ABSTRACT
The published repentances of Robert Greene took place twice in the early 1590s. They began with a series of books published in 1590 in which Greene eschewed the romance fictions that had made him “a second Ouid” and turned to prodigal-son tales. Greene’s model abjures outward heroism, and instead promotes internality constancy for his heroines, and repentance for his heroes. Like Greene and Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe lived inside the bustling world of St. Paul’s in its Elizabethan boom, and like Lodge’s his most productive years coincide with the fin de siecle malaise of the 1590s. The epidemic displays Nashe’s rhetoric at its most perverse: fat sweaty men coming near the King are guilty of “high treason”; cooks dissolve into sweat when basting their meats; tailors cut the “slightest and thinnest” garments to clothe a wasting populace. Nashe elevates Surrey to supreme object of desire and devalues nobility by that it consists entirely of apparel, trains, and expenses.
