Dido Queen of Carthage

Authorship

What is the Extent of Nashe's Contribution?

The title page of the 1594 Quarto states quite clearly that The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage was "written by Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Nash. Gent." Despite this, many but not all early commentators took the view1 that Marlowe was responsible for most if not all of the play. Some have credited Nashe merely with helping to bring Marlowe's play to publication after his death, perhaps applying some editorial changes or at most completing an unfinished scene or two. Are we in any better position today with the availability of sophisticated digital textual analysis tools to answer the question as to what might have been the extent of Thomas Nashe's contribution?

There are some intriguing considerations. Would Thomas Nashe, if indeed he did prepare the play for Quarto publication in 1594, really have credited himself as joint author if he had not made some significant contribution to the play? If he had thought to try and profit financially from his friend's recent death then he failed miserably, for in Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596) Nashe bemoans the fact that "I hauing got nothing by Printing these three yeres".2

The title page itself contains two minor curiosities in regard to the mention of Nashe as author. Is it in any way significant that the printing of Nashe's name on the front of the 1594 Quarto is in a smaller and more italicised typeface than Marlowe's? Probably not,3 rather it seems to be just a result of the design of the print layout. Other examples of books printed by widow Joan Orwin show a tendency for follow-on lines in a title page section to use a smaller font than the line above.

The reference to Nashe as a "Gent"(leman) is technically incorrect, but matched that on the title pages of his recent pamphlets Pierce Penniless and Strange Newes (both 1592). Nashe himself had refuted the accuracy of this title in a subsequent edition of the latter, complaining that "it hath pleased M^r Printer both in this booke and Pierce Pennilesse, to inuaile a vaine title to my name, which I care not for, without my consent or priuitie I here auouch".4 This would seem to argue against Nashe being closely involved in the preparation of Dido for publication a year or two later, otherwise he would surely have corrected this. Rather Thomas Woodcocke had simply followed the example of recent publications in describing Nashe's social status.

There are some small dramatic inconsistencies in the extant play text that might hint at a joint authorship that was not quite perfectly joined up, as noted by Oliver.5 Examples include unrealistic dramatic continuity (the Trojan ships are rigged by Iarbus without Aeneas leaving the stage in scene V.i), and simple conflicting statements (e.g. Sergestus leads Ascanius away in the same scene but Dido says she saw Achates taking the boy to the ships). Each might be explained away individually as the oversight of a single author, but collectively might they hint more at an underlying reason for the incongruities?

It was Bishop Thomas Tanner (1674-1735) who first stated that Nashe's contribution was merely to "perfecit et edidit" (complete and publish) the 1594 Quarto in his own posthumously published History of English Poetry (London, 1748).6 Tanner it was too, who first made tantalising mention of the inclusion of an elegy by Nashe for his dead friend in that first published Quarto, long since lost if it ever existed. Might the Bishop have taken the inclusion of this elegy to constitute both Nashe's written contribution as well as evidence that he was involved in its publication? Did the elegy say something about Nashe's part in the writing of the play?7 Alas we cannot know, unless a copy of the elegy is ever discovered.

In the second extant publication of the play some 231 years later in A Selection of Plays from the Old English Dramatists (1825), the editor(s) opined with no explanation that Nashe "probably, wrote the greater part" of the play "in which he was assisted by Marlowe", whilst dismissing the effort as "little more than a narrative taken from Virgil".8 The play was soon published in two subsequent collections of Marlowe's works ([Robinson] and [Oxberry]), and James Broughton writing in 1830 conversely stated a strong conviction that it was largely Marlowe's work. "I greatly doubt whether Nash had much or any share in the composition. I find no traces of his style; whilst Marlowe's luxurious imagery is continually discoverable; and I therefore suspect that Nash merely prepared it for the press, after Marlowe's death, or at the utmost completed two or three scenes, which were perhaps left unfinished".9

The oscillating views on attribution had begun. The following year none other than John Payne Collier (1831) credited Nashe with joint authorship via the medium of faint praise. "It is chiefly the circumstance of the monotony of Nash's versification which enables us to judge what parts of the tragedy of Dido proceeded from his pen, and what other parts from that of his coadjutor Marlow [whose scenes show] greater variety of rhythm, pause, and modulation in the verse, but [also] a nobler and a richer vein of poetry." Collier assigns the account of the fall of Troy in particular to Nashe [II.1] which he says "is in some places inflated almost to absurdity".10

Later collected works of Marlowe tended to follow Tanner's view. Dyce (1850) explicitly disagreed with Collier, and follows Tanner in believing "till some positive evidence be produced to the contrary, that Dido was completed for the stage by Nash after the decease of Marlowe".11 Brooke (1910) attributed some sections of more sophisticated verse to be the result of subsequent revision. This could have been done by Nashe when preparing the play for publication, but Brooke thinks due to verbal similarities "it [is] very likely that Marlowe subjected his old Cambridge play to a complete revision at about the time he was writing Edward II".12 Twenty years later Brooke had not changed his mind, concluding "that the evidences of Marlowe's authorship preponderate in every Act, the marks of Nashe's hand being few and generally indefinite".13

Even those editing the collected works of Nashe and including Dido could not agree. Grosart (1885) comes out strongly in favour of Nashe's authorship based on a very limited vocabulary test: "in my judgment very little of it was left by Marlowe for Nashe. His 'mighty line' is scarcely once found; nor even his choice epithets except in a very few cases".14 In stark contrast McKerrow's view (1910) of "what share, if any, Nashe had in it is very difficult to decide", but he finds that "the play seems to belong almost entirely to Marlowe", so much so that he "made no attempt to annotate it fully".15

The doubts inspired by these differences of opinion persuaded H.J. Oliver in the first Revels edition of the play (1968) to attempt some more rigorous bibliographical analysis using a small set of carefully chosen vocabulary.16 These comprised a dozen words and three phrases he identified as found only in Nashe and not Marlowe. He also analysed variations of spelling. Based on the presumption that a single compositor was responsible for the entire 1594 Quarto, and therefore that spelling variations might most likely be caused by different manuscript authors rather than different compositors, he makes some very tentative observations based on comparison with other works of the two authors.

Oliver recognised the dangers of this exercise, and admitted that this approach is statistically unsound, not least because he uses just the single page manuscript fragment of The Massacre at Paris to deduce a small set of characteristic Marlowe spellings. Further there is only one extant Nashe play (Summers Last Will and Testament), which does not make for a very extensive comparison of Nashe's dramatic style. Nevertheless, his analysis identified concentrations of Nashe spellings in sections of scenes I.i, IV.iv, and V.i. plus vocabulary in some seven scenes but especially I.i. But Oliver himself simultaneously notes, for example, that the opening scene with Jupiter and Ganymede is typically Marlovian both in style and subject matter, and this might tend to undermine what is anyway speculative analysis. He concludes that his findings are "at best, straws in the wind".17

The advent of computers has however enabled such stylometric analysis to be taken to a much more powerful level, facilitating comparisons of certain measures across large numbers of works. Thomas Merriam (2000) performed "logometric" analysis on Marlowe's works using five common words ("and", "but", "I", "no" and "not"), in particular analysing the results of function-word tests and relative letter frequencies. As a result of this analysis, he suggested that Marlowe was responsible for the first half of Dido, but that Nashe was responsible for the whole of the second half.18 Interestingly this conflicts with Oliver's tentative findings regarding the opening scene via different metrics, and Lunney and Craig identify the statistical weaknesses of Merriam's approach.19

In a lengthy article whose primary objective was to more firmly establish when the play was likely written, Martin Wiggins (2008) also assesses the extent of Nashe's authorship which would be a consideration in dating Dido. He argues strongly that the play was not written whilst Marlowe (and indeed Nashe) were at University as is often presumed, and is of the view that "to heed the statement that [Nashe] was Marlowe's co-author maintains the pressure of evidence towards a later date". It is a reasonable assertion that "if we are to discount a direct title-page statement of [Nashe's] authorship, we ought to demand a very good reason for doing so." Wiggins challenges the view that reduces Nashe's Dido contribution to "solely [that] of seeing it into print", noting that "scrupulous and dutiful literary executors are not normally named as coauthors on the title pages of their dead friends' work". 20

If there is little of Nashe's style in any part of the play, Wiggins suggests "perhaps that is because Nashe adopted a Marlovian 'house style' when writing in collaboration with Marlowe." Although he does not undertake any textual stylistic analysis of his own, he refers to Oliver's findings. Those tentative conclusions Wiggins gives a far more assertive air by labelling the words and phrases identified by Oliver as "Nasheisms scattered through the play" such that "the question editors should now be posing is not ... whether, but what, Nashe contributed to Dido".21

Advances in digital technology have facilitated ever more complex and wide-ranging comparative textual analyses. Darren Freebury-Jones and Marcus Dahl (2020) used the online EEBO-TCP 22 database of early English works to undertake two extensive analytical textual tests comparing Dido to works that can be confidently attributed to either Marlowe or Nashe. They found "compelling evidence for Marlowe's rhyming habits throughout the text".23 A Zeta vocabulary test (first developed by John Burrows in 2007) was undertaken to first analyse the complete texts of four Nashe works (three prose works plus [Nashe-Summer]) and four other Marlowe plays to identify a subset of words that appeared simultaneously most often in Marlowe and rarely in Nashe, and vice-versa to obtain a second subset. The appearance of those two sets in Dido was then analysed and came out in favour of Marlowe across all "segments" of the play. In a second test, rare phrases of three words or more to be found in each author's canon but not in a large set of other texts were analysed. The rare Marlowe phrases were found to be significantly more prevalent in Dido than those of Nashe which were on a par with rare Greene and rare Peele phrases.

Ruth Lunney and Hugh Craig examined Oliver's word and phrase identifications (termed "Nasheisms" by Wiggins) in great depth as well as undertaking two new extensive digital stylistic tests in their lengthy article Who Wrote Dido, Queen of Carthage? (2020). Further to Oliver's own caveats, the pair add additional doubts around many of the words and phrases used to strengthen Nashe's claim to part-authorship. Several of the terms do not appear in Nashe's other works in the exact form they are found in Dido, and/or appear in Marlowe's works in a different form. Those that rely on matching particular spelling variations in Nashe's other works are "unconvincing" for a number of reasons. Half of the "Nasheisms" appear only once in Dido, whilst some appear in other authors' works.24

The pair also argue that "in Nashe's works, the 'Nasheisms' identified by Oliver occur in contexts very different from those in Dido", including the example of "ticing" which is the most numerous "Nasheism" in Dido. The "most plausible Nasheisms 'exhaled' [I.i.25] and 'attract' [I.i.136] … which occur multiple times in Nashe and – in these specific forms - not elsewhere in Marlowe … are embedded in Dido within a distinctive Marlovian pattern - of eyes and fire and immense natural forces - that expresses the experience of love".25 Even the most distinctive Nasheisms, "Megaera's eyes" [II.i.230] and "glassy fields" [IV.iii.11], which also appear in Nashe's Lenten Stuffe published some five years later (1599), "join other Marlovian echoes [in the latter work] ... in affectionate parody".26 Indeed, those "Nasheisms" that appear only in Nashe's works after the publication of Dido could be considered as "appropriation" by Nashe. Lunney and Craig conclude that "the term 'Nasheism' is misleading and should be discarded. Considered as evidence, the 'Nasheisms' are unreliable, sometimes inconsistent, and often irrelevant; some arise in the narrative, and many are no more than common usage", and have been cited as evidence "without taking into account their contexts".27

As well as disposing of Oliver's "Nasheisms", Lunney and Craig also undertook some detailed stylometric analysis of their own. They extend the Zeta vocabulary test previously undertaken by Freebury-Jones and Dahl by using a larger set of "signature" works confidently attributed to one author or the other to form the Marlowe-not-Nashe and Nashe-not-Marlowe training word sets, and by breaking the works down into larger text segments. They use six Marlowe plays (noting that some of these may themselves be collaborative in part) and six Nashe prose works which produce two distinct groupings of word sets to provide strong confidence in the method. They then perform the same analysis on the segments of Dido, which all "cluster with the Marlowe segments." Wider analysis against a large number (227) of contemporary plays by other authors also finds that the Dido segments "appear as regular Marlowe segments, with no sign of any unusual affinity in the word-list scores with Nashe prose." They do however note the unsatisfactory limitation of comparing prose (Nashe) with plays (Marlowe and the other authors).28

Whilst this latest sophisticated textual analysis by Lunney and Craig finds strongly in favour of Marlowe as sole author and that "there are again no grounds here to detect any Nashe hand in any part of Dido",29 there remains that one key contradictory piece of evidence claiming Nashe's involvement. "This finding does not explain Nashe's name on Dido's title page, a problem which deserves a more adequate answer than Tanner's "edidit et perfecit" nearly three hundred years ago". They can only suggest weakly that "mistakes were sometimes made on title pages, and Dido's may well record one such error".30 The debate will surely continue.

Marlowe Rehearsing His Lines?

The strong imprint of Marlowe on the play's authorship is underlined by the inclusion of a number of lines that reappear in a more refined and celebrated form in his other plays. This might be one argument for an early dating of the play.31 The following are a few notable examples.

The following lines appear variously in Dido:

These are reproduced more concisely as perhaps Marlowe's most famous lines in Doctor Faustus:

The following example shows the ideas in one of Iarbus' more poetical speeches:

And those ideaa are here more elaborately built upon in Tamburlaine: