong in such a man of imployment can hardly be spard, which as the forenamed serpent, with his winding tayle fetcheth in those that come neere him: so with a rauishing tale, it gathers all mens heartes vnto him, which if hee haue not, let him neuer looke to ingender by the mouth, as rauens and doues doe, that is, mount or be great by vndermining.””
— Thomas Nash
