“Hick scorners jestes”: Thomas Nashe, Martin’s Month’s Mind, and the Tudor Dramatic Tradition

This essay examines the origins and implications of Martin’s Month’s Mind (1589), a piece attributed to Thomas Nashe, and written as part of the Anglican establishment’s response to the Martin Marprelate pamphlets (1588–1589). It makes three related arguments. First, it highlights Nashe’s engagement with strategies of early Tudor drama in writing this polemical prose work, such as allegorical purgation of evil, vice antics, the deathbed confession, and the mock testament. Second, it draws connections between this pamphlet and theater companies and their patrons to which it alludes, examining the role of theater as a political weapon to expose faction and to attack patrons of political opponents. It explores what it was meant to achieve and to whom and under what circumstances it created a proto-public sphere. Finally, it shows the power of drama to insert itself into a late sixteenth-century pamphlet war, where earlier Tudor polemical dramatic conventions worked as powerful tools, instruments known for their effective management of political causes. With those dramatic appropriations, Martin’s Month’s Mind made a case for publicly canvassed argument, offering its audience a sense of political awareness and of their own authority as questioning and engaged citizens. [J.I.]