Nashe, Greene, and Bunyan: Shaping English Fiction

Introduction: Two Extremes of 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 earlier for Greene and Nashe, who depicted these scenes in a strikingly realistic manner. The realism — and satire — that Greene and Nashe effected in their works served as a cold, sharp antidote to the era's passionate theological discourses and bloody civil wars. Bunyan, reflecting on the state of things a century later, would adopt a much calmer tone — one focused more on the spiritual redemption of the English people and less on the chicanery, conniving, foppery, foolishness, vice, scandal, sex, and sin.

If Greene and Nashe found amusement in pointing at the baseness of 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 certainly not the only one worth examining. 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 for how English writers could depict life, and between the two extremes was fair game. This paper discusses what these works contribute to the development of fiction in England and how their polarizing perspectives define the spectrum of English fiction.

Underworld Realism vs. Courtly and Spiritual Fiction

The underworld fiction of Nashe and Greene contrasts with the courtly fictions of the time by depicting a world where manners were simply absent. If courtly fiction focuses implicitly on the role that manners play in the life of a respectable person, Nashe and Greene were showing the other side of the coin — a side of life not typically depicted in art because it was not commonly viewed as worthy of attention. 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 Greene sought to explore in their underworld fiction.

Bunyan's Vanity Fair, as part of the longer Pilgrim's Progress, was at least fundamentally more attuned to the matter of transcendence. After all, The Pilgrim's Progress was a work meant to be measured in eternal terms. For Nashe and Greene, meditation upon the eternal was simply a distraction from the rollicking time that could be spent with scamps, wastrels, whores, pickpockets, 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 else's) money on drink and whatever other vices could be had for a sum.

Works Cited

Bunyan, John. "Vanity Fair." The Pilgrim's Progress.

Greene, Robert. The Complete Coney-Catching.

Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller.