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Thomas Nashe
(1567 - c. 1601)
Elizabethan poet, pamphleteer, and satirist Thomas Nashe is best known for his The Unfortunate Traveller, considered the first picaresque novel written in English.
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Miscellany
Setting grim tales during nighttime was critiqued as a cliché in 1594 by Thomas Nashe. “When any poet would describe a horrible tragical accident,” he wrote, “to add the more probability and credence unto it, he dismally begins to tell how it was dark night when it was done.”
When night in her rusty dungeon has imprisoned our eyesight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the devil keeps his audit in our sin-guilty consciences.
—Thomas Nashe, 1594
