Some planet that loves not cider
0 Comments Published by ginny on Saturday, November 4, 2006 at 12:58 AM.
I just have to say that OH MY GOD I LOVE Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller so far. 1594? I would have said 1694, if you know what I mean and I think you do!
No really, it's enormously funny and disturbing at the same time. In his first exploit, Jack Wilton, the narrator (a trickster pageboy) convinces a miserly bar owner that the King believes the bar owner to be a spy. First the guy entirely blacks out, then Wilton wakes him by pretending to be a customer demanding the bill, which reivives the barman enough to go beat his tapster (under-waiter) for ignoring the (fictitious) customers. Finally Wilton gets him back to himself enough that he can lament his fate, crying out "Nay then, questionless some planet that loves not cider hath conspired against me!"
This is pure comedy gold, people! Was there ever a play of this? It's so fantastically dramatic. I love the voice! Some planet that loves not cider! It has made me laugh out loud at least ten times, and I'm only about twenty pages in to it.
Nashe, by the way, is one of the infamous team behind the scandalous Isle of Dogs, which got Ben Jonson imprisoned for a while. The image at the top of the entry is of him in leg irons. It's from an anti-Nashe pamphlet that was part of an ongoing pamphlet war between Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, which apparently finally provoked Bishop Bancroft to decree that "all Nasshes bookes and Doctor Harveyes bookes be taken wheresoever they maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee ever printed hereafter."1
Truly fantastic. He's also the purported author of this very dirty poem entitled "The Choice of Valentines, or Thomas Nashe His Dildo."
Man, reading this stuff is my work? Yesssss.
Labels: books, early modern
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