Marlowe and Nashe

This essay explores the relationship between Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. There are a number of significant connections between the two writers: although Marlowe is known primarily as a dramatist and Nashe as a “proser,” evidence from the hostile Gabriel Harvey reveals that the two were connected in his mind. Nashe appears to have been eager to represent himself as Marlowe’s literary heir, in part through their joint admiration of Pietro Aretino. Both their names are printed on the title-page of Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594), unusual for drama published at that time. Nashe appears to have known Doctor Faustus, not published until 1604, as annotations in his hand demonstrate, and he may have played some role in the authorship of that play. Nashe pays homage to the dead writer in Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599), refiguring the doomed relationship between Hero and Leander narrated in Marlowe’s unfinished poem published posthumously in 1598 in the tale of the love between a red herring and a ling. Through this literary transformation of an Ovidian tale Nashe has fashioned Marlowe in his own image.