Pamphlets and Body-Related Metaphors in Thomas Nashe's Pierce Penilesse and Strange Newes

Abstract

This essay was runner-up in the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section.

This essay explores how Thomas Nashe's Pierce Penilesse and Strange Newes describe pamphlet culture in bodily terms. Firstly, the writing of pamphlets can be understood as a type of childbirth, with the book serving as a substitute for the physical presence and the assumed voices of the author. Next, pamphlets can be considered as having to remain financially viable; if they are not, they will die. To keep the book alive, the pen must feed. Its source of food can be the rich material Nashe finds in observing fellow Londoners, or even other textual works. Nashe shows how this may be done when he performs an act of cannibalism on Gabriel Harvey's Foure Letters with his own Strange Newes. Lastly this essay compares Nashe's conception of the printing industry with Bakhtin's notion of the Rabelaisian belly as a centre of life, death, nourishment and excretion. While Nashe represents urination as a creative act, defecation becomes a metaphor for the indifferent writings sold by printers to the public. So does he regard the pamphlet industry as an ailing body which can no longer produce works of literary brilliance and intellectual substance.