The Pierce Pennilesse pamphlets: theatrical practice and the intellectual’s satirical gaze

Abstract

This article represents the fi rst ever attempt to examine the series of pamphlets on Pierce Penniless, the poor London intellectual, written by T. Nashe, T. Middleton, Anonymous and T. Dekker in 1592–1606, as a unifi ed collection. The three sequels, written more than a decade later than Nashe’s original pamphlet, off er various solutions to Pierce’s problem except the change in attitude to scholars he had been yearning for. The protagonist’s supplication to the devil brings it close to Marlowe’s Tragical history of Doctor Faustus, composed only a little earlier, and highlights the uncommon elements in both narratives. Both Faustus and Pierce begin with melancholic introspection, although their later choices are diff erent in that Faustus renounces the learning he had been involved in, whereas Pierce’s appeal to the devil is a gesture intended to restore the order that he thinks had been undermined by the ‘cormorants’. Both Marlowe’s dramatic and Nashe’s prosaic narratives can be seen in the light of contemporary debate on “mongrel tragicomedy” (as defi ned by Philip Sidney). Rather than “mingling kings and clowns”, playwrights and pamphletists examine the tragic aspects of satire and comic aspects of intellectual plea by focusing on an intellectual protagonist. The pamphlet, traditionally seen as a moralistic genre only, appears as a complex text with an important focus on theatricality and the theatre as a metaphor of life and the stage of justice. The appearance of the devil on stage as a “Prologue in its own play” in Middleton’s Black Booke, the journey of the Knight of the post to hell in Dekker’s pamphlets and the point-by-point response to Pierce set against the panicridden city in the anonymous sequel are shown to be informed by theatre and imbued with theatricality.

Keywords

• Thomas Nashe
• Pierce Penniless
• pamphlet
• theatricality
• interrelation of literary genres
• tragicomedy
• satire