From the Three Letters (1580) to A New Letter (1593), the English works of Gabriel Harvey present us not so much with a coherent portrait of the critic as with the dramatization of a struggle between two opposed ideas of the critic, one given and the other given off.1 Puzzled by the reputation for pedantry that had clung to him since his days as a fellow at Cambridge, a reputation often borne out by his works, Harvey actively resists it, defining himself as a critic in contradistinction to the pedant. Gradually, the silhouette of a charitable, forward-looking, socially-invested, and above all discreet critic emerges, even if Harvey fails to fulfill those qualities himself. The figure of the pedant, which, as a means of marginalizing English literary criticism, threatened to provide it in its infancy with the same tragic fate reserved for Harvey himself, becomes an asset as Harvey and other critics employ it as an apophatic expression of proper critical practice and an idea over against which to plot out critical progress in England.
This is, as it were, the story so far. It remains incomplete, however, in that it passes over the diminutive figure at the pedant’s side, the Lady of May to Sidney’s Rombus, the Giannicco to Aretino’s Marescalco, the Nashe to Nashe’s Harvey. The role of the attendant satirist in the invention of the critic must be accounted for. After all, Harvey spends just as much ink defining Nashe’s critical identity, and opposing himself to it, as he does recuperating his own:
Nash, Nash, Nash, (quoth a louer of truth, and honesty), vaine Nash, railing Nash, craking Nash, bibbing Nash, baggage Nash, swaddish Nash, rogish Nash, Nash the bellweather of the scribling flocke, the swish-swash of the presse, the bumm of Impude[n]cy, the shambles of beastlines, the poulkat of Pouls-churchyard, the shrichowle of London, the toade-stoole of the Realme, the scorning-stock of the world, & the horrible Co[n]futer of foure Letters.
(2.273)2
The vigor with which this litany of aspersions reduces Nashe from man to beast to fungus fails to redeem the bathos of its final entry, which for Harvey is last but certainly not least. Giving Nashe tit for tat, and parodically striking at the apostrophic heart of raillery, Harvey indulges here in some vituperative name-calling. Yet there is something to it, and Harvey’s assessment of Nashe is not always so reactionary. More often, in fact, Nashe assumes in Harvey’s writings the shape of a readily identifiable type, an object of universal rather than merely personal scorn, a figure variously identified by Harvey and his contemporaries as the “railer,” the “backbiter,” the “detractor,” or sometimes just the “critic.” The application of this type makes it possible for Harvey to fill out Pierces Supererogation (1593) with a previously penned invective directed against the John Lyly of Papp with a Hatchet (1589). So strong is the resemblance between these two writers, Harvey notes, “that I need but overrun an old censure of the one by way of new application to the other” (2.121). The same principle that allows Lyly to stand for Nashe, or Nashe for Lyly, also allows Harvey’s quarrel with Nashe to inherit the structure of a more broad-based contemporary quarrel between productive modes of criticism or judgment and what was most often called “detraction.” That larger quarrel, and its appropriation by the critics of early modern England, is the subject of this chapter.
Like the pedant, the type evoked by Harvey’s portrait not just of Lyly and Nashe but also of Robert Greene possesses a set of defining features. Driven by what Harvey calls
“vile ambition” (2.121), the detractor sucks fame from his victims like a vampire. Hungry for fame, or just plain hungry, Greene attempts to advance his reputation “by diffamation of other” (1.163). Likewise, Nashe seeks “the exaltation of his fame, by the depression of their credit, that are hable to extinguish the proudest glimze of his Lampe” (3.325). By implying the inherent superiority of the detractor’s victims, and indicating their ability, were they so inclined, to snuff out the proud glow of his little lamp, Harvey makes an even more subtle point about the dynamics of detraction. Detraction, he suggests, depends upon distraction. Detractors win the unmerited fame they so desperately crave by drawing the critical attention of their readers or auditors toward the object of their detraction and away from themselves. Sidney had made a similar point in the Defence, observing that
not only in these µισόµουσοι, poet-haters, but in all that kind of people who seek a praise by dispraising others, that they do prodigally spend a great many wandering words in quips and scoffs, carping and taunting at each thing which, by stirring the spleen, may stay the brain from a through-beholding of the worthiness of the subject. Those kind of objections, as they are full of a very idle easiness, since there is nothing of so sacred a majesty but that an itching tongue may rub itself upon it, so deserve they no other answer, but, instead of laughing at the jest, to laugh at the jester.
(Misc. Prose 99-100)
Sidney thus corroborates and goes further than Harvey by providing a physiological account of the process of distraction by which detraction operates. As the detractor carps and taunts indiscriminately, his spleen becomes hyperactive, inhibiting the critical capacity of his brain. Presumably, Sidney aside, detraction promotes a similar effect among its readers by a kind of contagion. According to this pathology, detraction is not a mode of judgment but an obstruction of it.
The indiscretion of the detractor – that is, his tendency to detract indiscriminately – is, for Sidney and Harvey alike, essential to the risibility and critical irrelevance of this figure.
Where Sidney notes generally that “there is nothing of so sacred a majesty but that an itching tongue may rub itself upon it,” Harvey makes the point particular, and more specific, with Nashe:
where any phrase, or word presumeth to approch within his swing, that was not before enrowled in the Common-places of his paper booke, it is presently meere Inkhornisme: albeit he might haue heard the same from a thousand mouthes of Iudgement, or read it in more then an hundred writings of estimation .... if he vnderstand, it is Dunsery: if he vnder/stand not, it is either Cabalisme in matter, or Inkhornisme in forme: whether he be ripe, or vnripe, all is raw, or rotten, that pleaseth not his Imperiall tast.
(2.273-4)
Indiscriminate, to be sure: the detractor will swing at anything and dismisses everything. Elsewhere, Harvey compares Nashe to Meridarpax, the murine hero of the
Batrachomyomachia, who “neuer made such a hauock of the miserable frogges: as this Swash- pen would make of all English writers” (2.243). But Harvey here adds to the vice of indiscretion the antecedent vice of a singular and unregulated standard of judgment. As per Protagoras, the detractor is the measure of all things. He pursues his humorous tastes in spite of “a thousand mouthes of Iudgement,” condemning all that he reads in terms of his own narrow experience. With the political implications of Nashe’s “Imperiall tast,” Harvey conjures up the nightmare vision of the early modern tyrant, who ignores his advisors (“thousand mouthes,” “hundred writings”) and rules by personal will and appetite.
Beyond being vilely ambitious, indiscriminately condemnatory, and perversely singular in judgment, the detractor is lazy, cowardly, and parasitic. For Harvey, these qualities are all wrapped up in the limited mode in which Nashe operates, “railing, railing, railing: bragging, bragging, bragging – and nothing else” (2.117). “[W]ho cannot return home a quip[?]” (1.185). “[W]hat mad Bedlam cannot raile?” (2.115). Detraction requires no skill and involves no personal risk. Rather than meet Harvey on the field of logical
debate, and invest the time and energy required to work through the five-fold process of rhetorical preparation and performance, Nashe parasitically turns Harvey’s own material against him in Strange News (1593), “his only Art ... to mangle my sentences, hack my arguments, chopp and change my phrases, wrinch my wordes, and hale euery sillable most extremely; euen to the disjoynting, and maiming of my whole meaning” (2.115). All bluster, a “huge Behemoth of Conceit ... and the hideous Leuiathan of Vainglorie,” Nashe proves in execution “to be the sprat of a pickle herring ... a shrimpe in Witt, a periwinkle in Art, a dandiprat in Industrie, a dodkin in Valu” (2.115). “[H]e is no boddy, but a fewe pilfred Similes; a little Pedanticall Latin” (2.129) – a hodgepodge of regurgitated material from Gascoigne, Tarleton, Greene, and Marlowe (1.115).
Perhaps worst of all, the detractor engages in detraction with no moral end in mind. Early in the debate, in the Foure Letters (1592), Harvey appears to concede a point to his rival, remarking upon Nashe’s wit. But he hastens to qualify the compliment: “Fine plesant witt was euer commendable: and iudiciall accusation lawfull: but fie on grosse scurility and impudent calumny: that wil rather goe to Hell in iest, then to heauen in earnest, and seeke not to reform any vice, to backebite, and depraue euery person, that feedeth not their humorous fancy” (1.204). Detraction falls short of pleasant wit and judicial accusation by neglecting the moral perspective from which Harvey makes this distinction. Greene and Nashe, in their short-sighted pursuit of fame, have overlooked the more far-reaching effects of their works: “I pray God,” writes Harvey, “they have not done more harm by corruption of manners, then good by quickening of wit” (1.190). Wit will not save the detractor. The fact that he disregards the moral end of detraction, Harvey indicates, does not prevent it from having one.
In the Foure Letters and Pierces Supererogation (1593), Harvey is determined to illustrate the social impact of that moral end and to establish the threat posed to the commonwealth by detraction. Making this point forces him to expand the scope and to generalize the terms of his metacritical argument. The impudence of Nashe in challenging the integrity and compromising the dignity of Harvey, his elder and intellectual superior (at least in terms of accreditation), becomes the threat posed by detraction to the vast structures of hierarchy that were the mainstay of the Elizabethan world: “honor is precious; worship of value; Fame invaluable; they perilously threaten the commonwealth that go above to violate the inviolable parts thereof” (1.165). By threatening “God and good order” (1.203), the detractor threatens to reduce the world to “Vniuersall Topsy-tur[v]y” (2.131). A signally destructive form of the critic, the detractor inhibits learning, peace, and prosperity, both literary and civic.
It is in this context that Harvey most effectively consolidates his and our understanding of the detractor as a critical type. Beyond lumping together Greene, Nashe, Lyly, Elderton, the Martinists and anti-Martinists alike into the category of the detractor, this civic line of argumentation gives him occasion to further define and anneal that category with classical types and a touch of paralipsis:
I neither name Martin-mar-prelate: nor shame Papp wyth a hatchet: nor mention any other, but Elderton, and Greene: two notorious mates, & the very ringleaders of the riming, and scribbling crew. But Titius, or rather Zoilus in his spitefull vaine, will so long flurt at Homer: and Thersites, in his peeuish moode, so long fling at Agamemnon: that they wil become extremely odious & intollerable to all good Learning, and ciuill Gouernement: and in attempting to pull downe, or disgrace other without order, must needes finally ouerthrow themselues without relief.
(1.164)
Harvey here contains the wild variety and unpredictable novelty of the Elizabethan detractor by aligning him with a classical type represented by Zoilus, the infamous critic of Homer,