ABSTRACT
The holiday heroes are floutingly unrepentant. All except Harvest are found wanting and condemned to suffer pains appropriate to their particular kind of excess. The pageant is thus made up of a series of trials of pleasures, reminiscent of mediaeval debats and of the encounters between gay vices and sober virtues in the morality plays, but here primarily shaped by a holiday-everyday opposition. It is a kind of serio-comic-Everyman. Just as ~veryman begins with the summons from God, so Nashe's pageant begins with a song announcing Summer's approaching death, sung by woodnymphs and satyrs as Summer enters leaning on Autumn and Winter:
Fair Summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore; So fair a summer look for never more. All good things vanish, less than in a day, Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay.
