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Aretino and the Harvey-Nashe Quarrel

1969; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1261501

1938-1530

David McPherson,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe disagreed violently about Pietro Aretino, the Italian polemicist and pornographer (1492-1556), and their differences about him help to explain why Nashe was able to make a laughingstock of Harvey in their literary quarrel. During Harvey's youth (in the 1570's), he held the then prevailing view that Aretino was a gifted polemicist and politician (only in the 1590's did English writers begin to think of the Italian almost exclusively as a pornographer). In 1592 Harvey attacked Aretino just as violently as he had earlier praised him. His change of opinion must have occurred because he had had his fingers burned writing satire in 1580 and because Nashe, now his opponent, was praising Aretino extravagantly as the Scourge of Princes. Harvey, because of his distaste for Aretino and indeed for all satirists, was now writing as a man of reason above scurrility. Nashe, with Aretino as one of his models, cultivated an opposite pose, that of the lashing modern prose satirist, long on hyperbole and short on sober seriousness. Harvey, with his ponderous irony, was no match for Nashe, the “true English Aretine.“ (DCMcP)