Laughter in the Time of Plague: A Context for the Unstable Style of Nashe’s Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem

Others with showers of teares will dew thie herse Ile wepe for the in wine & not in verse.¹

THIS recently rediscovered epitaph for Thomas Nashe (perhaps written by Humphrey King) suggests that excessive weeping is uncongenial to Nashe’s satiric muse, and it is a judgment that seems confirmed by Nashe’s only lachrymose work, Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1593). This pamphlet belongs to the genre known as the “literature of warning,” but it deals with its subject matter with a distinctive lightness of touch.² Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem contains, for example, a brilliant parody of that staple of cheap pamphlets, the hackneyed catalogue of portents: “a Hearneshaw (a whole afternoone together) sate on the top of S. Peters Church in Cornehill. They talk of an Oxe that tolde the bell at Woolwitch, & howe from an Oxe he trans-formed himselfe to an olde man, and from an old man to an infant, & from an infant to a young man. Strange propheticall reports (as touching the sicknes) they mutter he gaue out.”³ The gossipy “mutter” and “a whole afternoone together” are combined with conventional omens, which in their turn are ridiculed by taking them beyond their logical extremes. The old man transforms ad absurdum, and the wonderful touch of having the ox tolling the bell makes an immediately comic picture out of traditionally chilling harbingers of transforming animals and the unexplained ringing of bells.

This article argues against the critical consensus that sees Christ’s Tears — with its serious subject matter and comic style—as a “monument of bad taste.”⁴ It contends that the incongruity between style and subject in Christ’s Tears is in fact a carefully crafted response to the plague. In the early modern period good spirits and laughter were held to be beneficial in warding off this disease, and incongruity was an important aspect of the contemporary theory of humor. This belief generated a distinct genre that influenced Nashe: the plague pamphlet that combined strict warnings with therapeutic pleasantry. Other plague-time writers turned, like Nashe, to Josephus’s history of the destruction of Jerusalem as a narrative that combined terrifying admonition with grotesque aspects that could generate the bleak humor congenial to the time. Laughter in plague time was considered beneficial for both the health and harmony of a society fracturing under the pressure of a contagious disease. The playful aspects of Nashe’s text, however uncongenial to a modern audience, promoted the good spirits and cohesion so essential to both the individual’s and the community’s welfare in the midst of an epidemic.

Nashe’s persona in Christ’s Tears abundantly fulfils Anna K. Nardo’s definition of “the ambiguous, tricky self,” which she identifies as the hallmark of a playful literary work, a self which, however much apparently absorbed in his subject, “always has an eye on the reader, whom he . . . wants to impress with his flashy wit.”⁵ The opening sentence of the work’s dedication asks leave “with the sportiue Sea Porposes, preludiately a little to play before the storme of my Teares” (9). Although the subject matter may change, however, from sportive to serious, linguistic playfulness does not end (as promised) with the dedication. The ornate inventiveness of this address, with its aural elisions (“sportiue Sea Porposes”) and boisterous coinages (“preludiately”) is echoed in the rest of the work, which is vibrant with puns and neologisms such as “doghouse,” “honeysome,” “jellied,” “pin-head,” and a further two hundred fifty-six new words.⁶ Gabriel Harvey, in his New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), accuses Nashe of blaspheming Christ with “counterfait Teares” in his “holy-holy profession.” The word “holy-holy” appears to be a specific attack on Nashe’s style—mocking the compounds that are such a distinctive part of Christ’s Tears. Harvey admonishes:

It is not puffing, or blustring in bombasted termes, or Babilonian phrases: but the fine and sweet course of Vertue, of industry, of Beaudesert, of Valour, of true brauery, that...