Nashe's Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599)

Small thinges we may expresse by great, and great by smal, though the greatnesse of the redde herring be not small.

--Thomas Nashe, Lenten Stuffe ¹

At a moment in early modern studies when a declared interest in material culture--objects, things, bodies, places--has become synonymous with a claim to theoretical currency, methodological innovation, or even, at its most dramatic, to the promise of disciplinary reinvention, we would do well to remind ourselves of the flourishing interest in the physical substance of everyday life that characterized early modern England and to revisit the very similar intellectual claims that such an interest sponsored. Here, too, research methods that had long enjoyed decades, if not centuries, of respectability and institutional support suddenly began to appear quaint, naïve, or unreliable when compared to the rigor and acumen of the new procedures favored by more forward-looking contemporaries: I am referring, of course, to the antiquarian interest in artifacts, documents, and physical remains, an interest that characterized a small but increasingly significant circle of English thinkers and their European counterparts and would eventually replace the categories of Aristotelian natural philosophy and finally lead to the scientific methods of modern empiricism. John Leland, William Lambarde, William Camden, Archbishop Matthew Parker, John Stow: each is a figure and a shadowy precedent for our own current fascination with the "matter" of culture and our increasingly reflexive "methodological fetishism," as several critics have recently described it. ²

In our current attempts to excavate--or perhaps to bury more deeply--the operative presumptions of a now outdated New Historicism and to supplement them with the exhumed spirit of Marx or the respectability of the archive, we would do well to revisit also one of the most penetrating, eccentric, and, happily, one of the most amusing critics of Elizabethan antiquarianism: Thomas Nashe. Nashe's peculiar Lenten Stuffe arguably remains the most elusive work of Elizabethan England's most unconventional writer, a text as protean and difficult to characterize as the red herring that is its primary motif. Ostensibly written as a panegyric to the city of Yarmouth and its chief product, the work's rambling, stream-of-consciousness style soon yields to Nashe's legendary invective and devolves into a scathing critique of papists and court culture, becoming by turns a vehicle for his considerable xenophobia and for his equally considerable national pride. An earlier critical tradition singled out the parody of Marlowe's Hero and Leander as the centerpiece of the text and regarded it as a peak in Nashe's mercurial literary career; the work as a whole has been called the premier English example of the mock encomium, epideictic oration, or paradox, in the European humanist tradition. ³ More recently, new historicist and materialist scholars have situated Lenten Stuffe in the context of England's growing participation in overseas trade, praising it for the radical social critique embedded in its carnivalesque language and Menippean form. ⁴

A red herring: the fish was one of Elizabethan England's most spectacularly successful commodities and would provoke commercial rivalry and armed skirmishes with the Dutch for more than a hundred years. At the close of the sixteenth century it had not quite become proverbial. Nashe dangles it before his reader like the jesting Cambridge graduate described in Lenten Stuffe who baits his hook with the fish, lifting it from the river before stupefied onlookers. "To draw on hounds to a sent," Nashe boasts, "to a redde herring skinne there is nothing comparable" (221). ⁵ The figure seems calculated to elude our grasp; indeed, perhaps the most salient aspect of Lenten Stuffe is the persistent way it renders any simple "reading" of its object an impossibility.

In this essay I suggest that we approach Lenten Stuffe as an exercise in epistemology: the text should be understood as an extended satire of many different modes of Elizabethan writing, all of which sought in some...