for the company.’ The play duly appeared a month later. But Nash asserts that, as far as he was concerned, it was ‘an imperfect embrio.’ He had himself only completed ‘the induction and first act of it; the other five acts, without my consent or the least guess of my drift or scope, by the players were supplied’ (Lenten Stuffe, v. 200). The piece, however, attacked many current abuses in the state with so much violence as to rouse the anger of the privy council. The license to Henslowe's theatre was withdrawn, and Nash, who protested that the acts written by others ‘bred’ the trouble, was sent to the Fleet prison, after his lodgings had been searched and his papers seized (Privy Council MS. Reg. October 1596–September 1597, p. 346). Henslowe notes (p. 98): ‘Pd this 23 of auguste 1597 to harey Porter, to carye to T Nashe nowe at this in the Flete, for wrytinge of the eylle of Dogges ten shellinges, to be paid agen to me when he canne.’ The restraint on the company was removed on 27 Aug., but Nash was not apparently released for many months; and, when released, he was for a time banished from London. ‘As Actæon was worried by his own hounds,’ wrote Francis Meres in his ‘Palladis Tamia,’ ‘so is Tom Nash of his Isle of Dogs. Dogs were the death of Euripides, but be not disconsolate, gallant young Juvenal! Linus, the son of Apollo, died the same death. Yet God forbid that so brave a wit should so basely perish! Thine are but paper dogs, neither is thy banishment like Ovid's, eternally to converse with the barbarous Getæ. Therefore comfort thyself, sweet Tom! with Cicero's glorious return to Rome, and with the counsel Æneas gives to his sea-beaten soldiers (Lib. i. Æneid).’ But persecution did not curb Nash's satiric tongue. In the printed version of his ‘Summers Last Will’ (1600) he inserted a contemptuous reference to the hubbub caused by the suppressed play: ‘Here's a coil about dogs without wit! If I had thought the ship of fools would have stay'd to take in fresh water at the Isle of Dogs, I would have furnish'd it with a whole kennel of collections to the purpose.’ The incident was long remembered. In the ‘Returne from Pernassus’ one of the characters says ‘Writs are out for me to apprehend me for my plays, and now I am bound for the Isle of Dogs.’
In 1597 Nash, in despair of recovering his credit, and being ‘without a penny in his purse,’ appealed for assistance to Sir Robert Cotton, but, with characteristic effrontery, chiefly filled his letter with abuse of Sir John Harington's recent pamphlet, ‘Metamorphosis of A-jax.’ He signed himself ‘Yours, in acknowledgment of the deepest bond,’ but his earlier relations with Cotton are unknown (Collier, Annals, i. 302). In 1592, in the second edition of his ‘Pierce Pennilesse,’ he had complained that ‘the antiquaries,’ of whom Cotton was the most conspicuous representative, ‘were offended without cause’ by his writings, and had protested that he reverenced that excellent profession ‘as much as any of them all.’ Nash's bitter temper certainly alienated patrons, and no permanent help seems to have reached him now. Selden, in his ‘Table Talk’ (ed. Arber, p. 71), tells a story of the scorn poured by Nash—‘a poet poor enough as poets used to be’—on a wealthy alderman because ‘the fellow’ could not make ‘a blank verse.’ In 1599 he showed all his pristine vigour in what was probably his latest publication, ‘Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, containing the description and first procreation and increase of the towne of Great Yarmouth, in Norfolke.’ This is a comically burlesque panegyric of the red herring, and is dedicated to Humfrey King, tobacconist and author. Nash had, he explains, recently visited Yarmouth, and had obtained a loan of money and very hospitable entertainment there (v. 202–3). Hence his warm commendation of the town and its industry. In the course of the work he announced that he was about to go to Ireland (v. 192). Next year he published his ‘Summers Last Will,’ and he has been doubtfully credited with a translation from the Italian of Garzoni's ‘Hospitall of Incurable Fooles,’ a satiric essay published by Edward Blount in 1600. But Blount seems to claim the work for himself. At the same time Nash's name figures among the ‘modern and extant poets’ whose work is quoted in John Bodenham's ‘Belvedere, or Garden of the Muses’ (1600). In 1601 Nash was dead; he had not completed his thirty-fourth year. A laudatory ‘Cenotaphia’ to his memory is appended by Charles Fitzgeffrey to his ‘Affaniæ’ (p. 195), which was published in that year. A less respectful epitaph among the Sloane MSS. states that he ‘never in his life paid shoemaker or tailor’ (Dodsley, Old Plays, 1874, viii. 9).
Nash's original personality gives him a unique place in Elizabethan literature. In rough vigour and plain speaking he excelled all his contemporaries; like them, he could be mirthful, but his mirthfulness was always spiced with somewhat bitter sarcasm. He was widely read in the classics, and was well versed in the Italian satires of Pietro Aretino, whose disciple he occasionally avowed himself. Sebastian Brandt's ‘Narren-schiff’ he also appreciated, and he was doubtless familiar with the work of Rabelais. He had
