Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), Political Satire, and the Elizabethan Public Sphere

FAIN: FB-57123-13

Jennifer L. Andersen
California State University, San Bernardino (San Bernardino, CA 92407-2318)

This project examines a series of major late Elizabethan controversies through the interventions of an astringent, astute, and ingenious satirist, Thomas Nashe. The study offers a comprehensive reassessment of Nashe's major works as political satires. Relying on theories of the public sphere and on extensive research on early modern satire, the study shows that political insiders attempted to control and manipulate the Elizabethan public sphere, but in the process of the government's experiments with media manipulation, these tools became available to political outsiders as well. Nashe's work was part of a complex campaign by factional elites to create a tightly controlled public sphere. Nashe parodies varieties of public discourse by calling attention to the fictionality of his narrator; the narrator apes official or authoritative rhetorics and then deconstructs them and chastises readers for having been taken in by verbal poses of solemnity, disinterestedness, and piety.

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