Dust hath closde Helens eye
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ord, have mercy on us. Even in Elizabethan lyric the hovering and plunging grief of thisstanza exceptionally sings. It is strange that we have so little verse ofNashe’s. He now has definite patrons- besides the Archbishop, an“Amyntas” m Pierce Penniless probably to be identified with the“Lord” he speaks of here of having been in the country with for fearof the plague raging this year through London, and Sir GeorgeCarey, captain-general of the Isle of Wight, with whom Nashe was atCarisbrooke Castle in the coming winter But his patrons seem alwaysto have come and gone. With Pierce Penniless he both became really known and devel-oped fully his particular gift for taking the English language by thethroat, at the same time clubbing it on the head, with passionate love.“Argument” there is none, except that the writer is determined topresent a supplication to the Devil, finds a messenger, and gives it tohim to read, he himself desires the support he deserves, and that allthe gold locked up in rich men’s coifers should be liberated. Manysms are then attacked: avarice, pride, envy, murder, wrath, gluttony,drunkenness, sloth, and lechery, and some classes: antiquaries, andenemies of poetry, and one person, Richard Harvey, then the “state”of hell IS discussed, and the devil’s nature, and “Amyntas” is praised.The work may seem to belong rather to what we should now call“popular culture” than to literature, but the distinction, fruitful now,had not then in fact arisen.t The same thing is true of his famous quarrel with the Harveys,which here begins, I have said nothing, by the way, of the great * Cf. M. C. Bradbrook, The Growh and Structure af Elksabeihm Comedy, 1955* t A study of the subject might begin with a page (312) in L. C Knight’sDrama (t Society in the Age of Jonson ( 1937 ), and some of the papers, especiallyClement Greenberg’s and Dwight Macdonald’s, assembled in the uneven collec-tion Mms Culture: The Popular Arts in America^ eds. Bernard Rosenbeig andDavid Mamting White, 1957 , 23
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