Thomas Nashe’s Almond for a Parrat (1590), corrected by the author

Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1601) wrote fast and died young. Between his arrival in London in 1588, fresh from Cambridge and aflame with ambition, to his untimely and undocumented death a little over a decade later, Nashe published nine substantial books in a variety of genres, including the proto-novel Unfortunate Traveller (1594), the comedy Summers Last Will and Testament (1600), and others that elude generic classification. He also supplied prefaces to works by Robert Greene and Philip Sidney that have become key documents for our understanding of late Elizabethan literary culture; worked with Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, and probably with others as an unidentified contributor to surviving plays or to plays that no longer survive; circulated a notoriously erotic poem in manuscript (“Choise of Valentines”); and is the attributed author of a half dozen polemical pamphlets written in response to the Martin Marprelate tracts (1588-89). 

Like many authors of the period, Nashe left little manuscript evidence of his writing. The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts (CELM) lists only four examples of Nashe’s hand:  

• a 1584 signature in the St John’s College Admission Book (St. John’s College, Cambridge, UK)  
• his autograph Latin verses on Ecclesiasticus 41:1, written as an undergraduate in 1585 as a condition of receiving a scholarship (National Archives, Kew, SPD 15/29, fol. 130)  
• his signature and annotations, including a quotation from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, in a copy of John Leland’s Principium (1589) (Folger, STC 15447, and Kate De Rycher’s 2016 Collation post)  
• a 1596 letter to William Cotton pleading that he had “nere a penny in my purse” (British Library, Cotton MS Julius C. III, fol. 280r)  

A new addition to the Nashe “archive”

A discovery in the Folger collection adds one more document to the Thomas Nashe archive: an author-corrected copy of Almond for a Parrat (1590) (STC 534 Bd.w. 25443 Copy 2). Long associated with Nashe but not conclusively attributed to him, Almond for a Parrat is one of the pamphlets written to combat the radical Presbyterian polemicist Martin Marprelate by turning Martin’s own irreverently jesting style against him. The Folger copy of Almond contains forty hand-written corrections to the text. The lucky survival of Nashe’s undergraduate Latin verses on Ecclesiasticus confirms both his responsibility for the corrections and, consequently, his authorship of the pamphlet. 

Examples of author-corrected copy from this period are rare, and this one may represent the only known example of author-corrected copy that confirms authorship of an anonymous or disputed text. The corrections furthermore afford us a glimpse of an early modern writer at work: Nashe alters, corrects, or adds words to improve clarity, rhythm, and rhetorical punch. He may have written quickly—throughout his works Nashe praises the virtues of “extemporal” prose—but these corrections reveal Nashe as a self-conscious stylist who took care over his words.  

Corrections only an author would make

Almond for a Parrat is a quarto pamphlet of 24 leaves (sigs. A–F4). The forty manuscript corrections in the Folger copy are distributed across sheets from ten of the pamphlet’s twelve formes (A outer, A inner, B outer, B inner, C inner, D outer, D inner, E outer, E inner, F outer). That range of distribution alone eliminates proof copy as an explanation for these corrections. As readers of this blog know, proofed sheets of early modern books were not discarded but often returned to the pile for perfecting, then subsequently gathered up with other completed sheets into marketed copies of the book. The odds are therefore astronomical that ten proofed sheets, each returned to its individual pile, would all end up gathered in just one of the 1000+ copies in the complete run. Another argument against any possibility that these manuscript corrections represent proofs is that a significant majority (more on the exceptions later) do not appear as stop-press corrections, even though collation of the sixteen surviving copies reveals stop-press corrections on five formes (A outer, A inner, C outer, C inner, and D inner). In effect, the two sets of corrections, stop-press and manuscript, complement one another: together they constitute a nearly complete “corrected version” of the entire text. 

These manuscript corrections furthermore are not the sort of copy-editorial markings occasionally left in their books by punctilious early modern readers. No reader would suggest substituting “fuelled” for “swelled” or “tracing” for “trotting”; no reader would know to replace “Hamstead” with the less familiar “Haustead.” Other changes reflect spelling preferences that nobody other than an author would make (“abortive” for “abhortive,” “pursivant” for “pursuivant,” “levalted” for “lavalted”). One change restores a joke about opponent “Martin Junior” botched in the initial printing (“Martin minimus” for “Martin Martinus”). Another replaces “trilled” with “trillild” in reference to the act of drinking up a bowl of beer, a verb with only one other recorded use—by Nashe. 

Identifying Nashe’s hand

While few examples survive of Nashe’s hand for purposes of comparison, his signed Latin verse paraphrase of Ecclesiasticus confirms his responsibility for these manuscript notations: the strong affinities of letter forms, density, slant, and overall look leave no doubt about the identification.¹ Here is the signature Nashe attached to the poem:

Note the identical “iss” and “ssi” combinations in “illustrissima” and “assisse”; the “im” and “in” combinations in the same word and “minimus”; and the distinctive “g,” open “e,” and other letter forms in “Margareta” and “tring” or “fuelled”:

Nashe made these corrections in his best, most legible hand—quite different from the hand he employed in his letter to William Cotton and, apparently, in manuscripts he submitted to the press that compositors struggled to read.

Why make the corrections post-publication? 

It seems that Nashe read proof sheets from only five of the twelve formes during the printing of Almond. We know Nashe was in the habit of reading proofs because he tells us so: “Gentlemen, in my absence (through the Printers over-sight, and my bad writing) in the leaves of C. and D. these errours are over-slipt” (Unfortunate Traveller, 2.202); “I am cald away to correct the faults of the presse, that escaped in my absence from the Printing-house” (Nashes Lenten Stuffe, 3.152).² At some point after Almond was printed, Nashe read the completed copy now at the Folger, taking advantage of the opportunity to add corrections on pages from six sheets he had not managed to proof when the pamphlet was in press. This copy contained three sheets (A outer, A inner, and C inner) in their corrected states, leaving him with little to add to those pages other than a handful of minor typographical fixes. But the copy happened to contain D inner in its uncorrected state. This explains why several corrections on pages from this sheet reflect stop-press corrections that appear in other copies: e.g., the uncorrected states “trotting,” “swelled,” and “Hamstead” are corrected to “tracing,” “fuelled,” and “Haustead.”

Why did Nashe make these corrections in a copy of a book that had already been published? Perhaps he hoped to present this “corrected” copy to a friend or patron. More likely, he hoped there would be a second printing and was preparing copy just in case: two other anti-Martinist pamphlets attributed to Nashe, A Countercuffe given to Martin Junior (1589) and The Returne of the renowned Cavaliero Pasquill (1589) had both already gone through more than one edition or issue. Unfortunately, no evidence survives of the immediate post-Nashe provenance of this copy. In the later seventeenth century it found its way into the 7600+-volume library of Archbishop William Sancroft (1617–1693).  

In general, the manuscript corrections made in the Folger copy of Almond mirror the kinds of corrections Nashe lists in the errata he provided in Strange Newes (1592), Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593), and Unfortunate Traveller. He focuses on revisions and corrections at the level of the word, and he seeks to ensure that the words in the text are those he intended, and that they appear in their right form and in his preferred order. He also takes great care to correct any errors in his Latin—an understandable concern, given his ruthless mockery of others for their poor or inelegant Latin. 

A few other patterns are worth noting. Three corrections in the Folger Almond restore difficult readings effaced by compositors defaulting to more conventional idioms: “assisse” for “assiste,” “Scottish binde” for “Scottish kinde,” “lombes” [looms] for “limbes”. These changes suggest that in addition to the “bad writing” Nashe invokes in Unfortunate Traveller as a reason for printer errors, Nashe’s manuscripts were susceptible to misreading by compositors because of his unconventional word choices and inventive idiom.

Compositors’ mistakes, Nashe’s corrections, and the OED 

In at least three cases, words Nashe corrects in the Folger Almond have entered the OED as if they represented genuine if otherwise unattested words or spellings rather than errors introduced by compositors struggling to read a poor hand: “reflexcye” (corrected to “reflexe”), “hodie-peeles” (“hodie-peeks”), and “subsistership” (“subsisership”). These corrections warn us that other single attestations in the OED might have similarly accidental sources. In another case, Nashe’s great editor Ronald B. McKerrow confidently glosses the otherwise unattested “Cowdresser” with “i.e. cowherd” (4.476), but Nashe corrects the error to “Towdresser,” a worker who prepares tow for spinning. The possibility of glossing a typo is one to haunt the dreams of editors. Finally, Nashe at one point corrects “boy” to “boxe,” encouraging students in Heather Wolfe’s paleography courses not to feel bad if occasionally flummoxed by the secretary “x”—the character could also fool typesetting professionals in the period. 

Since the corrections in the Folger copy of Almond for a Parrat are demonstrably authorial, they are all being incorporated in the edition included in a forthcoming Works of Nashe. One final significance of the Folger copy therefore is that it represents the unique copy-text for what will become the citation edition of this book.