yeare of the late Queen Elizabeth when Martin Marprelate was as mad as any of his Tubmen are now.’ Nash's ghost in a verse-preface claims to have ‘made the nest of Martins take their flight.’ On 17 Feb. 1644 there appeared a third work of like calibre, ‘Crop-eare curried, or Tom Nash his Ghost: declaring the pruining of Prinnes two last Parricidicall Pamphlets,’ by John Taylor. Nash's ‘merry wit,’ wrote Izaak Walton, ‘made some sport and such a discovery of [the Martinists'] absurdities as—which is strange—he put a greater stop to these malicious pamphlets than a much wiser man had been able’ (Life of Hooker, ed. Bullen, p. 208).
When the controversy subsided, Nash sought employment in more peaceful paths, and apparently tried his hand at poetry. The publisher Thomas Newman employed him in 1591 to edit an unauthorised edition of Sidney's ‘Astrophel and Stella.’ But it was quickly withdrawn, and in Newman's revised edition of the same year Nash's contributions were suppressed (cf. Arber, Garner, i. 467 seq.). In a prefatory address, entitled ‘Somewhat to reade for them that list,’ Nash had bestowed profuse and apparently sincere commendations on Sidney and his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and only showed his satiric vein when mockingly apologising for his ‘witless youth’ and ‘the dulness of his style.’ More serious offence was probably given by Nash's, or the publisher's, boldness in appending to Sidney's poems verses by Daniel and ‘sundry other noblemen and gentlemen,’ without apparently asking the consent of the authors. An anonymous poem of two stanzas, which in the unauthorised edition concludes the collection (‘If floods of tears could cleanse my follies past’), has been reasonably assigned to Nash himself (Pierce Pennilesse, ed. Collier, xxi.). These stanzas, transposed in order, were again printed with music in Dowland's ‘Second Booke of Songs,’ 1600. A manuscript copy of them is found in a printed edition of Nicholas Breton's ‘Melancholike Humours,’ 1600, among Tanner's books in the Bodleian Library, and there an admirable third stanza is added (‘Praise blindness, eyes, for seeing is deceit’). The additional lines, however, properly belong to a separate poem, which is also set to music in Dowland's ‘Second Booke,’ and possibly came likewise from ‘Nash's pen’ (Shakspeare Soc. Papers, i. 76–9, ii. 62–4).
As a professional controversialist, Nash was not willing to let the Martin Mar-Prelate controversy wholly die without making a strenuous effort to revive it. Circumstances favoured his ambition. In a lame and impotent way, Richard Harvey [q. v.], astrologer and divine, had taken part in the latest stages of the warfare. He had recommended peace, but his contributions were largely characterised by savage denunciations of the men of letters who had, he argued, irresponsibly embittered the strife. In his ‘Theological Discourse of the Lamb of God’ (1590), and in his ‘Plaine Percevall,’ he especially singled out Nash, Greene, and Lyly for attack. Nash he openly referred to as ‘the Cavaliero Pasquil’ (cf. Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. iv. 320 seq.). Nash retaliated by satirising his assailant's notoriously ineffective efforts in astrology in ‘A wonderful, strange, and miraculous Astrologicall Prognostication for this year of our Lord God 1591, by Adam Fouleweather, student in Asse-tronomy, ——, London, by Thomas Scarlet.’ Next year Nash's friend Greene carried the dispute a step further in his ‘Quip for an Upstart Courtier’ by contemptuously describing Richard Harvey and his well-known brothers Gabriel and John as the sons of a poor ropemaker of Saffron Walden. Moreover, in his ‘Groatsworth of Wit,’ which he completed on his deathbed, Greene encouraged Nash to carry on the controversy by apostrophising him as ‘young Juvenal, that biting satirist,’ whose business in life it was to ‘inveigh against vain men.’
In the autumn Nash liberally followed this advice by penning his ‘Pierce Pennilesse his Supplication to the Divell,’ which was first entered on the ‘Stationers' Registers’ on 8 Aug. 1592. It was an uncompromising exposure of the deceits by which worldly prosperity was fostered, and satirised contemporary society with all the bitterness of a disappointed aspirant to fortune. Some verse in the opening chapter—containing the lines:
Divines and dying men may talk of hell,
But in my heart her several torments dwell
—illustrates the depths of Nash's despondency. The couplet was effectively introduced into the popular play ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy,’ 1606. At the close of Nash's pamphlet is a fine sonnet commending Spenser's ‘Faerie Queene,’ but lamenting the omission of the name of a great nobleman (doubtless the Earl of Derby) from the list of those whom Spenser had commemorated in his prefatory sonnets. ‘Pierce Pennilesse’ was first published by Richard Jones with a pretentious title-page of the publisher's composition. The words ran: ‘Pierce Pennilesse his Supplication to the Divell. Describing the overspreading of Vice and the suppression of Vertue. Pleasantly interlac'd with variable delights and pathetically intermixt with conceipted reproofes.
