The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 by Steven Moore

Author:Steven Moore [Moore, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2013-04-17T07:21:00+00:00

There had been countless battle scenes in novels before, some brutal, but this is the first to rub the reader's face in the gory details while disrespecting the dead with flippantly alliterative rhythms ("unwieldy Switzers wallowing ... sprightly French sprawling"). "Like a crow that still follows aloof where there is carrion" (277), Jack next goes to Monster in Germany, where John Leyden is leading the Anabaptist uprising against the emperor of Saxony (1534; Nashe merrily mixes fact with fiction throughout the novel). Jack mocks this ragtag army and their theology, and after witnessing another slaughter heads back to England and offers his service to the poet Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (1517?-47), who, though in love with a lass named Geraldine, soon leaves with Jack for Italy.135

En route, the pair stop over at Rotterdam to visit Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, then pass through Wittenberg, where they are treated to some "scholastical entertainment," including a magic show by Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) in which he conjures up the ghost of Cicero. Approaching Italy, Surrey and Jack decide to switch places, and in Venice they indulge in all sorts of antic capers with pimps and whores. Pietro Aretino makes a cameo appearance, and the cheerful vulgarity of his Dialogues enlivens this portion of the novel. (Nashe pauses to pay a three-page tribute to him [309-11]: "ne'er a line of his but was able to make a man drunken with admiration.") In Florence Surrey visits the house where his beloved was born, which allows Nashe to parody the extravagant prose his fellow University Wits were churning out in their romance novels:136

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