At least the woodcut tells us a little bit about Nashe's appearance.
For an Elizabethan gentleman he's very raffish - long straggling hair,
no hat, floppy collar, doublet left unbuttoned. Even more surprisingly,
he has no beard. That odd mouth is probably an attempt to depict what evidently
was a feature of Nashe's real appearance; he had buck teeth. (Lichfield also insists he had a hook nose.)
Of course Nashe is shown in the most discreditable light possible, as
a jailbird. And it's true Nashe did actually see the inside of a jail,
at least once. In 1996 a letter was discovered
in an English archive which mentions Nashe had been jailed in Newgate for
writing against the London authorities. He was hardly a "jailbird" in the
usual sense though. His main crime was writing as if Elizabethan England
had free speech (it hadn't). |