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- The Works of Thomas Nashie
The Works of Thomas Nashie
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Excerpt from The Works of Thomas Nashie: Edited From the Original Texts
The entry in the Stationers' Register on Sept. 19, 1588, shows, I think, that the Anatomy was written by that date, and perhaps also that the MS. was in the hands of T. Hacket, the publisher, for I see no reason for supposing that he would have expended even sixpence in registering a work merely promised by an unknown and untried author. Further, the reference at 23. 24-5 to the Calabrian flood, prophesied for 1587, can hardly have been written much later than the end of that year, while that the Anatomy was quite an early work is suggested by the great tendency to the imitation of the style of Euphues, which when Nashe was at Cambridge he greatly admired (i. 319. 15-16), the parade of classical learning, and the absence of allusion to London and London life.
The dedication was perhaps written at the time of the publication of the work, but of this we cannot be certain. The expression at 5. 12-14 'the circumstaunce of my infancie, that brought forth this Embrion' seems indeed to suggest this, but it is not perfectly clear. See note on the passage.
An obscure reference to the Anatomy in the Preface to Menaphon, iii. 324. 31 'If you chance to meete it in Paules, shaped in a new suite of similitudes', may possibly mean that it had undergone some revision before publication, but I am by no means sure that more is intended than 'in a new form', i.e. printed instead of in manuscript.
On the whole I think we may date the work between the summer of 1587 and the spring of 1588, and that thus it is, with the exception of the copy of Latin verses printed at iii. 298 - 9, the earliest of Nashe's writings which have come down to us. It was begun in the country during a vacation (9. 18).
The date of printing was probably February or March 1589-90. The title-pages of the two issues seem, so far as can be judged by comparing one with a photograph of the other, to be from the same setting up of type, with the single exception of the last two figures of the date. Had the printing been completed much before the end of the year (March 25), it seems unlikely that the type of the preliminary matter would have been kept standing.
2. General Character of the Work.
The Anatomy seems to have been intended as an attack upon the female sex, and with this the first quarter of the work is concerned.
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