ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how Thomas Nashe's work's tricky relationship to humanism reveals often unacknowledged or unarticulated differences and contradictions always already in play within that milieu. It considers the ways in which critics have attempted to reduce Nashe's "senseless discourse" to sense. Nashe can be in the "prime" of his "best wit", but that primacy functions in inverse proportion to his ability to produce anything of value. All his "labours" turn to "loss"; his virtuosity has no virtue; and the efforts of his extemporal vein end up being "all in vaine". For the Renaissance, the possibility of poetry's futility was pushed to the extreme by the genre of romance, which was problematic for early modern writers because it produced an excess of pleasure over instruction. The chapter suggests that Nashe teases his readers to indulge in the kind of irrelevant hedonism that Britomart briefly experiences before the demand for relevance restores the linearity of her allegorical quest.
