3.1.10. Nashe, Have with you to Saffron Walden

3.1.10. Thomas Nashe, Have With You To Saffron Walden [1] [Sept.] 1596

Gabriel Harvey's Hunt Is Up

Containing a full answer to the eldest son

of the halter-maker,

Nashe, his confutation of the sinful Doctor.

1596

In 1593 Nashe had publicly implored Harvey for ‘reconciliation and pardon’, paying apparently unironic tribute to his ‘abondant Schollership, courteous well governed behaviour, and ripe experienst iudgement’. But in 1594 -and for the remaining years of his life- he gave Harvey no quarter, for he had ‘welneare betrayed me to infamie eternall’. (Katherine Duncan-Jones)

Harvey, according to Nashe, slandered him to the London authorities with the result that they jailed him for Christ's Tears. In revenge Nashe made such a sustained, savage, and to be honest unfair comic onslaught on Harvey that his reputation has never recovered. (Rita Lamb)

Gabriel Harvey's denunciation of Thomas Nashe following the publication of Christs Teares (October 1593) did not do him any favours. Though 1593 saw him celebrate the miraculous defeat of his enemy, (see 3.1.7 Harvey, A new Letter of Notable Contents), he could no longer expect any support from the “excellent Gentlewoman”, that is to say William Shake-speare. Harvey's likeness to Don Adriano de Armado in Loves labors lost (written in 1594/95) exposed the spiteful rhetorician to ridicule.

A manuscript of the comedy (‘Labore Dolore’) found its way to Nashe’s publisher John Danter. “A red nose Ballad-maker that resorted to our Printing-house,” says Nashe. In fact, it was most probably Nashe himself who gave Danter the play in which he is portrayed so flatteringly. An unauthorised edition of Loves labors lost first appears to have gone on sale in 1595 or 1596, since a remark in the quarto from 1598 (“Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere”) indicates that a first print went missing.

At any rate: Tom Nashe now saw that the time was ripe to take revenge on his enemy, which he did extensively and with relish. Like Harvey before him, he too, however, made the mistake of being too prolix; his new pamphlet consisted of 165 pages. It was clear that he had overstepped the mark – three years later, the Anglican Archbishop John Whitgift intervened. The ecclesiastical rule enforcer ordered that the satires by Harvey and Nashe be seized and burned and also banned those by other satirists, including Hall, Marston, Guilpin, Middleton and John Davies. (“That all Nasshes bookes and Doctor Harvyes bookes be taken wheresoever they maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee ever printed hereafter.”)

Nashe's polemic writings posthumously provide us with much indispensable information. And despite the satirist's efforts to conceal and stultify the figure of the “excellent Gentlewoman” wherever possible in Have with You to Saffron Walden, without him we would not have anything concrete on England's “first Orpheus or quintessence of invention.” Nashe, the“pigeon-egg of discretion”, as Costard jokingly calls him in Love’s Labour’s Lost , is deserved of a memorial alongside that of his literary patron Edward de Vere, alias William Shakespeare.

Twenty allusions to Shakespeare's Love’s Labour’s Lost (1-3, 5-6, 14, 33, 39, 41-42, 60-61, 67, 74, 85, 86-90), two allusions to Romeo and Juliet (19-20) and two to 2 Henry IV (75, 82) - a reference to The Merchant of Venice (20), one to As you like it (72) - six allusions to the Earl of Oxford and Gabriel Harvey's The Mirror of Tuscanismo (19, 35, 43, 47-48, 86), as well as a variety of Spanish and Italian illusions (9, 12, 13, 39, 57, 90): Such a result justifies the careful study of a difficult, but extremely valuable text from the 16th century.

Have With You To Saffron Walden 1596

To the most Orthodoxal and reverent Corrector of staring hairs, the sincere & finigraphical
rarifier of prolixious rough barbarism, the thrice egregious and censorial animadvertiser
of vagrant mustachios,[2] chief scavenger of chins, and principal Head-man of the parish
wherein he dwells, special supervisor of all excremental superfluities[3] for Trinity
College in Cambridge, and (to conclude) a notable and singular benefactor
to all beards in general, Don Richardo Barbarossa de Caesario[4],
Tho: Nashe wisheth the highest Top of his contentment
and felicity, and the Shortening of all his enemies.

Acute and amiable Dick, not Dic mihi, Musa, virum [sing to me of the man, Muse], Musing Dick, that studied a whole year to know which was the male and female of red herrings; not Dic obsecro [Answer, for heaven’s sake], Dick of all Dicks … old Dick of Lichfield, Iubeo te plurimum salvere [I hope you stay in best health], which is by interpretation, I joy to hear thou hast so profited in gibberish…

Without further circumstance, to make short (which, to speak troth, is only proper to thy Trade), the short and long of it is this. There is a certain kind of Doctor of late very pitifully grown bald, and thereupon is to be shaven immediately, to try if that will help him. Now I know no such nimble fellow at his weapon in all England as thyself, who (as I hear) stand’st in election at this instant to be chief Crowner or clipper of crowns in Cambridge, and yet no defacer of the Queen's coin neither … but however it falls, hath his [the Doctor’s] head or his hair the falling sickness never so, without any more delay, Off or on, trimmed he must be with a trice, and there is no remedy but thou must needs come and join with me to give him the terrible cut.

Wherefore (good Dick) on with thy apron [a linen dress, to protect the clothes from dirt], & arm thyself to set him down at the first word: Stand to him, I say, and take him a button lower [5], fear not to show him a knack of thy occupation (Barbers knacking their fingers), and once in thy life let it be said that a Doctor wears thy cloth [6] (their lousy napery they put about men's necks whiles they are trimming), or that thou hast caused him to do penance, and wear Hair-cloth for his sins. Were he as he hath been (I can assure thee), he would clothe and adorn thee with many gracious gallant compliments, and not a rotten tooth that hangs out at thy shop-window but should cost him an indefinite Turkish army of English Hexameters. O, he hath been old dog at that drunken staggering kind of verse, which is all uphill and downhill like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechfield, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter, now soused up to the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes…

All the devoir, Diamond Dick, which I am in this Epistle of thy dainty composition to expostulate, is no more but this, that since under thy redoubted patronage and protection my works are to have their royal Bestellein (the royallest Pass in Germany that may be, only for Dukes & great princes), and more than common safe-conduct into the world, and that for the Meridian of thy honour and magnificence they are chiefly elevated & erected, thou wouldst bravely mount thee on thy barbed steed, alias thy triumphant barber's Chair, and girding thy keen Palermo razor[7] to thy side instead of a trenchant Turkish semitory [scimitar], and setting thy sharp-pointed lance (an instrument to let blood with) in his rest, be with them at a hair's-breadth that backbite and detract me…

Whereso, generous Dick (without hum drumb it spoken), I utterly despair of them [the Harveys], or not so much despair of them as count them a pair of poor idiots, being not only but also two brothers, two blockheads, two blunderkins, having their brains stuffed with naught but balderdash, but that they are the very botts & the glanders to the gentle Readers, the dead Palsy and Apoplexy of the Press, the Sarpigo and the Sciatica of the 7. Liberal sciences, the surfeiting vomit of Lady Vanity, the sworn bawds to one another's vainglory, &, to conclude, the most contemptible Monsieur Ajaxes of excremental conceits[8] and stinking kennel-raked-up invention that this or any Age ever afforded.

Purposely that space I left, that as many as I shall persuade they are Pachecos, Poldavisses and Dringles [9] may set their hands to their definitive sentence, and with the clerk help to cry Amen to their eternal unhandsomming.

Ply them, ply them uncessantly, unico Dick, even as a Water-man plies for his Fares, and insinuate and go about the bush with them like as thou art wont to insinuate and go about the grizzly bushy beard of some savage Saracen butcher…

Dick, no more at this time, but Nos-da diu catawhy [10] and all the recompense I can make thee for being, like a Chancery Declaration, so tiring troublesome unto thee is this, if thou wilt have the Doctor for an Anatomy, thou shalt; do but speak the word, and I am the man will deliver him to thee to be scotched and carbonadoed, but in any case speak quickly, for here he lies at the last gasp of surrendering all his credit and reputation.

Thy Friend, Tho: Nashe,
if thou beest foe, Dick, to
all the generation of
the Harveys.

To all Christian Readers to whom these Presents shall come.

Well said, my masters, I perceive there cannot be a new book come forth but you will have a fling at it. Say, what are you reading? Nashe against Harvey. Fo, that's a stale jest; he hath been this two or three year about it…

I protest, I do not write against him because I hate him, but that I would confirm and plainly show to a number of weak believers in my sufficiency that I am able to answer him, and his friends and not his enemies let him thank for this heavy load of disgrace I lay upon him, since their extreme disabling of me in this kind, & urging what a triumph he had over me, hath made me to ransack my standish more than I would.

This I will boldly say, look how long it is since he writ against me; so long have I given him a lease of his life, & he hath only held it by my mercy.

Memorandum, I frame my whole Book in the nature of a dialogue, much like Bullen and his Doctor Tocrub [11], whereof the Interlocutors are these:

Imprimis, Seignior Importuno, the Opponent.

The second, Grand Consiliadore, chief Censor or Moderator.

The third, Domino Bentivole, one that stands, as it were, at the line in a Tennis-court, and takes every ball at the volley.

The fourth, Don Carneades [12] de Boon Compagniola [of the bounteous country], who, like a busy Country Iustice sits on the Bench and preacheth to thieves out of their own confessions, or rather, like a Quartermaster or Treasurer of Bridewell, whose office is to give so many strokes with the hammer as the publican unchaste offender is to have stripes, and by the same Tubal's music to warn the blue-coat Corrector when he should patience and surcease: so continually, when by Seignior Importuno the Doctor is brought to the cross, Don Carneades sets down what proportion of justice is to be executed upon him, and when his back hath bled sufficient, gives a signal of retrait…

These four, with myself, whom I personate as the Respondent in the last place, shall (according as God will give them grace) clap up a Colloquium amongst them, and so school my gentle Comrade or neighbour Quiquisse [thin legs] in some few short principles of my learning and industry that (I doubt not) by that time they have concluded and dispatched with him, my Gorboduc Huddle-duddle will gladly (on his knees) resign to me his Doctorship, and as Antisthenes could not beat Diogenes away from him, but he would needs be his scholar whether he would or no, so shall I have him haunt me up and down to be my prentice to learn to indite, and, do what I can, I shall not be shut of him.

Dialogus.

Interlocutores: Seignior Importuno; Grand Consiliadore;

Domino Bentivole; Don Carneades de Boon Compagniola;

Pierce Pennilesse, Respondent [= Tom Nashe].

Importuno: What, Tom, thou art very welcome. Where hast thou been this long time; walking in Saint Faith's Church under ground, that we never could see thee? Or hast thou took a Chamber in Coal-Harbour, where they live in a continual mist, betwixt two Brewhouses.

Consiliadore: Indeed, we have missed you a great while, as well spiritually as corporally; that is, no less in the absence of your works, than the want of your company: but now, I hope, by your presence you will fully satisfy us in either.

Bentivole: Nay, I would he would but fully satisfy and pay one, which is the Doctor: for this I can assure him, he is run far in arrearages with expectation, & to recover himself it will be very hard, except he put twice double as much aqua fortis in his ink as he did before.

Carneades: No aqua fortis, if you love me, for it almost poisoned and spoiled the fashion of Stone’s the fool's nose; and would you have it be the destruction and desolation of a Doctor Fool now? What, content yourself, a mess of Tewkesbury mustard or a dram and a half of Tower Hill vinegar will seem a high festival banquet, and make a famous coronation show on this forlorn Civilian's hungry table.

Importuno: Tush, tush, you are all for jest, & make him be more careless of his credit than he would be, by thus contemning and debasing his Adversary. Will you hear what is the united voice and opinion abroad? Confidently they say he is not able to answer him, he hath deferred it so long; & if he do answer him, howsoever it be, it is nothing, since he hath been a whole age about it, though I, for mine own part, know the contrary …

Respondent: Will you have patience, and you shall hear me expressly and roundly give him his quietus est…

As newfangled and idle, and prostituting my pen like a Courtesan is the next Item that you tax me with, well, it may and it may not be so, for neither will I deny it nor will I grant it, only thus far I'll go with you, that twice or thrice in a month, when res est angusta domi [the severe pressure of poverty], the bottom of my purse is turned downward, & my conduit of ink will no longer flow for want of reparations, I am fain to let my Plow stand still in the midst of a furrow, and follow some of these newfangled Galiardos and Seignior Fantasticos, to whose amorous Villanellas and Quipassas [13] I prostitute my pen in hope of gain, but otherwise there is no newfangleness in me but poverty, which alone maketh me so unconstant to my determined studies, nor idleness, more than discontented idle trudging from place to place, to and fro, and prosecuting the means to keep me from idleness… For many a fair day ago have I proclaimed myself to the world Pierce Pennilesse, and sufficient pedigrees can I show to prove him my elder brother. What more remaineth behind of the condemned estate I stand in, till this Domine Deuce-Ace [14] be conswapped, & sent with a pair of new shoes on his feet and a scroll in his hand to Saint Peter, like a Russian when he is buried, as also of the immortality of the Print, & how, though not this age, yet another age three years after the building up the top of Paul's steeple[15], may baffle and infamize my name when I am in heaven & shall never feel it, in four words I will defeat and lay desolate.

With a good will, agreed, & like Mahomet's angels in the Alcoran, that are said to have ears stretching from one end of heaven to the other, let your attention be indefinite & without end, for thus I begin.

Mascula virorum [The male of men], Saint Mildred and Saint Agapite [Saint Agapitus]! More letters yet from the Doctor? nay, then we shall be sure to have a whole Gravesend Barge full of News, and hear soundly of all matters on both ears. Out upon it, here's a packet of Epistling as big as a Pack of Woollen cloth, or a stack of salt-fish. - Carrier, didst thou bring it by wain, or on horse-back? - By wain, sir, & it hath cracked me three axletrees, wherefore I hope you will consider me the more. - Heavy news, heavy news, take them again, I will never open them. Ah, quoth he (deep sighing), to me, I wot, they are the heaviest, whose Cart hath cried creak under them forty times every furlong: wherefore, if you be a good man, rather make mud walls with them, mend highways, or dam up quagmires with them, than thus they should endamage me to my eternal undoing. I, hearing the fellow so forlorn and out of comfort with his luggage, gave him his Charon's Naulum [fare], or ferry three halfpence, & so dismissed him to go to the place from whence he came, and play at Lodum [=at ludum, play with knucklebones]. But when I came to unrip and unbombast this Gargantuan bag-pudding[16], and found nothing in it but dogs' tripes, swines' livers, oxgalls, and sheep's guts^{^[17]}, I was in a bitterer chafe than any Cook at a long Sermon when his meat burns…Gabriel Harvey, my stale Gull ... hath unawares proclaimed open wars afresh in a whole Alexandrian Library of waste-paper. Pierces his Supererogation, or Nashes Saint Fame, prettily & quirkingly he christens it; and yet not so much to quirk or cross me thereby, as to bless himself and make his book sell, did he give it that title; for having found, by much shipwrecked experience, that no work of his, absolute under his own name, would pass…

Foul evil go with it, I wonder you will prate and tattle of six and thirty full points so compendiously trussed up (as may be) in six and thirty sheets of paper, whenas those are but the shortest proverbs of his wit; for he never bids a man good morrow but he makes a speech as long as a proclamation; nor drinks to any but he reads a Lecture of three hours long, De Arte bibendi [of the art of drinking]. O 'tis a precious apophthegmatical [sententious] Pedant[18], who will find matter enough to dilate a whole day of the first invention of Fy, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman...

Those that be so disposed to take a view of him ere he be come to the full Midsummer Moon and raging Calentura of his wretchedness, here let them behold his lively counterfeit and portraiture, not in the pantofles of his prosperity, as he was when he libelled against my Lord of Oxford, but in the single-soled pumps of his adversity[19], with his gown cast off, untrussing, and ready to bewray himself upon the news of the going in hand of my book.

If you ask why I have put him in round hose, that usually wears Venetians? [20] It is because I would make him look more dapper & plump and round upon it, whereas otherwise he looks like a case of toothpicks, or a lute-pin put in a suit of apparel. Gaze upon him who list, for I tell you, I am not a little proud of my workmanship, and, though I say it, I have handled it so neatly, and so sprightly, and withal ouzled, gidumbled, muddled and drizzled it so finely, that I forbid ever a Hanns Boll, Hanns Holbein, or Hanns Mullier of them all (let them but play true with the face) to amend it, or come within forty foot of it.

Importuno: But for the Doctor, try it who will, his stile is not easy to be matched, being commended by divers (of good judgement) for the best that e'er they read.

Respondent: Amongst the which number is a red-bearded threadbare Cavalier, who (in my hearing) at an ordinary, as he sat fumbling the dice after supper, fell into these terms (no talk before leading him to it): There is such a Book of Harvey's (meaning this his last Book against me) as I am a Soldier and a Gentleman, I protest, I never met with the like contrived pile of pure English. O, it is divine and most admirable, & so far beyond all that ever he published heretofore as daylight beyond candlelight, or tinsel or leaf-gold above arsedine, with a great many more excessive praises he bestowed upon it: which authentically I should have believed if, immediately upon the nick of it, I had not seen him shrug his shoulders, and talk of going to the Bath, and after, like a true Pandar (so much the fitter to be one of Gabriel's Patrons), grew in commending, to young gentlemen, two or three of the most detested loathsome whores about London for peerless beauteous Paragons, & the pleasingest wenches in the world; whereby I guessed his judgement might be infected as well as his body: & he that would not stick so to extol stale rotten laced mutton will, like a true Millanois [Milanese] [21], suck figs out of an ass's fundament, or do anything. I more than half suspect those whom you prefer for the best judgements are of the same stamp, or if they be not, I will set a new stamp on their judgements, having (to let them see their dotage and error, and what his style is they make such a miracle of) mustered together, in one gallimaufry or short Oration, most of the ridiculous senseless sentences, finical flaunting phrases and termagant ink-horn terms throughout his Book, and framed it in his own praise and apology because I would cut his cloak with the Wool, though Lyly and Nashe never so cry Non placet [non agreed] thereat. Auditors, awake your attention, and here expect the clear repurified soul of truth without the least shadow of fiction, the unflattered picture of Pedantism, that hath no one smile or crinkle more than it should: for I deeply vow, on my faith and salvation, if he were a Doctor of gold, here in his own clothes he shall appear to you, & not so much as a knot to his winding-sheet, or corner tip to the smallest selvage of his garments I will insert; only a needle and thread to truss up his trinkets more roundly (upon better advice) I am determined to lend him, in hope it may be his thread of life, and even by that single bounty double stitch him unto me to be my devoted beadsman till death, but not a pin's-head or a moth's pallet [pate] room gets he of any farther contribution. Hem, clear your throats, and spit soundly, for now the pageant begins, and the stuff by whole Cart-loads comes in.

AN ORATION, INCLUDING MOST OF THE MISCREATED WORDS AND SENTENCES IN THE DOCTORS BOOK.

Renowned and amicable readers, from whom it is not concealed that silence is a slave in a chain, and the pen the hot shot of the musket,

Bentivole: Mark, mark, a sentence, a sentence.

Oration:

Tell me (I pray you), was ever Pegasus a cow in a cage, Mercury a mouse in a cheese, Dexterity a dog in a doublet, Legerdemain a slow-worm, Vivacity a lazy-bones,Eentelechy a slugplum, Humanity a spittle-man, Rhetoric a dummerell, Poetry a tumbler, History a bankrupt, Philosophy a broker?

Consiliadore: Aye, marry, now it works.

Respondent: I belie him not a word; just as it is there, in his own text it comes together.

Oration:

Why should I then, that have been an incorruptible Aeropage,

Bentivole: Stay! that same Aeropage, he is a foreigner new come over: let us examine him if he be the Queen's friend or no, ere he pass.

Oration:

without any pregnant cause be thus prestigiously besieged and marked with an Asterisk by them that are superficial in Theory?

Carneades: On my virtuous chastity & verity, pregnant, prestigious, superficial and pretty!

Oration:

In many extraordinary remarkable energetical lines and perfunctory pamphlets, both in ambidexterity and omnidexterity, together with matters adiaphoral, have I disbalassed my mind, & not let slip the least occasionet of advantage, to acquaint the world with my pregnant propositions and resolute Aphorisms.

Consiliadore: That word Aphorisms, Greene's Executors may claim from him; for while he lived he had no goods nor chattels in commoner use than it.

Importuno: Away, away, I cannot be persuaded he would ever come forth with any one of

these balductum [balderdash] bastardly terms.

Respondent: You cannot? Then cannot I be persuaded that you cannot be persuaded…

Oration:[22]

Omitting (sicco pede) my encomiastical orations and mercurial and martial discourses of the terribility of war, in the active & chivalrous vein, every way comparable with the cavalcades of Bellerophon, or Don Alphonso d'Avalos, my seraphical visions in Queen Poetry, quaint theorics, melancholy projects and pragmatical discourses … they (I say) with their frumping contras, tickling interjections, together with their vehement incensives and allectives, as if they would be the only A per se a's, or great A's of puissance, like Alexander (whom yet some of our modern worthies disdain to have sceptred the est Amen of valure), commence redoubtable monomachies against me, and the dead honey-bee, my brother.

Bentivole: A per se, con per se, tittle est Amen! [23] Dost thou not feel thyself spoiled? Why, he comes upon thee (man) with a whole horn-book.

Importuno: What a supernatural Hibble de Bean it is, to call his brother a dead honey-bee!

Consiliadore: I laughed at nothing so much as that word arch-patrons. Go thy ways, thought I, thou art a civilian, and may’st well fetch metaphors from the Arches, but thou shalt never fish any money from thence whilst thou liv'st…

Respondent: Hark, hark, how he praiseth Sir Philip Sidney.

Oration:

Sweet Sir Philip Sidney, he was the Gentleman of courtesy and the very Esquire of industry.

Carneades: The Esquire of industry? O scabbed scald squire (Scythian Gabriel) as thou art, so underfoot to commend the clearest mirror of true Nobility!

Consiliadore: What a mischief does he taking any man's name in his ulcerous mouth? that being so festered and rankled with barbarism is able to rust and canker it, were it never so resplendent.

Respondent: In all his praises he is the most forspoken [one who is speaking evil] and unfortunate under heaven; & those whom he ferventest strives to grace and honour he most dishonors and disgraceth by some uncircumcised sluttish epithet or other: and even to talk treason he may be drawn unwares, and never have any such intent, for want of discretion how to manage his words.

Bentivole: It is a common scoff amongst us to call any foolish prodigal young gallant the gentleman or flower of courtesy; & (if it were well scanned) I am of the opinion with the same purpose he did it to scoff and deride Sir Philip Sidney in calling him the Gentleman of courtesy, and the very Esquire of industry.

Respondent: Poor tame-witted silly Quirko [quirk =a quibble], on my conscience I dare excuse him, he had never any such thought, but did it in as mere earnest, as ever in commendation of himself and his brothers he writ these two verses,

Singular are these three, Iohn, Richard, Gabriel Harvey, For Logic, Philosophy,Rhetoric, Astronomy.

As also, in like innocent well-meaning, added he this that ensues.

Oration:

His Entelechy was fine Greece, and the finest Tuscanism in grain.

Although I could tickle him with a contrary precedent, where he casts Tuscanism, as a horrible crime, in a Nobleman's teeth[24].

Carneades: Body of me, this is worse than all the rest; he sets forth Sir Philip Sidney in the very style of a dyer's sign. As if he should have said:

HERE WITHIN THIS PLACE IS
ONE THAT DYETH ALL KIND
OF ENTELECHY IN FINE GREECE,
AND THE FINEST TUSCANISM
IN GRAIN THAT MAY BE, OR ANY
COLOUR ELSE YE WOULD DESIRE.
AND SO GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.

Bentivole: More Copy, more Copy, we leese a great deal of time for want of Text.

Importuno: Apace, out with it, and let us ne'er stand pausing or looking about, since we are thus far onward.

Oration:

But some had rather be a Pole-cat with a stinking stir than a Musk-cat with gracious favour.

Bentivole: I smell him, I smell him; the wrongs that thou hast offered him are so intolerable as they would make a Cat speak; therefore look to it, Nashe, for with one Pole-cat perfume or another he will poison thee, if he be not able to answer thee.

Carneades: Pole-cat and Musk-cat? There wants but a Cat a mountain [leopard, panther], and then there would be old scratching.

Bentivole: Aye, but not only no ordinary Cat, but a Musk-cat, and not only a Musk-cat, but a Musk-cat with gracious favour (which sounds like a Prince's style Dei gratia): not Tibault or Isegrim, Prince of Cats, were ever endowed with the like Title.[25]

Respondent: Since you can make so much of a little, you shall have more of it.

Oration:

To utter the entrails of a spherical heart in few syllables, Musk is a sweet courtesan, and sugar and honey dainty hypocrites. [26]

Bentivole: O, sweeter and sweeter; somebody lend me a handkerchief, that I may carry some home in my pocket for my little Godson.

Carneades: Madam Musk, if you be a courtesan (as the Doctor informs us), sure you have dressed a number of my friends sweetly, have you not? But you were never otherwise like for man's apparel & woman's apparel, all was one to you, and some mystery there was in it, that they always cried, Foh, what a stink is here, and stopped their noses when you came near them. For your worships, Master Sugar & Master Honey (be you likewise such dainty hypocrites as he gives testimony), I doubt not but at one time or other we shall taste you.

Respondent: Say, let me look upon it: aye, it is the same, right Isenborough [Eisenburg] good, or never trust me. A speech or sudden exclamation, which, after he had been in a deadly sound for six or seven hours (upon what fear-procured sickness I leave you to imagine), was the first words upon his reviving he uttered.

Oration:

But the art of figs had ever a dapper wit and a deft conceit; Saint Fame give him joy of his black coal & his white chalk.

Consiliadore: Saint Fame is one of the notorious nicknames he gives thee, as also under the art of figs (to cleave him from the crown to the waist with a quip) he shadows Master Lyly ...

Respondent: For my own proper person, if I do not (in requital of St. Fame) ensaint and canonize him for the famousest Palliard [beggar] and Seignior Penaquila [Senior Quill Pen] that hath breathed since the reign of S. Tor [Arthurian knight], let all the droppings of my pen be seized upon by the Queen's Takers for Tar to dress ships with. I tarry too trifling superfluously in the twittle-cum-twattles of his Text: take it, with a wanion, altogether, if you will have it.

Oration:

Embellishedly I can resolve them, here they shall not meet with chalk for cheese; and though some drink oil of pricks for a restorative, they shall have much ado to void syrup of Roses: for it is not every man's blab that casts a sheep's eye out of a calf's head, and for aught I know, I see no reason why the Wheel-wright may not be as honest a man and pregnant mechanician as the Cutler, the Cutler as the Drawer, the Drawer as the Cutter, and the Writer as the Printer. And so I recommend every one, and them all, to your courtesies.

Your mindful debtor, Gabriel Harvey.

Carneades: Thou hast oppressed us with an Inundation of Biscayanism [Basque] (the most barbarous Spanish[27], even as the northern tongue of the English), and though we would fain have made him stand in a white sheet for his bawdy oil of pricks (a common receipt for the green sickness[28]), as also examined his syrup of roses, wherein Rose Flowers is best experimented, yet time & tide (that stays for no man) forbids us to tire any more on this carrion, being more than glutted with it already.

Bentivole: But yet, to give him this one comfort at the parting, it had not been amiss that, whereas he stands in such fear of casting his sheep's eye out of his calf's head, thou never meant’st it, but if it were an ox's he should still keep it[29], and rather thou wouldst enlarge it than impair it.

Respondent: Aye, make it up a pair (I swear) rather than he should be unprovided. Responde brevitur, Seignior Importuno, have not I comprehended all the Doctor's works bravely, like Homer's Iliads in the compass of a nutshell? Now where be our honourable Cavaliers, that keep such a prating and a gabrill [gabble] about our Gabriel and his admirable style? Let them look to it, I would advise them, for the course they take in commending this coarse Himpenhempen Slampamp [30], this stale Apple-squire Cockledemois [a kind of shell], who, some 18 years since when these Italianate carnation-painted horse-tails were in fashion, in selfsame sort was about (if his chamber-fellow had not overruled him) to have scutchaneled [=cochinealed] and painted his picke-devant[31], to make it trave[elle]rlike antic: this jadish course, this javel's [rogue’s] course, this drumbling course, this dry-brained course, if you persevere and insist in, and on the top of asses’ buskined ears thus labour to build trophies of their praise, canonizing every Belshangles [morris-dancer] the water-bearer for a saint, and the contemptiblest world's dish-clout for a Relic; inspiredly I prophesy, your ends will be ale and Shoreditch, that all preferment and good spirits will abandon you: and more (to plague you for your apostata conceits) ballads shall be made of your base deaths, even as there was of Cutting Ball [who was hanged at Tyburn].

The life and godly education from his childhood of that
thrice famous Clerk and worthy Orator and Poet,
Gabriel Harvey.

Gabriel Harvey, of the age of forty-eight or upwards (Turpe senex miles [An aged soldier is ugly] [32], 'tis time for such an old fool to leave playing the swashbuckler), was born at Saffron Walden, none of the obscurest towns in Essex ...

His education I will handle next, wherein he ran through Didimus' or Diomedes' 6000 books of the Art of Grammar, besides learned to write a fair capital Roman hand, that might well serve for a bongrace [broad-brimmed hat] to such men as ride with their face towards the horse tail, or set on the pillory for cozenage or perjury ... But in his Grammar years (take me thus far with you) he was a very graceless litigious youth, and one that would pick quarrels with old Gulielmus Lyly's Syntaxis and Prosodia every hour of the day. A desperate stabber with penknives, and whom he could not overcome in disputation, he would be sure to break his head with his pen and ink-horn. His father prophesied, by that his venturous manhood and valure, he would prove another St. Thomas a Becket for the church. But his mother doubted him much, by reason of certain strange dreams she had when she was first quick with child of him, which well she hoped were but idle swimming fancies of no consequence... For first she dreamed her womb was turned to such another hollow vessel full of disquiet fiends as Solomon's brazen bowl wherein were shut so many thousands of devils, which (deep hidden underground) long after the Babylonians (digging for metals) chanced to light upon, and mistaking it for treasure, brake it ope very greedily, when, as out of Pandora's Box of maladies which Epimetheus opened, all manner of evils flew into the world, so all manner of devils then broke loose amongst humankind. Therein her drowsy divination not much deceived her, for never were Empedocles' devils so tossed from the air into the sea, & from the sea to the earth, and from the earth to the air again exhaled by the Sun, or driven up by winds & tempests, as his discontented poverty (more disquiet than the Irish seas) hath driven him from one profession to another ... Yea, and from the air he fell to the sea (that my comparison may hold in every point), which is, he would needs cross the seas to fetch home two pennyworth of Tuscanism: from the sea to the earth again he was tossed, videlicet [evidently], shortly after he became a roguish Commentator upon earthquakes, as by the famous Epistles (by his own mouth only made famous) may more largely appear. Ultima linea rerum [death is everything's final limit], his final entrancing from the earth to the skies was his key-cold defence of the Clergy in the tractate of Pap-Hatchet [‘An Advertisement for Pap-Hatchet and Martin Marprelate’], intermingled, like a small Fleet of Galleys, in the huge Armada against me...[33]

At the same time (over and above), she thought that, instead of a boy (which she desired), she was delivered and brought to bed of one of these kestrel birds called a windfucker. Whether it be verifiable, or only probably surmised, I am uncertain, but constantly up and down it is bruited how he pissed ink as soon as ever he was born, and that the first clout he fouled was a sheet of paper... The wonders of my great Grandfather Harvey's progeniture were these. In the very moment of his birth there was a calf born in the same Town with a double tongue, and having ears far longer than any ass, and his feet turned backward, like certain people of the Tartars, that nevertheless are reasonable swift. In the hour of his birth, there was a most darksome Eclipse, as though hell and heaven about a consultation of an eternal league had met together. Those that calculated his nativity said that Saturn and the Moon (either of which is the causer of madness) were melancholy conjoined together (contrary to all course of Astronomy) when into the world he was produced. About his lips, even as about Dion's ship, there flocked a swarm of wasps as soon as ever he was laid in his cradle. Scarce nine years of age he attained to, when, by engrossing of ballads that came to any Market or Fair thereabouts, he aspired to be as desperate a ballad-maker as the best of them. The first fruits of his Poetry being a pitiful Ditty in lamentation of the death of a Fellow that, at Queen Mary's coronation, came downward, with his head on a rope, from the Spire of Paul's steeple, and brake his neck. Afterward he exercised to write certain graces in rime doggerel, and verses upon every Month, many of which are yet extant in Primers and Almanacs… By this time imagine him rotten-ripe for the University, and that he carries the poke for a mess of porridge in Christ's College: which I do not upbraid him with as any disparagement at all, since it is a thing everyone that is Scholar of the House, is ordinarily subject unto by turns, but only I thrust it is for a Periphrasis of his admission or matriculation…

In the year when the earthquake was, he fell to be a familiar Epistler, & made Paul's Churchyard resound or cry twang again with four [=three] notable famous Letters[34]: in one of which he interlaced his short but yet sharp judicial of Earthquakes, & came very short and sharp upon my Lord of Oxford in a rattling bundle of English Hexameters[35]. How that thrived with him, some honest Chronicler help me to remember, for it is not comprehended in my brain's Diary or Ephemerides: but this I can justify, that immediately upon it, he became a common writer of Almanacs. 'Tis marvel if some of you, amongst your unsatiable overturning of Libraries, have not stumbled on such an approved architect of Calendars as Gabriel Frend, the Prognosticator[36]. That Frend [=Friend] I not a little suspect (if a man should take occasion to try his Frend) would be found to be no Frend, but my constant approved mortal enemy Gabriel Harvey. Well, I may say to you, it is a difficult rare thing in these days to find a true Frend. But the probable reasons which drive me to conjecture that it is a false Frend which deludes us with these dirty astronomical predictions, & that Gabriel Harvey is this Frend in a corner, which no man knows of, be these that follow… O eternal jest (for God's sake help me to laugh): What, a grave Doctor, a base Iohn Doleta, the Almanac-maker, Doctor Deuce-ace and Doctor Merryman?[37] Why, from this day to proceed, I'll never go into Paul's Churchyard to enquire for any of his works, but (wherever I come) look for them behind the door, or on the backside of a screen (where Almanacs are set usually), or at a Barber's or Chandler's shop never to miss of them. A maker of Almanacs, quoth a, God forgive me, they are readier money than Ale and cakes, and are more familiar read that Tully's familiar epistles, or the Discourse of Debitor & Creditor, especially of those that ordinary write Letters, or have often occasion to pay money.

I have a tale at my tongue's end, if I can happen upon it, of his hobby-horse revelling & domineering at Audley End[38] when the Queen was there: to which place Gabriel (to do his country more worship & glory) came ruffling it out huffty tuffty in his suit of velvet. There be them in Cambridge that had occasion to take note of it, for he stood noted or scored for it in their books many a fair day after: and, if I take not my marks amiss, Raven, the botcher by Pembroke Hall (whether he be alive or dead I know not), was as privy to it, every patch of it from top to toe, as he that made it …There did this, our Talatamtana or Doctor Hum, thrust himself into the thickest ranks of the Noblemen and Gallants, and whatsoever they were arguing of, he would not miss to catch hold of, or strike in at the one end, and take the theme out of their mouths, or it should go hard. In selfsame order was he at his pretty toys and amorous glances and purposes with the Damsels, & putting bawdy riddles unto them. In fine, some Disputations there were, and he made an Oration before the Maids of Honour, and not before her Majesty, as heretofore I misinformedly set down, beginning thus:

Nux, mulier, asinus simili sunt lege ligata,
Haec tria nill recte faciunt, si verbera desunt.
A nut, a woman, and an ass are like,
These three do nothing right, except you strike.

Carneades: He would have had the Maids of Honour thriftily cudgelled, belike, and lambacked one after another.

Respondent: They understood it not so.

Bentivole: No, I think so, for they understood it not at all.

Consiliadore: Or, if they had, they would have driven him to his guard.

Carneades: Or had the Guard driven him down the stairs, with Dieu vous garde, Monsieur; go and prate in the yard, Don Pedant [39], there is no place for you here…

This finished (though not for the finishing or pronouncing this), by some better friends than he was worthy of and that afterward found him unworthy of the graces they had bestowed upon him, he was brought to kiss the Queen's hand, and it pleased her Highness to say (as in my former Book I have cited) that he looked something like an Italian[40]. No other incitement he needed to rouse his plumes, prick up his ears, and run away with the bridle betwixt his teeth, and take it upon him [swaggered]; (of his own original engrafted disposition thereto he wanting no aptness) but now he was an insulting monarch above Monarcho the Italian[41], that wore crowns on his shoes; and quite renounced his natural English accents & gestures, & wrested himself wholly to the Italian punctilios, speaking our homely Island tongue strangely, as if he were but a raw practitioner in it, & but ten days before had entertained a schoolmaster to teach him to pronounce it. Ceremonies of reverence to the greatest States (as it were not the fashion of his country) he was very parsimonious and niggardly of, & would make no bones to take the wall of Sir Philip Sidney [42] and another honourable Knight (his companion) about Court yet attending; to whom I wish no better fortune than the forelocks of Fortune he had hold of in his youth, & no higher fame than he hath purchased himself by his pen[43]: being the first (in our language) I have encountered, that repurified Poetry from Art's pedantism, & that instructed it to speak courtly. Our Patron, our Phoebus, our first Orpheus or quintessence of invention he is: wherefore either let us jointly invent some worthy subject to eternize him; or let War call back Barbarism from the Danes, Picts and Saxons to suppress our frolic spirits, and the least spark of more elevated sense amongst us finally be quenched and die, ere we can set up brazen Pillars for our Names and Sciences, to preserve them from the Deluge of Ignorance.[44]

But to return from whence I have strayed, Dagobert Coppenhagen [45] in his jollity persisteth; is Hail fellow well met with those that look highest: and, to cut it off in three syllables, follows the train of the delicatest favourites and minions ... and straight knocked me up together a Poem called his Aedes Valdinenses [46], in praise of my Lord of Leicester, of his kissing the Queen' hand, and of her speech & comparison of him, how he looked like an Italian, what vide saith he in one place; Did I see her Majesty? quoth a, Imo, vidi ipse loquentem cum Snaggo, I saw her conferring with no worse man than Master Snagge. The bungerliest verses they were that ever were scanned, being most of them houghed and cut off by the knees out of Virgil and other Authors ... I had forgot to observe unto you, out of his first four [=three] familiar Epistles, his ambitious stratagem to aspire; that whereas two great Peers being at jar, and their quarrel continued to bloodshed, he would needs, uncalled and when it lay not in his way, step in on the one side[47], which indeed was the safer side (as the fool is crafty enough to sleep in a whole skin) and hew and slash with his Hexameters[48], but hewed and slashed he had been as small as chippings, if he had not played duck Friar and hid himself eight weeks in that Nobleman's house for whom with his pen he thus bladed. Yet nevertheless Sir Iames a Croft, the old Controller[49], ferreted him out, and had him under hold in the Fleet a great while, taking that to be aimed & levelled against him, because he called him his old Controller, which he had most venomously belched against Doctor Perne [50]. Upon his humble submission, and ample exposition of the ambiguous Text, and that his forementioned Maecenas' mediation, matters were dispensed with and qualified, & some light countenance, like sunshine after a storm, it pleased him after this to let fall upon him, and so dispatched him to spur Cut back again to Cambridge. Where after his arrival, to his associates and companions he privately vaunted what redoubled rich brightness to his name this short eclipse had brought, and that it had more dignified and raised him than all his endeavours from his childhood. With such incredible applause and amazement of his Iudges he bragged he had cleared himself, that everyone that was there ran to him and embraced him, and shortly he was promised to be called to high preferment in court, not an ace lower than a Secretaryship, or one of the Clerks of the Council.

Readers, be merry, for in me there shall want nothing I can do to make you merry. You see I have brought the Doctor out of request at Court, & it shall cost me a fall but I will get him hooted out of the University too, ere I give him over. What will you give me when I bring him upon the Stage in one of the principallest Colleges in Cambridge? Lay any wager with me, and I will; or, if you lay no wager at all, I'll fetch him aloft in Pedantius, that exquisite Comedy in Trinity College[51]; where, under the chief part, from which it took his name, as namely the concise and firking [driving, forcing] finical-do [affectedly fastidious] fine Schoolmaster, he was full drawn & delineated from the sole of the foot to the crown of his head. The just manner of his phrase in his Orations and Disputations they stuffed his mouth with, & no Buffianism [buffoonianism] throughout his whole books, but they bolstered out his part with; as those ragged remnants in his four [=three] familiar Epistles[52] twixt him and Senior Immerito, Raptim scripta, Nosti manum & stylum [53] ... , being the pitifullest pangs that ever any man's Muse breathed forth. I leave out half; not the carrying up of his gown, his nice gait on his pantofles, or the affected accent of his speech, but they personated. And if I should reveal all, I think they borrowed his gown to play the Part in, the more to flout him. Let him deny this (and not damn himself) for his life, if he can. Let him deny that there was a Show made at Clare Hall [Cambridge,] of him and his two Brothers, called;

Tarrarantantara turba tumultuosa Trigonum,
Tri-Harveyorum, Tri-harmonia.

Let him deny that there was another Show made of the little Minnow, his brother, Dodrans Dick [54] at Peterhouse, called; Duns furens. Dick Harvey in a frenzy.

Whereupon Dick came and broke the College glass windows; and Doctor Perne (being then, either for himself or Deputy, Vice-chancellor) caused him to be fetched in and set in the Stocks till the Show was ended, and a great part of the night after. - The first motive or caller forth of Gabriel's English Hexameters was his falling in love with Kate Cotton, and Widdowe’s his wife, the butler of St. Iohn's. And this was a rule inviolate amongst the fraternity of them: Gabriel was always in love, Dick still in hate, either with Aristotle or with the Great Bear in the firmament, which he continually baited; or with Religion, against which in the public Schools he set up Atheistical Questions, and besides compared his beard so Porphyrian blasphemously[55], as I am afraid the earth would swallow me if I should but rehearse.

Once he had made an Hexameter verse of seven feet, whereas it would lawfully bear but six; which fault a pleasant Gentleman having found him with, wrapped the said verse in a piece of paper & sent a louse with it, inserting underneath, This verse hath more feet than a louse. But to so Dictionary a custom it was grown with him that after supper, if he chanced to play at Cards, and had but one Queen of Hearts light in his hand, he would extempore in that kind of verse run upon men's hearts and women's heats all the night long, as,

Stout heart & sweet heart, yet stoutest heart to be stooped.

No maypole in the street, no weathercock on any Church steeple, no garden, no arbour, no laurel, no yew tree that he would overslip without hail-sing after the same method. His brains, his time, all his maintenance & exhibition upon it he hath consumed, and never intermitted till such time as he began to Epistle it against me, since which, I have kept him a-work indifferently: and that in the deadest season that might be; he lying in the ragingest fury of the last Plague, when there died above 1600 a week in London, ink squittering and printing against me at Wolfe's in Paul's Churchyard. Three quarters of a year thus cloistered and immured he remained, not being able almost to step out of doors, he was so barricadoed up with graves which besieged and undermined his very threshold; nor to open his window evening or morning but a damp (like the smoke of a Cannon) from the fat manured earth with contagion (being the burial place of five parishes), in thick rolling clouds would strugglingly funnel up, & with a full blast puff in at his casements ... The argument (to my great rejoicing & solace) from hence I have gathered was that my lines were of more smarting efficacy than I thought, & had that steel and metal in them which pierced & stung him to the quick, and drove him, upon the first searching of the wounds I had given him, to such raving impatience as he could rest nowhere, but through the poisonfullest jaws of death, and fire and water, he would burst to take vengeance, and not only on the living but the dead also (as what will not a dog do that is angered? bite and gnarl at any bone or stone that is near him) : but rather I deem that from the harsh grating in his ears & continual crashing of sextons' spades against dead men's bones (more dismal music to him than The Voice, or Ghost's Hearse[56]) he came so to be incensed & to inveigh against the dead, therewith they exasperating and setting his teeth on earth, more than he would.

A Gentleman, a friend of mine, that was no stranger to such bandyings as had passed betwixt us, was desirous to see how he looked since my strappadoing and torturing him; in which spleen he went and inquired for him: answer was made he was but new risen, and if it would please him to stay, he would come down anon. Two hours good by the clock he attended his pleasure, whiles he (as some of his fellow In-mates have since related unto me) stood acting by the glass all his gestures he was to use all the day after, and currying & smudging and pranking himself unmeasurably. Post varios casus [through various misfortunes] his case of toothpicks, his comb-case, his case of head-brushes and beard-brushes, run over, & tot discrimina rerum [and through so many perils], rubbing cloths of all kinds, down he came, and after the beso las manos [I kiss your hand], with amplifications and compliments he belaboured him till his ears tingled and his feet ached again. Never was man so surfeited and overgorged with English as he cloyed him with his generous spirits, renumeration of gratuities, stopping the posterns of ingratitude, bearing the lancer too severe into his imperfections, and traversing the ample forest of interlocutions. The Gentleman swore to me that upon his first apparition (till he disclosed himself) he took him for an Usher of a dancing School, neither doth he greatly differ from it, for no Usher of a dancing School was ever such a Bassia Dona [bacio dona = donor of a kiss], or Bassia de umbra de umbra des los pedes, a kisser of the shadow of your feet's shadow[57], as he is. I have perused verses of his, written under his own hand to Sir Philip Sidney, wherein he courted him as he were another Cyparissus or Ganymede; the last Gordian true-love's knot or knitting up of them is this;

Sum iecur ex quo te primum Sydnee vidi,
Os oculosque regit, cogit amare iecur.
All liver am I, Sidney, since I saw thee;
My mouth, eyes, rules it, and to love doth draw me.

For brevity's sake I omit twenty things, as the conflict betwixt my Hostess of the Dolphin in Cambridge and him, at my being there, about his lying in her house a fortnight, and keeping one of the best Chambers, yet never offering to spend a penny; ... his threatening any Noble-man whatsoever that durst take my part, and vowing he would do this and that to him if he should; his incensing my L. Mayor against me that then was, by directing unto him a persuasive pamphlet to persecute me[58], and not to let slip the advantage he had against me, and reporting certain words I should speak against him that Christmas at a Tavern in London, when I was in the Isle of Wights then and a great while after...

Pierce's Supererogation printed, the charge whereof the Doctor had promised to defray and be countable to Wolfe for, amounting (with his diet) to 36 pounds, from Saffron Walden no argent would be heard of, wherefore down he must go amongst his tenants, as he pretended (which are no other than a company of beggars that lie in an out-barn of his mother's sometimes) and fetch up the grand sums, or legem pone [cash down]. To accomplish this, Wolfe procured him horses and money for his expenses, lent him one of his Prentices (for a serving creature) to grace him, clapping an old blue coat on his back, which was one of my Lord of Hereford's liveries (he pulling the badge off), & so away they went. Saint Christopher be their speed, and send them well back again; but so prays not our Dominico [Dominican] Civilian, for he had no such determination: but as soon as ever he had left London behind him, he insinuated with this Iuventus to run away from his Master, and take him for his good Lord and supporter. The Page was easily mellowed with his attractive eloquence[59], as what heart of adamant or enclosed in a Crocodile's skin (which no iron will pierce) that hath the power to withstand the Mercurian heavenly charm of his Rhetoric?[60] With him he stays half a year, rubbing his toes and following him with his sprinkling-glass & his box of kissing comfits from place to place, whiles his Master, fretting & chafing to be thus colted of both of them, is ready to send out Process for the Doctor, and get his Novice cried in every market Town in Essex: but they prevented him, for the imp or stripling, being almost starved in this time of his being with him, gave him warning he would no longer serve him, but would home to his master, whatever shift he made. Gabriel thought it not amiss to take him at his word because his clothes were all greasy and worn out, & he is never wont to keep any man longer than the suit lasteth he brings with him, and then turn him to grass and get one in new trappings; and ever pick quarrels with him before the year's end because he would be sure to pay him no wages: yet in his prudent forecast he concluded it better policy for him to send him back to his Master than he should go of his own accord ... Wolfe, holding himself palpably flouted therein, went and feed Bailies, and gets one Scarlet (a friend of his) to go and draw him forth, & hold him with a tale whiles they might steal on him & arrest him ... Without more pause, away they hurried him, & made him believe they would carry him into the City where his Creditor was, when, coming under Newgate, they told him they had occasion to go speak with one there, and so thrust him in before them for good manners' sake, because he was a Doctor and their better, bidding the Keeper, as soon as ever he was in, to take charge of him. Some lofty tragical Poet help me, that is daily conversant in the fierce encounters of Raw-head and bloody bones, and whose pen, like the Plows in Spain that often stumble on gold veins, still splits and stumps itself against old iron and raking o'er battered Armour and broken Truncheons, to recount and express the more than Herculean fury [61] he was in when he saw he was so notably betrayed and bought and sold: He fumed, he stamped, he buffeted [stroke] himself about the face, beat his head against the walls, and was ready to bite the flesh off his arms if they had not hindered him; out of doors he would have gone (as I cannot blame him) or he swore he would tear down the walls and set the house on fire if they resisted him; whither, quoth he, you villains, have you brought me? To Newgate, good Master Doctor, with a low leg they made answer: I know not where I am. In Newgate, again replied they, good Master Doctor: Into some blind corner you have drawn me to be murdered; to no place (replied they the third time) but to Newgate, good master Doctor. Murder, murder (he cried out); somebody break in, or they will murder me. No murder but an action of debt, said they, good Master Doctor. O, you profane Plebeians, exclaimed he, I will massacre, I will crucify you for presuming to lay hands thus on my reverent person.

Consiliadore: Of the Doctor it may be said, as Ovid saith of the Scritch owl:

Aliisque (dolens) fit causa dolendi [and, suffering, is a cause of suffering]. [62]

He cannot be content to be miserable himself, but he must draw others to miscarry with him. And as Plato had his best beloved Boy, Agatho, Socrates his Alcibiades, Virgil his Alexis; so hath he his Barnabe [Barnes] and Anthony [Chute] for his minions and sweethearts, though therein I must needs tell him (as Fabritius the Roman consul writ to Pyrrhus when he sent him back his Physician that offered to poison him) he hath made as ill choice of friends as of enemies; seeking, like the Panther, to cure himself with man's dung, and, with the very excrements of the rubbishest wits that are, to restore himself to his blood, and repair his credit and estimation.

Carneades: Allons, allons, let us march, and from arms and skirmishing cast thyself in the arms of a sweet Gentlewoman, that here at the end of the Epistle stands ready to embrace thee. Gabriel calls her the excellent Gentlewoman[63], his patroness, or rather championess in this quarrel, meeter by nature and fitter by nurture to be an enchanting Angel with a white quill than a tormenting fury with her black ink.

Respondent: What, is he like a Tinker, that never travels without his wench and his dog? or like a German, that never goes to the wars without his Tannakin [his Ann] and her Cock on her shoulder? That Gentle-woman (if she come under my fists) I will make a gentle-woman, as Doctor Perne said of his man's wife,

Tunc plena voluptas,

Cum pariter victi foemina virque iacent.

[Ovid: Then pleasure is full, when man and woman lie conquered together.]

Then it is sport worth the seeing, when he and his woman lie crouching for mercy under my feet, I will bestow more cost in belabouring her because, throughout the whole paunch of his book, he is as infinite in commending her as Saint Ierome in praise of Virginity; and oftener mentions her than Virgil & Theocritus Amaryllis. In one place he calls her the one she, in another the credible Gentlewoman, in a third the heavenly plant, and the fourth a new star in Cassiopeia, in the fifth the heavenly creature, in the sixth a Lion in the field of Minerva, in the seventh a right bird of Mercury's winged chariot, with a hundred suchlike: he saith she hath read Homer, Virgil, the divine Archetypes of Hebrew, Greek, and Roman valour, Plutarch, Polyen, Agrippa, Tyraquel.

Bentivole: I have found him, I have the tract of him. He thinks in his own person if he should rail grossly, it will be a discredit to him, and therefore hereafter he would thrust forth all his writings under the name of a Gentlewoman, who, howsoever she scolds and plays the vixen never so, will be borne with, and to prevent that he be not descried by his alleging of Authors (which it will hardly be thought can proceed from a woman), he casts forth this Item, that she hath read these and these books, and is well seen in all languages.

Consiliadore: Shall we have a Hare of him, then, a male one year and a female another, or, as Pliny holds, there is male and female of all things under heaven[64], and not so much but as of trees and precious stones, so cannot there be a male Confuter but there must be a female confuter too, a Simon Magus but he must have his whore Selenes, an Aristotle that sacrificed to his harlot Hermia, but every Silius Poeta must imitate him? Doth he, when his own wits fail, cry Da Venus consilium, Holy Saint Venus, inspire me? But as Bentivole hath well put in, Pars minima est ipsa puella sui. [65] I believe it is but a mere copy of his countenance, and only he does it to breed an opinion in the world, that he is such a great man in Ladies' and Gentlewomen's books that they are ready to run out of their wits for him, as in the Turk's Alcoran it is written that 250 Ladies hanged themselves for the love of Mahomet, and that like another Numa Pompilius, he doth nothing without his nymph Egeria.

Importuno: Nay, if Iupiter joined with the Moon (Harvey and his Gentlewoman) conspire against thee, & that, like another Messier Gallan, the hangman of Antwerp, he hath a whole Burdell under his government, it cannot choose but go hard with thee. She will say, as the Italian Lady did, Kill my children as long as thou wilt, here is the mould to make more.

Consiliadore: We read that Semiramis was in love with a Horse, but for a Gentlewoman to be in love with an Ass is such a trick as never was[66].

Respondent: It would do you good to hear how he gallops on in commending her; he says she envies none but art in person and virtue incorporate, and that she is a Sappho, a Penelope, a Minerva, an Arachne, a Iuno, yielding to all that use her and hers well, that she stands upon masculine and not feminine terms; & her hottest fury may be resembled to the passing of a brave Career by a Pegasus, and wisheth heartily that he could dispose of her recreations.

Carneades: Call for a Beadle and have him away to Bridewell, for in every syllable he commits lechery.

Respondent: He threats she will strip my wit into his [=my] shirt[67], were that fair body of the sweetest Venus in print, & that it will then appear, as in a clear Urinal, whose wit hath the green sickness.

Bentivole: If she strip thee to thy shirt, if I were as thee, I would strip her to her smock.

Carneades: That were to put that fairest body of Venus in Print indeed with a witness, and then she never need to have her water cast in an urinal for the green sickness.

Respondent: She may be Queen Dido's peer for honesty for any dealings I ever yet had with her; but any Gentlewoman's name put in his mouth, it is of more force to discredit it than Lycophron's pen was to discredit Penelope[68], who, notwithstanding Homer's praises of her, saith she lay with all her wooers.

Consiliadore: Whether she be honest or no, he hath done enough to make her dishonest, since, as Ovid writes to a Leno, Vendibilis culpa facta puella sua est.[69] He hath set her commonly to sale in Paul's Churchyard.

Importuno: Let us on with our Index or Catalogue, and descant no more of her, since I am of the mind that, for all the storms & tempests Harvey from her denounceth, there is no such woman, but 'tis only a Fiction of his[70], like Menander's Fable or Comedy called Thessala, of women that could pluck back the Moon when they listed; or Ennius' invention of Dido, who, writing of the deeds of Scipio, first gave life to that Legend. The Epistle Dedicatory past, the Gentlewoman's demur or Prologue staggers next after, the first line whereof is stolen out of the Ballad of Anne Askew [71], for, as that begins
  I am a woman poor and blind,
so begins this:
  O Muses, may a woman poor and blind,
and goes on,
  Is't possible for puling wench to tame
  The furibundal champion of fame?
Bids thee hazard not, panting quill, thy aspen self, calls thee bombard-goblin, and most railipotent for every reign, then followeth she with a counter Sonnet or correction of her own preamble, where there is nothing but braggardous affronts, white-livered tronts, where doth the Urany or Fury ring, pull-crow implements, Danter's scarecrow press, and ends with Ultrix accincta flagello.

Respondent: Yea, Madame Gabriela, are you such an old jerker? then, Hey ding a ding[72], up with your petticoat, have at your plum-tree: but the style bewrays it, that no other is this goodwife Megaera but Gabriel himself; so doth the counter-sonnet and the correction of preambles, which is his method as right as a fiddle. I will never open my lips to confute any rag of it, it confuting itself sufficiently in the very rehearsal. And so doth that which is annexed to it, of her old Comedy new entitled, where she saith her prose is as resolute as Bevis' sword, calls me rampant beast in formidable hide, with I wot not what other Gaetulian [= Getan, Getic] slabberies[73], scare-bugs thee [=me] with a Comedy which she hath scrawled and scribbled up against me. But we shall lenvoy him [write an Envoy as Farewell], and trump and poop him well enough if the wind come in that door, and he will needs fall a Comedizing it. Comedy upon comedy he shall have, a moral, a history, a tragedy, or what he will[74]. One shall be called The Doctor's Dump; another Harvey And His Excellent Gentlewoman, Madame Whipsidoxy; a third The Triumphs Of Saffron Walden, With The Merry Conceits Of We Three, or The Three Brothers; a fourth Stoop Gallant, or The Fall of Pride; the fifth and last A Pleasant Interlude Of No Fool To The Old Fool, with a Iig at the latter end in English Hexameters of O Neighbour Gabriel, And His Wooing Of Kate Cotton. More than half of one of these I have done already, and in Candlemas term you shall see it acted, though better acted than he hath been at Cambridge, he can never be; where upon every Stage he hath been brought for a Sycophant and a Sow-gelder.

Importuno: What say’st thou to The Printer's Advertisement to the Gentleman Reader?

Respondent: I say, ware you break not your shins in the third line on preambles and

postambles; and that it is not the printer's but Harvey's ...

Importuno: His book --

Respondent: Hands off! There is none but I will have the unclasping of that, because I can do it nimblest. It is divided into four parts, one against me, the second against M. Lyly, the third against Martinists, the fourth against Dr. Perne. Neither are these parts severally distinguished in his order of handling, but like a Dutch stewed-pot, jumbled altogether, and linsey-woolsey woven one within another. But one of these parts falleth to my share, I being bound to answer for none but myself, yet if I speak a good word now & then for my friends by the way, they have the more to thank me for.

Incipit Caput primum.

I was ever unwilling to undertake anything, etc.

You lie, you lie, Gabriel, I know what you are about to say, but I'll shred you off three leaves at one blow. You were most willing to undertake this controversy, for else you would never have first begun it; you would never have lien writing against me here in London, in the very heart of the Plague, a whole Summer; or after (through your Friends' entreaty) we were reconciled, popped out your Book against me. Now say what you will of being urged, losing of time, impudency and slander, & another Table Philosophy that ye fancy; for there is not a dog under the table that will believe you…

Carneades: Thou art unwise to canvas it so much, for he thrust it in but for a Rhetorical figure of amplification.

Respondent: Rhetorical figure? And if I had a hundred sons, I had rather have them disfigured, & keep them at home as ciphers, than send them to school to learn to figure it after that order[75].

Carneades: You may have them worse brought up, for so you should be sure never to have them counted liars, since Rhetoricians, though they lie never so grossly, are but said to have a luxurious phrase, to be eloquent amplifiers, to be full of their pleasant Hyperboles; or speak by Ironies; and if they raise a slander upon a man of a thing done at home, when he is a 1000 mile off, it is but Prosopopeia, personae fictio, the supposing or feigning of a person, and they will allege Tully, Demosthenes, Demades, Aeschines, and show you a whole

Talaeus & [Rhetorica] Ad Herennium [76] of figures for it, four and fifty times more licentious. These Arithmetic figurers are suchlike juggling transformers, lying by Addition and Numeration, making frays and quarrelling by Division, getting wenches with child by Multiplication, stealing by Substraction, and if in these humours they have consumed all, and are fain to break, they do it by Fraction.

Respondent: That last part of Arithmetic (which is Fraction, or breaking) I intend to teach Gabriel; though to all the other, as Addition, Division, Rebating or Substraction, of his own engrafted disposition he is apt enough, and so he is to Multiplication too, he having, since I parted with him last, got him a Gentlewoman.

Bentivole: Both thou and he talk much of that Gentlewoman, but I would we might know her, and see her unhuked and naked once, as Paris, in Lucian's Dialogues, desires Mercury he might see the three Goddesses naked, that strove for the golden Ball.

Carneades: The Venus she is that would win it from them all if the controversy were now afloat again: and, which thou pretermittedst before, he puts her in print for a Venus, yet desires to see her a Venus in print[77]; publisheth her for a strumpet (for no better was Venus) and yet he would have her a strumpet more public.

Respondent: By that name had he not so published her, yet his peacock-pluming [furnishing with plumes] her like another Pandora (from Poets' too parasitical commending of whom first grew the name of Pandar, though Sir Philip Sidney fetcheth it out of Plautus), through his incredible praising of her, I say, (wherein one quarter of his Book is spent), he hath brought all the world into a persuasion that she is as common as Rhubarb among Physicians; since (as Thucydides pronounceth) she is the honestest woman of whose praise or dispraise is least spoken. My pen, he prodigally insulteth, she shall pump to as dry a sponge as any is in Hosier Lane[78], and wring our brains like empty purses. Idem per idem [the same through the same] in sense he speaks, though it be not his comparison, and, Tamburlaine-like, he braves it indesinently in her behalf, setting up bills like a Bearward or Fencer, what fights we shall have and what weapons she will meet me at.

Consiliadore: Fasilia, the daughter of Pelagius, King of Spain, was torn in pieces by a bear; & so I hope thou wilt tear her, and tug with her, if she begin once to play the Devil of Dowgate: but as there was a woman in Rome that had her child slain with thunder and lightning in her womb ere she was delivered; so it is like enough hers will be, and prove an Embryon, and we shall never see it: or if we do, look for another armed Pallas [79] issuing out of Iove's brain, or an Amazonian Hippolyte that will be good enough for Theseus; or the female of the Aspis, who (if her mate be killed by any passenger in the way) through fire, through the thickest assembly she will pursue him, or anything but water. [80]

Bentivole: In some Countries no woman is so honourable as she that hath had to do with most men, and can give the lustiest striker odds by 25 times in one night, as Messalina did; and so it is with this his brach or bitch-fox …

Respondent: Quis nisi mentis inops tenerae declamat amicae? [Ovid: Who but an idiot would make pompous speeches to his little sweetie?] Who but an ingram cosset [ignorant lamb] would keep such a courting of a Courtesan to have her combat for him? [81]

Hydra's heads I should go about to cut off (as Tacitus says of them that think to cut off all discommodities or inconveniences from the Laws) if I should undertake to run throughout all the foolish, frivolous reprehensions & cavils he hath in his Book. I will take no knowledge of his tale of ten eggs for a penny, and nine of them rotten, a gormandizing breakfast, he says, I was at of eggs and butter, which, if he can name where, when or with whom, I will give him an annuity of egg-pies. No more will I of his calling me Captain of the boys, and Sir Kill-prick [82], which is a name fitter for his Piggen de wiggen or gentlewoman[83], or else, because she is such a honey sweetikin, let her be Prick-madam, of which name there is a flower[84], & let him take it to himself, and reign entire Cod-piece Kinko, and Sir Murdred of placards [plackets ][85], durante bene placito [during good pleasure], as long as he is able to please or give them gear. Likewise the Captainship of the boys I toss back to him, he having a whole Band of them to write in his praise: but if so he term me in respect of the minority of my beard, he hath a beard like a Crow with two or three dirty straws in her mouth, going to build her nest. See him & see him not I will, about that his measled invention of the Goodwife my mother's finding her daughter in the oven, where she would never have sought her if she had not been there first herself (a hackney proverb in men's mouths ever since K[ing] Lud was a little boy[86], or Belinus, Brennus' brother, for the love he bare to oysters, built Billingsgate); therefore there is no more to be said to it but if he could have told how to have made a better lie, he would.

Oo yes, be it known, I can rime as well as the Doctor, for a sample whereof, instead of his

Noddy Nashe, whom every swash, and

his occasional admonitionative Sonnet, his Apostrophe Sonnet, and tiny titmouse L’envoy [87], like a welt at the edge of a garment, his goggle-eyed Sonnet of Gorgon and the wonderful year, and another L'envoy for the chape of it, his Stanza declarative, Writer's post-script in metre, his knitting-up Cloase [Cloacas-Gloss], and a third L'envoy, like a fart after a good stool; instead of all these (I say) here is the tuft or label of a rime or two, the trick or habit of which I got by looking on a red nose Ballad-maker that resorted to our Printing-house. They are to the tune of Labore Dolore [88], or the Parliament tune of a pot of ale and nutmegs and ginger, or

Elderton's ancient note of meeting the devil in conjure house lane. If you hit it right, it will go marvellous sweetly.

Gabriel Harvey, fame's duckling,
hey noddy, noddy, noddy,
Is made a gosling and a suckling [89],
hey noddy, noddy, noddy.
Or that's not it, I have a better:
Dilla, my Doctor dear,
sing dilla, dilla, dilla;
Nashe hath spoiled thee clear,
with his quilla, quilla, quilla.

… My clew is spun, the Term is at an end, wherefore here I will end and make vacation, but if you will have a word or two of Doctor Perne and Master Lyly, instead of one of Gabriel's Apostrophe Sonnets or L'envoys by Struthio Bellivecento de Compasso Callipero[90], and the Contents of it, I protest and adjure, you shall.

Against Doctor Perne our Poditheck or Tolmach [91] hath in his book twilted and stitched in a whole pennyworth of paper, which his Gossipship, that had the naming of the child, dubs The Encomium [praise] of the Fox … Doctor Perne is casked up in lead, and cannot arise to plead for himself: wherefore this (as duty to those someway binds me that were somewhat bound to him) I will commit to ink & paper in his behalf. Few men lived better, though like David or Peter he had his falls, yet the University had not a more careful Father this 100 year, and if in no regard but that a chief Father of our Common-wealth loved him, (in whose house he died), he might have spared and forborne him. His hospitality was as great as hath been kept before or ever since upon the place he had, and for his wit & learning, they that mislike want the like wit and learning, or else they would have more Iudgement to discern of it.

For Master Lyly (who is halves with me in this indignity that is offered), I will not take the tale out of his mouth, for he is better able to defend himself than I am able to say he is able to defend himself, and in as much time as he spends in taking Tobacco one week, he can compile that which would make Gabriel repent himself all his life after. With a black sant [sanctus] he means shortly to be at his chamber window for calling him the Fiddlestick of Oxford…

More battering engines I had in a readiness prepared to shake his walls, which I keep back till the next Term, meaning to insert them in my Four Letters Confuted, which then is to be renewed and reprinted again…

Herewith the Court breaks up and goes to dinner, all generally concluding with Trajan: The gods never suffer any to be overcome in battle but those that are enemies to peace.

Tu mihi criminis, Author [You are the reason for my crime].[92]

FINIS

Bibliography:

Detobel‘ Collected Essays.

The Harvey-Nashe Quarrel and Love's Labor's Lost by Robert Detobel and K.C. Ligon (2009)

The Harvey-Nashe Quarrel by Rita Lamb: http://sicttasd.tripod.com/quarshort.html

McKERROW, Ronald B., ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, London, 1904-10; Vo. IV, Notes.

https://archive.org/details/workseditedfromo04nashuoft

NOTES:

[1] “Have With You To Saffron Walden”: The title means: “Go against Saffron Walden”. (The ballad “As I went to Walsingham” was also called “Have with you to Walsingham”.) - Nashe’s Arch enemy, Gabriel Harvey, was born in Saffron Walden. – No entry in the Stationers’ Register.

Date of Composition and Publication. -Ronald B. McKerrow, Nashe’s Works, vol. IV, 1908, p. 302:

There seems to be no precise evidence as to the date of this work, the composition of which perhaps extended over a considerable period. The reference .. to the 'late deceased' Countess of Derby [Margaret Stanley, Countess of Derby, wife of Henry Stanley, fourth Earl of Derby, died 28, September 1596], shows that the sheet in which it occurs had been at least not printed off by the end of September, 1596. The work seems to have circulated in MS. for some three months among the author's friends before publication, and it is, I think, not improbable that all the early part was added just before it was sent to press. There is a reference to its publication in Candlemas Term [beginning of Hilary Term = 24 January 1596/97]. The only serious reason alleged for the delay in replying to Harvey seems to be that Nashe expected the aid of others.

We conclude: Nashe’s Have with You was published in January/February 1597.

[2] “animadvertiser of vagrant mustachios”: Jokingly Thomas Nashe calls barber surgeon Richard Lichfield (died 1630) an ‘animadverter’ - that is a censurer or unfavourable critic - of vagrant mustaches. In other words: Nashe instructs Dick Lichfield to trim the beard of the tramp, Gabriel Harvey. - Nashe plays on the words of Don Adriano de Armado in Loves labors lost (V/1):

I must tell thee it will please his Grace (by the worlde) sometime to leane upon my poor shoulder, and with his royall finger thus dally with my excrement, with my mustachy.

[3] “special supervisor of all excremental superfluities”: Nashe repeats the allusion to the Braggart (= Don Adriano de Armado) in LLL (V/1): “it will please his Grace … with his royall finger thus dally with my excrement”. (See note 2.)

[4] “Don Richardo Barbarossa de Caesario”: Richard Lichfield, the barber surgeon of Trinity College, Cambridge. - In 1583 Gabriel Harvey became junior proctor of Cambridge University, and in 1585 was elected master of Trinity Hall, of which he had been a fellow from 1578, but the appointment appears to have been quashed at court. A second application for the mastership of Trinity Hall failed in 1598.

[5] “and take him a button lower”: In LLL (V/2) Armado challenges Costard to a duel, and the two are led on by the onlookers who keep referring to them as Pompey and Hector.

PAGE. Maister, let me take you a button hole lower. Do you not see, Pompey is uncasing for the Combat: What meane you? you will loose your reputation.
BRAGGART. Gentlemen and Souldiers, pardon me, I will not combat in my shirt.

Henry C. Hart (1906) comments ‘take him a button lower’: “Help you off with your garment, with reference to the proverbial phrase meaning to humiliate one.” - See 3.1.9 Loves labors lost, note 113.

[6] “let it be said that a Doctor wears thy cloth”: In Loves labors lost Don Armado appears shirtless, wearing Jaquenetta's linen.

[7] “girding thy keen Palermo razor”: Perhaps an allusion to Harvey’s remark in A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593): “the Reply of the Excellent Gentlewoman is the fine razor that must shave away every rank hair of his [Nashe’s] great courage and little wit”.

[8] “the most contemptible Monsieur Ajaxes of excremental conceits”: Gabriel and Richard Harvey. Ajax was a variant of a jakes, a slang term possibly of French origin for "toilet". - See Loves labors lost (V/2):

CLOWNE. O sir, you have overthrowne Alisander the Conquerour: you will be scrapt out of the painted cloth for this. Your Lion that holdes his Polax sitting on a close stoole, will be geven to Aiax.

[9] “Pachecoes, Poldavisses and Dringles”: Ronald B. McKerrow, the editor of Nashe’s Works, vol. IV (1908), comments: “The name ‘Pacheco’ was borne by several Spaniards of distinction, but Nashe was, I think, using it simply on account of its similarity in sound to 'patch', a fool. – ‘Poldavis’ was a kind of coarse canvas, here used apparently for the wearer, clown, rustic. – ‘Dringles”, apparently eqivalent to ‘fools’.”

[10] “Nos-da diu catawhy”: See Ronald B. McKerrow (1908): “For the Welsh ‘Nos da, Duw cadw chwi’, i. e. Good-night, God preserve you.”

[11] „like Bullen and his Doctor Tocrub”: Ronald B. McKerrow comments: “The reference is to the popular work of William Bullein (d. 1576) entitled A Dialogue . . . against the fever Pestilence, 1564.“

[12] “Don Carneades”: Carneades (214/3–129/8 BC) was an Academic skeptic born in Cyrene. By the year 159 BC, he had started to refute all previous dogmatic doctrines, especially Stoicism.

[13] “these newfangled Galiardos and Seignior Fantasticos, to whose amorous Villanellas and Quipassas I prostitute my pen in hope of gain”: Thomas Nashe wrote among other things the erotic poem The Choice of Valentines (c. 1592) for Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (1573-1624). - See Ronald B. McKerrow (1908): “Ital. gagliardo, brisk, lively. - Villanellas: A species of Italian rustic poetry or possibly the French villanelle, a much more complicated form, is meant.“ - Quipassa: Ital. Chi passa per questa strada‚ who is going down the street‘, found in a popular song: Quipassa, o’th bels and bones. (See Norman Blake, Norman Francis Blake, eds.: Shakespeare's Non-Standard English: A Dictionary of His Informal Language.)

[14] “this Domine Deuce-Ace”: Master Gabriel Harvey. ‘Deuce-ace’ means two and one (i.e. a throw that turns up deuce with one die and ace with the other); hence, a poor throw, bad luck (OED). By adding two and one, one arrives at Harvey's famous Three proper Letters (1580). – In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare mocks both Don Adriano de Armado and his page, Moth.

BOY.
How many is one thrice tolde?
ARMADO.
I am ill at reckning, it fitteth the spirit of a Tapster.
BOY.
You are a Gentleman and a Gamster sir.
ARMADO.
I confesse both, they are both the varnish of a compleat man.
BOY.
Then I am sure you know how much the grosse
summe of deus-ace amountes to.
ARMADO.
It doth amount to one more then two .
BOY.
Which the base vulgar do call three.
ARMADO.
True.

[15] “yet another age three years after the building up the top of Paul's steeple”: The steeple of St Paul’s, destroyed by fire in 1561, wasn’t built up throught the next hundred years. Its reconstruction came to be viewed as one of life’s dimmer eventualities.

[16] “this Gargantuan bag-pudding”: Nashe’s Retourkutsche auf Harvey’s Bemerkung in Pierces Supererogation (1593): “such a Gargantuist as can devour me quick in a salad.”

[17] “and found nothing in it but dogs' tripes, swines' livers, oxgalls, and sheep's guts”: See Thomas Nashe, Strange Newes (1593): “we have cat's-meat and dog's-meat enough for these mongrels.”

[18] “O 'tis a precious apophthegmatical [sententious] Pedant”: Harvey's Cambridge fellows lampooned his compulsive note-taking in a Latin comedy, Pedantius, performed at Trinity College on February 6, 1581, in which Pedantius hopes to sell his books, „enriched with marginal annotations like precious gems or stars,“ for financial gain. - See Edward Forsett’s Pedantius (1581), A hypertext edition by
Dana F. Sutton, The University of California, Irvine. http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/forsett/

[19] “not in the pantofles of his prosperity, as he was when he libelled against my Lord of Oxford, but in the single-soled pumps of his adversity”: In spite of the fact that the Earl of Oxford had supported and encouraged the rhetorician in his younger years, Gabriel Harvey ridiculed, and insulted his former benefactor in 1580 with his “Mirror of Tuscanismo”. - ‘The single-soled pumps of his adversity’ make a reference to Romeo and Juliet (II/4):

MERCUTIO: Follow me this jest, now till thou hast worn out thy pump, that, when the single sole of it is worn, the jest may remain, after the wearing, solely singular.
ROMEO: O single-sold jest, solely singular for the singleness!

It is no coincidence that Nashe quotes Shakespeare at the very moment when he speaks of the Earl of Oxford. He does the same thing again two lines further on. See note 20.

[20] “If you ask why I have put him in round hose, that usually wears Venetians?”: In Strange Newes (1593) Nashe called his adversary a ‘Jack of the Falcon’. That refers to The Merchant of Venice (I/2):

NERISSA. What say you then to Falconbridge, the young baron of England?
PORTIA. You know I say nothing to him, for he understands not me, nor I him: he hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian, and you will come into the court and swear that I have a poor pennyworth in the English. He is a proper man's picture; but alas, who can converse with a dumb-show? How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour everywhere.

This young Baron Falconbridge is a laughable figure. He takes pride in walking around in Venice wearing a Spanish ‘round hose’. - See note 19.

[21] “like a true Millanois [Milanese]”: Ronald B. McKerrow (1908): “The story of Frederick Barbarossa and his punishment of the inhabitants of Milan in 1162“.

[22] “Oration”: The following “reading” is mainly written by Nashe; it is an improvised cross section of material taken from Harvey’s pamphlets.

[23] “A per se, con per se, tittle est Amen!”: Gabriel Harvey gave Thomas Nashe the name “A per se a”, handing him a fit occasion for a brilliant riposte: “A per se a? Passion of God, how came I by that name? My godfather Gabriel gave it me, and I must not refuse it. Nor if you were privy whence it came would you hold it worthy to be refused, for before I had the reversion of it, he bestowed it on a nobleman, whose new fashioned apparel and “Tuscanish gestures…” - In Pierces Supererogation (1593) Harvey states: “a brief but material sum that called the old Ass the great A, and the est Amen of the new Supererogation.” - See 3.1.6 Harvey, Pierces Superergation, note 87.

[24] “a contrary precedent, where he casts Tuscanism, as a horrible crime, in a Nobleman's teeth”: See note 19 above, and 3.1.6 Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, note 36.

[25] “BENTIVOLE. Aye … not only a Musk-cat, but a Musk-cat with gracious favour: not Tibault or Isegrim, Prince of Cats, were ever endowed with the like Title”: Romeo’s friends Benvolio and Mercutio talked about the rough neck, Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (II/4) :

MERCUTIO. Alas, poor Romeo ... is he a man to encounter Tybalt?
BENVOLIO. Why, what is Tybalt?
MERCUTIO. More than Prince of Cats, I can tell you. O, he's the courageous captain of compliments.

With his Prince of Cats Shakespeare plays on the name Tybert (or Thibault) in the medieval tales of “Reynard the Fox”. The satirist Nashe adds Harvey‘s Musk-cat with gracious favour and the cat Isegrim from William Baldwinʼs fable Beware the Cat (1570) to Shakespeare‘s Prince of Cats.

[26] “Oration: To utter the entrails of a spherical heart in few syllables, Musk is a sweet courtesan, and sugar and honey dainty hypocrites”: This “Oration” is a fabrication made up by Nashe.

[27] “Thou hast oppressed us with an Inundation of Biscayanism (the most barbarous Spanish”: Nashe's unusual use of Spanish-sounding names and terms refers to the weird behaviour of Don Adriano de Armado, the amorous Spain, in Loves labors lost. - See notes 9, 12, 13, 39 and 57.

[28] “the green sickness”: In Foure Letters (1592) Gabriel Harvey uses the term to insult Robert Greene; now Nashe turns the self same term against Harvey.

[29] “but if it were an ox's he should still keep it”: This probably alludes to the fictional support of the Earl of Oxenforde (the Oxe).

[30] “Himpenhempen Slampamp”: See Ronald B. McKerrow (1908): “Himpenhempen: Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584, p. 85, 'Hemton hamten ... stampen'. - Slampamp: The word seems to mean a beating.”

[31] “his picke-devant”: A short beard trimmed to a point.

[32] “Turpe senex miles”: Turpe senex miles, turpe senilis amor: An aged soldier and an aged lover are ugly (Ovid, Amores I.9.)

[33] “in the huge Armada against me”: Nashe mentions Harvey's pamphlets “the huge Armada against me”, speaking in reference to Shakespeare’s “refined travailer of Spaine”, Don Adriano de Armado.

[34] “with four notable famous Letters”: Nashe means the publication of Three proper and wittie familiar Letters of 1580, to which is added, two or three months lare, with its own title page: Two Other Very Commendable Letters, of the same mens writing.

[35] “upon my Lord of Oxford in a rattling bundle of English Hexameters”: See note 19.

[36] “he became a common writer of Almanacs. 'Tis marvel if some of you … have not stumbled on such an approved architect of Calendars as Gabriel Frend, the Prognosticator”: Gabriel Harvey alias “Gabriel Frende” published over twenty prognostical almanachs between 1583 and 1623.

[37] “a base Iohn Doleta, the Almanac-maker, Doctor Deuce-ace and Doctor Merryman?”: “John Doleta” published Strange Newes out of Calabria Prognosticated in the Yere 1586 and A confutation of the tenne great plagues (1587). - Doctor Deuce-ace: Nashe can’t resist the temptation to refer to Shakespeare’s joke about the man who can’t add one and one together; see note 14. - Doctor Merryman: See L. Wright's Display of Duty, 1589, “Certain necessarie rules of health prescribed by D. Dyet, D. Quiet, and D. Merryman“.

[38] “I have a tale at my tongue's end … of his hobby-horse revelling & domineering at Audley End”: In July 1578, Gabriel Harvey was summoned to Audley End House (Essex), the home of Lord Thomas Howard (1561-1626) where Queen Elizabeth was residing. Lord Burghley had requested that the young retoritian deliver an official speech in Latin in honour of the Queen and her Lord Treasurer. Harvey added congratulatory passages to the Earl of Leicester, Christopher Hatton, Philip Sidney and the Earl of Oxford. The speech was published under the title Gabrielis Harveii Gratulationum Valdinensium Libri Quatuor in September 1578. (The Gratulationes Valdinenses, ed. and transl. by Thomas Hugh Jameson. Yale University 1938.) - See 3.1.5 Nashe, Strange Newes, note 68.

[39] “Don Pedant”: The “Don” is a reference to Shakespeare’s Don Adriano de Armado (= Gabriel Harvey), thus making the Pedant a Spain.). - See note 18.

[40] “that he looked something like an Italian” In Strange Newes (1593) Nashe wrote: “Her Highness, as she is unto all her subjects most gracious: so to scholars she is more loving and affable than any Prince under heaven. In which respect, of her own virtue and not his desert, it please her so to humble the height of her judgement as to grace him a little, whiles he was pronouncing, by these or suchlike terms. ‘Tis a good pretty fellow, a looks like an Italian, and after he had concluded, to call him to kiss her royal hand.”

[41] “but now he was an insulting monarch above Monarcho the Italian”: See Loves labors lost (IV/1):

BOYET. This Armado is a Spaniard that keepes here in court,
A Phantasime, a Monarcho, and one that makes sport
To the Prince and his Booke-mates.

Ronald B. McKerrow (1908) comments: “'Monarcho', i. e. Monarch, the nickname by which this person seems to have been known. The fact of his being mentioned in LLL has caused references to him to be collected, but though these are fairly numerous they tell us little. It seems most probable that he was a hanger-on of the Court, who lived on his reputation for fantasticality. If we are to believe Scot, he was not altogether sane ; see the Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584, where having mentioned the 'melancholike humor' of Thrasibulus, who imagined 'that all the ships, which arrived at port Pyrceus, were his', he continues, 'The Italian, whom we called here in England, the Monarch, was possessed with the like spirit or conceipt'. In Churchyards Chance, 1580, there is a poem on him called ' The Phantasticall Monarches Epitaphe ', from which it would appear that he was then dead. We also learn that 'On gallant robes his greatest glorie stood'. Scot's statement as to his madness is supported by an anecdote quoted by Reed from A brief discourse of the Spanish State, 1590, from which it appears that he claimed to be sovereign of the whole world.” - See 3.1.9 Loves labors lost, note 66.

[42] “& would make no bones to take the wall of Sir Philip Sidney and another honourable Knight (his companion)”: Take the wall: assert the right to walk nearest the wall, on the inside of the pathway. Harvey claims privileges otherwise reserved for Sir Philip Sidney. – It is highly likely that Nashe was thinking of the following passage from Romeo and Juliet (I/1):

SAMPSON. A dog of that house shall move me to stand: I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague's.

Here again, it is no coincidence that Nashe embellishes his work with a quote from Shakespeare. The term “another honourable Knight (his companion)” refers to none other than Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. - See note 43.

[43] “another honourable Knight (his companion) about Court yet attending; to whom I wish no better fortune than the forelocks of Fortune he had hold of in his youth, & no higher fame than he hath purchased himself by his pen”:

This very important comment was first noticed by Robert Detobel (Detobel’s Collected Essays, Thomas Nashe’s Testimony, 2009.) This honourable companion of Sidney who was also a courtier couldn’t be any other than the Earl of Oxford. Only the poets Sidney and Oxford were present in Audley End, and Have with you wasn’t written until 1596, at which time Sidney had been dead for ten years.

[44] “Our Patron, our Phoebus, our first Orpheus or quintessence of invention he is … to preserve them from the Deluge of Ignorance”: This is praise indeed to the Earl of Oxford alias William Shake-speare. We can also find the statement “being the first … that repurified Poetry from Art's pedantism” in Strange Newes (1593): “Still be constant to thy content, love poetry, hate pedantism”.

[45] “Dagobert Coppenhagen”: Apparently a mere nonce-name.

[46] “Aedes Valdinenses”: Harvey’s Gratulationes Valdinenses (1578). - See note 38.

[47] “that whereas two great Peers being at jar, and their quarrel continued to bloodshed, he would needs, uncalled and when it lay not in his way, step in on the one side”: During the quarrel between the Earl of Leicester (side on sife with Philip Sidney, his nephew) and the Earl of Oxford on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s “French marriage”, Gabriel Harvey seized the party of Leicester and lampooned Oxford in “Speculum Tuscanism” (April 1580).

[48] “and hew and slash with his Hexameters”: Once again, Nashe touches the sore point: Harvey’s “Mirror of Tuscanismo”, published in Three proper and wittie familiar Letters (1580). - See notes 19 and 35.

[49] “Sir Iames a Croft, the old Controller”: Sir James Croft (died 1591), controller of Queen Elizabeth's household and privy councillor, 1570, commissioner for the trial of Mary Queen of Scots, 1586.

[50] “which he had most venomously belched against Doctor Perne”: In Pierces Supererogation (1593) Gabriel Harvey directed a most unpleasant pamphlet against Doctor Andrew Perne (c.1519-1589), Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and dean of Ely.

[51] “Pedantius, that exquisite Comedy in Trinity College”: See note 18.

[52] “his four familiar Epistles”: See note 34.

[53] “twixt him and Senior Immerito, Raptim scripta, Nosti manum & stylum”: Senior Immerito: Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). - Raptim scripta: hastily written. Gabriel Harvey wrote “Raptim, uti vides” -‘In haste, as you see’ (Three … Letters, 1580). Forsett’s Pedantius (1581) countered with: ‘scripta enim sunt uti vides raptim et negligenter” - ‘Hastily and negligent written, as you see.’ - Nosti manum & stylum: ‘In a known hand and style’ (G. H., Three … Letters, 1580).

[54] “Dodrans Dick”: The dodrans (Latin: nine-twelfths) was an Ancient Roman bronze coin. The three-fourth Richard Harvey.

[55] “his beard so Porphyrian blasphemously”: Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234 – c. 305 AD) was a Neoplatonic philosopher. He wrote a treatise Against the Christians, which was banned by emperor Constantine the Great, and was involved in a controversy with a number of early Christians.

[56] “The Voice, or Ghost's Hearse”: See The Shirburn Ballads, ed. A. Clark, 1907, p. 337, where we find a ballad ‘to the tune of The goste's hearse alias The voice of the earth’.

[57] “Bassia de umbra de umbra des los pedes, a kisser of the shadow of your feet's shadow”: See George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie, III. 24, (1589): “With us the women give their mouth to be kissed, in other places their cheek, in many places their hand, or instead of an offer to the hand, to say these words, Bezo los manos. And yet some others surmounting in all courtly civility will say, Los manos & los piedes [I kiss your hands and your feet]. And above that reach too, there be that will say to the Ladies, L'ombra de sus pisadas, the shadow of your steps.”

[58] “his incensing my L. Mayor against me that then was, by directing unto him a persuasive pamphlet to persecute me”: This passage refers to a denunciation in December 1592, when Nashe stayed for the for the first time at the Isle of Whight. - See 3.1.7 Harvey, A New Letter, note 32.

[59] “The Page was easily mellowed with his attractive eloquence”: A meaningful side glance at Don Adriano de Armado and his page Moth in LLL.

[60] “the Mercurian heavenly charm of his Rhetoric”: Compare Armado’s (= the Braggart’s) last words in Loves labors lost: “The wordes of Mercury are harsh after the songes of Apollo.”

[61] “to recount and express the more than Herculean fury”: See Shakespeare, Loves labors lost (I/2):

ARMADO.
Comfort mee Boy, What great men have bin in love?
BOY.
Hercules Maister.
ARMADO.
Most sweete Hercules: more authority deare Boy, name more.

[62] “Aliisque (dolens) fit causa dolendi”: Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI, 345: ‘et nunc accipiter, nulli satis aequus, in omnes saevit aves aliisque dolens fit causa dolendi’ - ‘Now, as a hawk, he [Daedalion] rages against all birds, is merciful to none, and, suffering, is a cause of suffering.’

[63] “Gabriel calls her the excellent Gentlewoman”: Nashe doesn’t dare to reveal the related secrets, so he tries to maintain Harvey‘s mystery of the excellent Gentlewoman. Besides he sees a chance to make fun of Harvey (= Madame Gabriela).

[64] “as Pliny holds, there is male and female of all things under heaven”: Pliny, the elder, The Natural History, XIII.7 “The more diligent enquirers into the operations of Nature state that all trees, or rather all plants, and other productions of the earth, belong to either one sex or the other; a fact which it may be sufficient to notice on the present occasion, and one which manifests itself in no tree more than in the palm.” - Nashe bezieht sich auf Harvey’s Ausspruch in Pierces Supererogation (1593): “I dare not Particularize her [the Gentlewoman’s] Description, according to my conceit of her beau-desert, without her licence or permission, that standeth upon masculine, not feminine, terms.”

[65] “Pars minima est ipsa puella sui”: Ovid, Remedia amoris, 343: ‘Auferimur cultu; gemmis auroque teguntur omnia; pars minima est ipsa puella sui. - We are won by dress; all is concealed by gems and gold; a woman is the least part of herself.’

[66] “but for a Gentlewoman to be in love with an Ass is such a trick as never was”: With the possible exception of Titania’s love for Master Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

[67] “He threats she will strip my wit into his [=my] shirt”: In Pierces Supererogation (1593) Harvey says: “She [the Gentlewoman], with as Visible an Analysis as any Anatome, strippeth his [Nashe’s] Art into his doublet, his wit into his shirt.” - In Loves labors lost Don Armado appears shirtless, wearing Jaquenetta's linen. See LLL (V/2):

ARMADO. The naked trueth of it is, I have no Shirt.
I goe Woolward for pennance.

[68] “but any Gentlewoman's name put in his mouth, it is of more force to discredit it than Lycophron's pen was to discredit Penelope”: [McKerrow] Perhaps taken carelessly from Cornelius Agrippa De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum liber, cap. 4, trans. 1569, fol. I2 V , 'Licophron writeth, that Penelope, made famouse by Homer for her singular chastitie, did bedde with certaine of her lovers'.

[69] “Vendibilis culpa facta puella sua est”: Ovid, Amores III, Elegy XII: ‘Vendibilis culpa facta puella mea est’ : It's my fault if the girl's been rendered marketable.

[70] “there is no such woman, but 'tis only a Fiction of his”: Nashe attempts to lay the riddle of the excellent Gentlewoman to rest with this plausible yet deliberately incorrect interpretation.

[71] “the Ballad of Anne Askew”: Anne Askew (1521-1546) was an English poet and Protestant who was condemned as a heretic by English government.

[72] “Hey ding a ding”: Perhaps Nashe alludes to the song “It was a Lover and his Lass” in As You Like It (V/3):

When birds do sing, Hey ding a ding, ding.
Sweet lovers love the spring.

The satirist had already come very close to Shakespeare’s song in the Burlesque Summer's Last Will (1592). Nashe’s “lusty Ver” (1. Lat. ver = spring; 2. Ver = E. Vere) sings:

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,
Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu wee, to witta woo.

[73] “I wot not what other Getulian slabberies”: Nashe possibly refers to the Getae (Thracian) - and the Getic ‘barbara verba’ of Ovid’s Ex Ponto IV.13.

[74] “Comedy upon comedy he shall have, a moral, a history, a tragedy, or what he will”: First of all a reference to the comedy Loves labors lost. One is reminded of the words of Polonius: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”.

[75] “And if I had a hundred sons, I had rather have them disfigured, & keep them at home as ciphers, than send them to school to learn to figure it after that order”: See Shakespeare, 2Henry IV, IV/3: “If I had a thousand sons”, muses Falstaff, “the first humane principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.”

[76] “a whole Talaeus & Ad Herennium”: Audomarus Talaeus (= Omer Talon, 1510–1562) was a French humanist, the author of Rhetorica (1548).- Rhetorica ad Herennium is s the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric.

[77] “that Gentlewoman … he puts her in print for a Venus, yet desires to see her a Venus in print”: Nashe refers to Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation (1593): “The stay of the Publication resteth only at my instance, were that fair body of the sweetest Venus in Print, as it is redoubtedly armed with the complete harness of the bravest Minerva.” With this Harvey made the rather astonishing claim that the Gentlewoman held back her satire on Nashe solely for his (Harvey's) benefit. - See 3.1.4 Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, note 182.

At this point it is interesting to note with how much alacrity Nashe veils the “excellent Gentlewoman” in secrecy. He has clearly been instructed to observe a strict non-disclosure policy after the revelations that he made in Strange Newes (1593).

[78] “My pen … she shall pump to as dry a sponge as any is in Hosier Lane”: This is clearly a reference to Harvey’s sentence: “One She, and two He’s, have vowed they will pump his Railing ink-horn as dry as ever was Holborn Conduit” (see 3.1.6 Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, note 85). - Hosier Lane: A lane running into Smithfield from the west.

[79] “look for another armed Pallas”: Harvey wrote: “her [the Gentlewoman’s] hottest fury may fitly be resembled to the passing of a brave career by a Pegasus, ruled with the reins of a Minerva's bridle”, and “the sweetest Venus in Print, as it is redoubtedly armed with the complete harness of the bravest Minerva.” (See 3.1.6 Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, notes 172 and 182.)

[80] “or the female of the Aspis, who (if her mate be killed by any passenger in the way) through fire, through the thickest assembly she will pursue him, or anything but water”: See Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, VIII.35: “The neck of the asp puffs out, and there is no remedy whatever against its sting ... The male and the female are generally found together, and the one cannot live without the other; hence it is that, if one of them happens to be killed, the other takes incredible pains to avenge its death.”

[81] “Who but an ingram cosset would keep such a courting of a Courtesan to have her combat for him?”: That is exactly what Gabriel Harvey experienced after he had complemented the “excellent Gentlewoman” in such an obtrusive manner. Shake-speare caricatured him in Loves labors lost as Don Adriano de Armado.

[82] “his calling me Captain of the boys, and Sir Kill-prick”: The obscene turn of phrase “Sir Kill-prick” was a reaction to Nashe’s choice of words in Pierce Pennilesse (1592) when he spoke of “the noble blood of the Kilprickes [Chilperics] and Childeberds [Childeberts], kings of France”. - Captain of the boys: An allusion to Pistol in 2Henry IV, II/4. - See 3.1.6 Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, note 107.

[83] “a name fitter for his Piggen de wiggen or gentlewoman”: OED: “Pigwiggen, -wiggin, used by Greene and Nashe as a quasi-proper name, and by Drayton as the name of a fairy knight favoured by Queen Mab the wife of Oberon. - See Nashe, Lenten Stuffe (1599): “If it were so, goodman Pig-wiggen, were not that honest dealing?”

[84] “let her be Prick-madam, of which name there is a flower”: Prick-madams are stonecrops; however, in using this term he probably is making a reference to Shake-speare’s “Master Mistress of my passion” (Sonnet 20: ‘But since she [Nature] pricked thee out for women’s pleasure’).

[85] “and let him take it [the Prick-madam] to himself, and reign entire Cod-piece Kinko, and Sir Murdred of placards”: An unveiled reference to Berownes’s poetical homage to Amor in LLL (III/1):

This signior Iunios gyant dwarffe, dan Cupid,
Regent of Love-rimes, Lord of folded armes,
Th'annointed soveraigne of sighes and groones:
Liedge of all loyterers and malecontents:
Dread Prince of Placcats, King of Codpeeces -

[86] “a hackney proverb in men's mouths ever since K. Lud was a little boy”: Nashe replies (!) on William Shakespeare’s Loves labors lost (IV/1):

ROSALINE. Shall I come upon thee with an olde saying, that was a man when King Pippen of France was a little boy, as touching the hit it.
BOYET. So I may answere thee with one as olde that was a woman when Queene Guinover of Brittaine was a litle wench as touching the hit it.

But why does the satirist speak of a 'hackney’ proverb? a 'hackney proverb'? - Because he wants to combine his response to Harvey with a message to the Earl of Oxford alias Shake-speare! And because in the year 1596 this Earl and author set up house with his second wife, Elizabeth Trentham, in Stoke Newington (Borough of Hackney).

[87] “instead of his Noddy Nashe, whom every swash, and his occasional admonitionative Sonnet, his Apostrophe Sonnet, and tiny titmouse L’envoy”: Nashe comments Harvey's quaint poems at the end of Pierce’s Supererogation (Grst II.327 & 338-340) in a most unorthodox way.

[88] “the trick or habit of which I got by looking on a red nose Ballad-maker that resorted to our Printing-house. They are to the tune of Labore Dolore”:

Which “Ballad” served as Nashe’s inspiration in the art of rhyming? As we shall see, in Shakespeare’s Verses in LLL: “The Foxe, the Ape, and the Humble Bee”. See note 89. - The “red nose Ballad-maker” is, as Robert Detobel (The Dedication of Strange News, 2009) has pointed out, none other than Shakespeare (see Master William’s “Comment upon Red-noses” in Strange Newes); the “Printing-house” is the house belonging to Nashe's publisher John Danter, who published Nashe’s Have With You to Saffron Walden in 1596, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in 1594 and Romeo and Juliet in 1597 (a ‘rather good’ and a ‘bad quarto’) It is most likely that Danter printed the first versions of Loves Labor’s Lost (which must have been unauthorised) in the year 1595-96, as the edition from 1598 bears the words: “Newly corrected and augmented.”

That is why “the tune of Labore dolore” seems to be the tune of “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” See LLL (I/1):

BEROWNE. Why? all delightes are vaine, but that most vaine
Which with paine purchas'd, doth inherite paine,
As painefully to poare upon a Booke -

[89] “Gabriel Harvey, fame's duckling, / hey noddy, noddy, noddy,/ Is made a gosling [young goose] and a suckling”: Nashe’s mockery is an echo on Shakespeare’s verses in Loves labors lost [III/1]:

ARMADO.
  The Foxe, the Ape, and the Humble-Bee,
  Were still at odds, being but three.
PAGE [= Boy =Moth].
  Untill the Goose came out of doore,
  And staied the odds by adding foure.

See also: 3.1.9. Shakespeare, Loves labors lost, note 54.

[90] “L'envoys by Struthio Bellivecento de Compasso Callipero”: A sarcastic nickname for Gabriel Harvey with a military leaning, referring to Don Adriano de Armada. - Bellum, belli (Latin): the war; calliper compasses being compasses for measuring the calibre of a bullet. (See Three bookes of colloquies concerning the arte of shooting, 1557.)

[91] “our Poditheck or Tolmach”: Another name for Gabriel Harvey. - Ronald B. McKerrow (1908) comments: “Poditheck : Apparently another of Nashe's random borrowings from Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries, ed. 1903-5, II. p. 369, where the second word in a Samoyede vocabulary is ' Poddy thecke, come hither'. - Tolmach: See Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, ed. 1903-5, II. p.449, where a Tartar of this name is mentioned.

[92] “Tu mihi criminis, Author”: Ovid, Meatamorphoses, XV.40: “O cui ius caeli bis sex fecere labores, Fer precor, inquit, opem; nam tu mihi criminis auctor.’ - O you, whose twelve labours gave you the right to heaven, help me, I beg you! Since you are the reason for my crime.’