ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book expands the now-established pattern of interrogating Thomas Nashe's broad interest in early modern media technologies. It provides renewed attention to Nashe's interface with drama, that most famous of Elizabethan forms which the focus on Nashe as "man in print" has tended to marginalize. The book shows how the clown and public performer Richard Tarlton influenced Nashe's career in multiple ways, as performer, stylist, and self-promoting author. It explores reproductive language in Nashe's self-aware prose, suggesting that the reproductive female body was especially salient in authorial self-creation and self-understanding in Nashe's works. The book suggests that Nashe was powerfully influenced by advances in medical science, especially Vesalius's landmark achievements in understanding and textually reproducing the physical anatomy of the human body. It draws together the work of some established Nashe critics to help revise the paradigms of their earlier work.
