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'''Thomas Nashe''' (November [[1567]] - ?[[1600]]) was an [[England|English]] [[Elizabethan]] pamphleteer, poet and satirist. Son of [[William Nash]] a minister and Margaret his wife.

Baptized in [[Lowestoft]], [[Suffolk]]. The family moved to [[West Harling]], near [[Thetford]] in [[1573]]. Around [[1581]] Thomas went up to [[St John's College, Cambridge]] gaining his bachelor's degree in [[1586]]. Then he moved to [[London]] and started his literary career.

It does not appear that Nash ever proceeded Master of Arts at Cambridge,
and most of his biographers agree that he left his college about 1587.
It is evident, however, that he had got into disgrace, and probably was
expelled; for the author of "England to her three Daughters" in
"Polimanteia," 1595, speaking of Harvey and Nash, and the pending
quarrel between them, uses these terms: "Cambridge make thy two children
friends: ''thou hast been unkind to the one to wean him before his time'',
and too fond upon the other to keep him so long without preferment: the
one is ancient and of much reading; the other is young, but full of
wit." The cause of his disgrace is reported to have been the share he
took in a piece called "Terminus et non Terminus," not now extant; and
it is not denied that his partner in this offence was expelled. Most
likely, therefore, Nash suffered the same punishment.

If Nash be the author of "[[An Almond for a Parrot]]," of which there is
little doubt, although his name is not affixed to it, he travelled in
Italy; and we find from another of his pieces that he had been in
Ireland. Perhaps he went abroad soon after he abandoned Cambridge, and
before he settled in London and became an author. His first appearance
in this character seems to have been in [[1589]], and we believe the
earliest date of any tract attributed to him relating to [[Martin Marprelate]] is also [[1589]]. He was the first, as has been frequently
remarked, to attack this enemy of the Church with the keen missiles of
wit and satire, throwing aside the lumbering and unserviceable weapons
of scholastic controversy. Having set the example in this respect, he
had many followers and imitators, and among them [[John Lily]], the dramatic
poet, the author of "Pap with a Hatchet."

In London Nash became acquainted with [[Robert Greene]], and their
friendship drew him into a long literary contest with [[Gabriel Harvey]], to
which Nash owes much of his reputation. It arose out of the posthumous
attack of Harvey upon Robert Greene, of which sufficient mention has
been made elsewhere. Nash replied on behalf of his dead companion, and
reiterated the charge which had given the original offence to Harvey,
viz., that his brother was the son of a ropemaker. One piece was
humorously dedicated to [[Richard Litchfield]], a barber of Cambridge, and
Harvey answered it under the assumed character of the same barber, in a
tract called "The Trimmino of Thomas Nash," which also contained a
woodcut of a man in fetters.

He remained in London apart from periodic visits to the countryside to avoid the plague, and in 1597, following the supression of ''The Isle of Dogs'' (co-written with [[Ben Jonson]]), Jonson was jailed, but Nashe was able to escape to the country.  He remained for some time in Great Yarmouth before returning to London.

He was alive in 1599, when his last known work ''Nashes Lenten Stuffe'' was published, and dead by 1601, when he was memorialized in a Latin verse in ''Affaniae'' by Charles Fitzjeoffrey.

He was featured in [[Thomas Dekker]]'s ''[[News from Hell]]'' and the anonymous ''[[The Three Parnassus Plays]]'', which provides this epitaph:

 ''Let all his faults sleep with his mournful chest''
 ''And there for ever with his ashes rest''
 ''His style was witty, though it had some gall;''
 ''Some things he might have mended, so may all.''
 ''Yet this I say, that for a mother of wit,''
 ''Few men have ever seen the like of it.''

'''Works by Thomas Nashe'''

* [[1589]] ''[[The Anatomy of Absurdity]]''
* [[1590]] ''[[Preface to Greene's Menaphon]]''
* [[1590]] ''[[An Almond for a Parrot]]''
* [[1592]] ''[[Pierce Penniless]]''
* [[1592]] ''[[Summer's Last Will]]'' (play performed 1592, published [[1600]])
* [[1592]] ''[[Strange News]]''
* [[1593]] ''[[Christ's Tears over Jerusalem]]''
* [[1594]] ''[[Terrors of the Night]]''
* [[1594]] ''[[The Unfortunate Traveller]]''
* [[1596]] ''[[Have with You to Saffron Walden]]''
* [[1597]] ''[[The Isle of Dogs, play|Isle of Dogs]]'' (Lost)
* [[1599]] ''[[Nashe's Lenten Stuff]]''

He is also credited with the erotic poem ''The Choice of Valentines'' and his name appears on the title page of [[Christopher Marlowe]]'s ''[[Dido, Queen of Carthage]]'', though there is uncertainty as to what Nashe's contribution was.  Some editions of this play, still extant in the 18th century but now unfortunately lost, contained memorial verses on Marlowe.

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====References====
* Adapted from the [[Wikipedia]] article, "Thomas_Nashe" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nashe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nashe], used under the [[GNU Free Documentation License]]