The Oxford Authorship Site

Caricatures of Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe

Internal evidence in the tracts suggests that Thomas Nashe was a pen-name of Oxford's from 1589 to 1600.

Nashe is best remembered today for his part in a quarrel in print with the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey.

The Harvey/Nashe quarrel from 1589-1599 was one of the most intriguing pamphlet wars in literary history. On the one side was the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey, and on the other the London satirist Thomas Nashe. Why these two went to buffets in print for a decade, and why there are so many references in the course of the quarrel to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, has been, until now, an unsolved mystery.

An account of the quarrel, and internal evidence in the texts of the relevant tracts and documents, reveal that the underlying cause of the quarrel was Harvey’s injurious statements in print about Oxford, and that Oxford occupied such a prominent place in the quarrel because the author behind the pen-name ‘Thomas Nashe’ was Oxford himself.

TRACTS AND DOCUMENTS IN THE HARVEY/NASHE QUARREL

1578

Gratulationes Valdinenses [excerpt]

1580

Three Proper and Witty Familiar Letters

The Choice of Valentines [undated]

1589

Preface to Greene’s Menaphon

The Anatomy of Absurdity

Pap with an Hatchet

1590

Epistle to The Lamb of God