Greene's Coney Catchers and Bunyan's Christian

Nashe, Greene, Bunyan and English Fiction
Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, Robert Greene’s Coney-Catching pamphlets and John Bunyan’s Vanity Fair each captured something of the imagination of early modern England. Bunyan’s vision of “juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves and rogues” in Vanity Fair was a reality a century before for Greene and Nashe, who actually depicted these visions in a realistic manner. The realism (and satire) that Green and Nashe effected in their works was a cold, sharp anecdote to the times’ fighting, passionate discourses on theology, and bloody civil wars. Bunyan, following up on the state of things a century later, would reflect a much calmer tone—one that was focused more on the spiritual redemption of the English people and less on the chicanery, the conniving, the foppery, the foolishness, the vice, the scandal, the sex, and the sin. If Greene and Nashe found amusement in pointing at the baseness of the human character (a side of humanity that the Old World described as being touched by Original Sin), Bunyan wanted to remind his English readers that this depiction of life was not the only one—and not the only one, surely, that should be examined. As a result, these writers impacted the development of English fiction in ways that pushed and pulled artists in often very opposing directions. They set the stage, so to speak, for how English writers could depict life: and between the two extremes was fair game. This paper will discuss what these fictions bring to the development of fiction in England and how their polarizing perspectives defines the spectrum of English fiction.
The underworld fiction of Nashe and Greene contrasts with the courtly fictions of the time by depicting a world where manners were simply missing. If courtly fiction focuses implicitly on the role that manners have in the life of a respectable person, Nashe and Greene were showing the other side of the coin. They were showing a side of life that was not typically depicted in art because it was not commonly viewed as worthy of having a light shone upon it. Shakespeare could get away with creating characters of tremendous rakish quality in his plays because he often balanced the stage by setting them beside characters of finer moral quality. He could be bawdy—but he was not without the ability to elicit a fine, transcendental note. Transcendentals were not qualities that Nashe and Green sought to explore in their underworld fiction. Bunyan’s Vanity Fair, as part of the longer Pilgrim’s Progress, was at least fundamentally more in tune with the matter of transcendence. After all, the Pilgrim’s Progress was something that was meant to be measured in terms of the eternal. For Nashe and Greene, meditation upon the eternal was simply a distraction from the rollicking time that could be spent with scamps, wastrels, whores, pick-pockets, and the like. For Greene especially, life was not interesting if it was spent being a “holy palmer”—it was interesting if one was spending (preferably someone’s) money on drink and whatever other vices could be had for a sum.
Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller Jack Wilton is a type of character who has reappeared throughout history in fiction, film and everything in between: the individual who is everywhere—at all the important events of a given era, meeting all the important people, yet he himself is a mere commoner, a speck. Thomas Berger would reincarnate him in Little Big Man, and Tom Hanks would don the role in Forrest Gump—but Nashe’s Wilton is their forerunner, witnessing events of the 16th century like the slaughter of the Anabaptists and meeting famous personages like Erasmus and Thomas More. Throughout, Wilton serves as the mouthpiece for Nashe, giving commentary on the various whims and disasters of mankind.
Greene’s Coney-Catching pamphlets are in line more with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the earthy, or worldly, pilgrims (rather than the saintly ones) who tell their bawdy tales: there is some similarity between the way, for instance, the Pardoner carries and is described using his bag of fake relics and the way Greene describes the art of coney-catching. There is a kind of authenticity in the sketches—a representation of a side of life that would otherwise not be known. It is seedy, deplorable, and not fit for fine company—and yet it cannot be resisted: it demands one’s attention, namely, because it is true. Its truth is evident in the details that Greene gives the reader, and the details, as vivid as they are, are what connect the work to others like Nashe’s Traveller or even to Bunyan’s Vanity Fair. There is fine-tuned attention to detail that merits awe and respect and shows that Greene has studied the phenomenon considerably well. The depiction of the coney-catchers is worthy of Dickens himself and could easily serve as a forerunner of the London that Dickens would describe for a later generation: “The cony-catchers, apparelled like honest civil gentlemen, or good fellows, with a smooth face, as if butter would not melt in their mouths, after dinner when the clients are come from Westminster Hall and are at leisure to walk up and down Paul's, Fleet-street, Holborn, the Strand, and such common haunted places, where these cozening companions attend only to spy out a prey” (Greene 4). Greene’s coney-catcher has more in common with the genre of realism for its gritty depiction of low fellows, robbers, men and women of the street and the appeal that they hold for the imagination.
Greene’s sense of realism would help to spark a wave of refreshing realism in England that could be sensed in Shakespeare leading up to the turn of the century and beyond and that could later be seen in the epistolary works of the next century. If Bunyan’s Vanity Fair has appeal for its depiction of Christian, quite literally a Christian Everyman and an allegorical character who copes with sin and all the traps set by Satan in Vanity Fair, Greene’s pamphlets were like a tour-guide through the real Vanity Fair of England. They were like what Dante might have given to England had he been born an Englishman in 16th century and been obliged to depict the Inferno as a real place called London. Greene set the stage for Bunyan by drawing back the curtain and revealing humankind for what it really was. A century later Bunyan could come back and flip the switch, reminding humanity that it need not follow such a path towards vice as depicted by Greene.
Thus, these two writers with a century between them provide the framework for English fiction—amoral on the one hand, and wholly focused on morality on the other. In Protestant England, this two-sided approach to English fiction made sense as it was essentially the carrying on of the tradition begun by Chaucer, who recognized in humanity both extremes—the good and the bad—and coupled them together in one pilgrimage. Greene simply picks up the journey again two centuries after Chaucer—not to Canterbury—but rather to the local London pubs and alleys, focusing only on one type of character—the sinful kind—and having a merry time doing so. Bunyan, a century after Greene, goes the opposite way—finding more of interest in the good character, the one who seeks union with God—a type also to be found among the pilgrims depicted by Chaucer.
The moral ambivalence that Greene projects in his pamphlets also helps to reveal the extent to which England was—like the rest of Europe—suffering from a crisis of character and moral identity. The Continent along with England had identified as Roman Catholic for many centuries, and it was only now in the 16th century that this identity was really beginning to be challenged. Decadence was one of the results of this challenge—for as Joseph Conrad would later show in his novels revolution always allows the worst elements to rise to the top. The Protestant Revolution (also called a Reformation) did indeed allow certain elements to rise—and Greene puts them on display.
Bunyan’s moral response was then like an attempt to put the lid back on the Pandora’s box that the Revolution had taken off (inside was Greene with his cohorts and friends/fiends). The English fiction that followed had the expanse of space between the two to travel. The wide spectrum was the field in which they could play—and that field would include English satirists, from Swift to Pope and on to Waugh. It would include the mannerists—from Thackeray to Austen. It would include the Romantics who would also rise up from the shadows of that spectrum—from Shelley to Stoker. Greene and Bunyan were like two sides of the English artist coin. They shared the same backdrop—England, but one preferred the light, the other the dark. Nashe enjoyed mocking life on the Continent in the Unfortunate Traveller and like Greene (the works were published about the same time) had a taste for a more decadent side of fiction. However, the two did not discover decadence: Chaucer had already exposed it in the previous century. The wars between Protestants and Roman Catholics had come about as a result of it, and the outcome would be determined by victors. In England the victors were the Protestants—and so the stages would close for a time and the enjoyment that fiction and theater had given to the common people would be frowned upon because it would not reflect the proper kind of sentiment that Bunyan’s Vanity Fair would discourage. For Bunyan, the Vanity Fair was straight from Satan and wholly to be avoided—and for Greene and Nashe it was simply part of life (a sentiment not unshared by Chaucer).
The fact was that humanism and the era of courtly fiction swung the pendulum of feeling in one direction, and Nashe and Greene rode the pendulum back as it swung in the opposite direction. Bunyan caught it again and rode it on once more in the opposite direction of them (this time putting the experience through the lens of his own pious Protestant ethic). English fiction thus bounced from piety to impiety and its authors alternately denounced and celebrated the foibles, failings and sometimes faith of the people in real life they either met or tried to be.
Bunyan’s Christian was certainly intended to be an Everyman (like the titular character in the English mystery play). Yet it was Greene and Nashe who depicted a more realistic Everyman in their examination of everyday life across a range of settings—Nashe taking his main character from country to country in Europe while Green took his reader from ignoble man of the street to ignoble man of the street, detailing their plots, their manner of thieving, revealing their secrets and doing it all with a great deal of joy and pleasure at the marvelous manner in which these people concocted their methods and went about their coney-catching.
In conclusion, Greene, Nashe and Bunyan shared a native country—but their vision of life was different in that Greene and Nashe appreciated the amusement that could be afforded by detailing the sordid side, while Bunyan appreciated the spiritual joy that could be felt by detailing the pilgrim’s progress to the virtuous side. Their works set the stage for English fiction, defined the parameters, and depicted the two extremes. English fiction from then on—and to some extent even before—fell somewhere within the two poles set by these writers.

Works Cited
Bunyan, John. “Vanity Fair.” http://www.bartleby.com/71/1016.html
Greene, Robert. The Complete Coney-Catching.
http://www.exclassics.com/cony/cony.pdf
Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller.
http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Nashe/Unfortunate_Traveller.pdf