Thomas Nashe and Late Elizabethan Writing

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and a fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature and culture, including Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005), Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012), Lying in Early Modern Culture (2017) and John Donne (Reaktion, 2021).

Thomas Nashe and Late Elizabethan Writing gives us a clear, accessible summary of all the surviving works and places them in relation to the various worlds that Nashe inhabited. Such overviews require considerable knowledge and judgement, which Hadfield possesses as one of the general editors of the forthcoming Oxford Complete Works edition. - Bart van Es, Times Literary SupplementAndrew Hadfield’s remarkable new book deftly displays the edgy wit and verbal inventiveness with which Nashe gives voice to his provocative understanding of the interrelated social, commercial, and religious worlds that defined the unsettling modernity of his England. - David Scott Kastan, Yale UniversityThomas Nashe was a bright, fierce light in Elizabethan literature, whose work was banned by the church authorities. From secretly circulated pornography to the herrings of East Anglia, and from Puritan propaganda to the first English novel, Nashe is always productive and provocative. Andrew Hadfield’s lucid new life opens up Nash’s funny, savage, deeply topical works for a new readership, emphasising their range, verve, and specificity. Hadfield’s skill is in contextualising without overshadowing the literary brio of the writing, and in recovering the Nashe whom all his contemporaries – including Shakespeare – wanted to emulate. - Emma Smith, Hertford College, Oxford