Greene's Coney Catchers and Bunyan's Christian Essay

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Nashe, Greene, Bunyan and English Fiction

Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, Robert Greene’s Coney-Catching pamphlets and John Bunyan’s Vanity Fair each captured something of the imagination of early modern England. Bunyan’s vision of “juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves and rogues” in Vanity Fair was a reality a century before for Greene and Nashe, who actually depicted these visions in a realistic manner. The realism (and satire) that Green and Nashe effected in their works was a cold, sharp anecdote to the times’ fighting, passionate discourses on theology, and bloody civil wars. Bunyan, following up on the state of things a century later, would reflect a much calmer tone—one that was focused more on the spiritual redemption of the English people and less on the chicanery, the conniving, the foppery, the foolishness, the vice, the scandal, the sex, and the sin. If Greene and Nashe found amusement in pointing at the baseness of the human character (a side of humanity that the Old World described as being touched by Original Sin), Bunyan wanted to remind his English readers that this depiction of life was not the only one—and not the only one, surely, that should be examined. As a result, these writers impacted the development of English fiction in ways that pushed and pulled artists in often very opposing directions. They set the stage, so to speak, for how English writers could depict life: and between the two extremes was fair game. This paper will discuss what these fictions bring to the development of fiction in England and how their polarizing perspectives defines the spectrum of English fiction.

The underworld fiction of Nashe and Greene contrasts with the courtly fictions of the time by depicting a world where manners were simply missing. If courtly fiction focuses implicitly on the role that manners have in the life of a respectable person, Nashe and Greene were showing the other side of the coin. They were showing a side of life that was not typically depicted in art because it was not commonly viewed as worthy of having a light shone upon it. Shakespeare could get away with creating characters of tremendous rakish quality in his plays because he often balanced the stage by setting them beside characters of finer moral quality. He could be bawdy—but he was not without the ability to elicit a fine, transcendental note. Transcendentals were not qualities that Nashe and Green sought to explore in their underworld fiction. Bunyan’s Vanity Fair, as part of the longer Pilgrim’s Progress, was at least fundamentally more in tune with the matter of transcendence. After all, the Pilgrim’s Progress was something that was meant to be measured in terms of the eternal. For Nashe and Greene, meditation upon the eternal was simply a distraction from the rollicking time that could be spent with scamps, wastrels, whores, pick-pockets, and the like. For Greene especially, life was not interesting if it was spent being a “holy palmer”—it was interesting if one was spending (preferably someone’s) money on drink and whatever other vices could be had for a sum.

Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller Jack Wilton is a type of character who has reappeared throughout history in fiction, film and everything in between: the individual who is everywhere—at all the important events of a given era, meeting all the important people, yet he himself is a mere commoner, a speck.

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Thomas Berger would reincarnate him in Little Big Man, and Tom Hanks would don the role in Forrest Gump—but Nashe’s Wilton is their forerunner, witnessing events of the 16th century like the slaughter of the Anabaptists and meeting famous personages like Erasmus and Thomas More. Throughout, Wilton serves as the mouthpiece for Nashe, giving commentary on the various whims and disasters of mankind.

Greene’s Coney-Catching pamphlets are in line more with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the earthy, or worldly, pilgrims (rather than the saintly ones) who tell their bawdy tales: there is some similarity between the way, for instance, the Pardoner carries and is described using his bag of fake relics and the way Greene describes the art of coney-catching. There is a kind of authenticity in the sketches—a representation of a side of life that would otherwise not be known. It is seedy, deplorable, and not fit for fine company—and yet it cannot be resisted: it demands one’s attention, namely, because it is true. Its truth is evident in the details that Greene gives the reader, and the details, as vivid as they are, are what connect the work to others like Nashe’s Traveller or even to Bunyan’s Vanity Fair. There is fine-tuned attention to detail that merits awe and respect and shows that Greene has studied the phenomenon considerably well. The depiction of the coney-catchers is worthy of Dickens himself and could easily serve as a forerunner of the London that Dickens would describe for a later generation: “The cony-catchers, apparelled like honest civil gentlemen, or good fellows, with a smooth face, as if butter would not melt in their mouths, after dinner when the clients are come from Westminster Hall and are at leisure to walk up and down Paul's, Fleet-street, Holborn, the Strand, and such common haunted places, where these cozening companions attend only to spy out a prey” (Greene 4). Greene’s coney-catcher has more in common with the genre of realism for its gritty depiction of low fellows, robbers, men and women of the street and the appeal that they hold for the imagination.

Greene’s sense of realism would help to spark a wave of refreshing realism in England that could be sensed in Shakespeare leading up to the turn of the century and beyond and that could later be seen in the epistolary works of the next century. If Bunyan’s Vanity Fair has appeal for its depiction of Christian, quite….....

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