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The paper acknowledges the role of Lazarlllo de Toruies in creating the
model of picaresque fiction In Elizabethan times, but also points to its native,
English tradition and background, especially to anatomies of roguery
which introduced a much stronger element of crime into the English picaresque
story. This is exemplified by traditional short stories of crime embedded in
T. Deloney's Thomas of Reading and in Robert Greene s tendency towards
writing criminal lives in his last part of his Cony-Catchin? pamphlets.
The main body of the paper consists of a detailed analysis of The Unfortunate
Traveller or The Life of Jack Milton (1594) by Thomas Nashe. Its
aspects of a "historical" novel .and of a picaresque novella, gradually evolving
into a crime story of grotesque and horror until It reaches the depth of
the tragedy of revenge and horror in Chapter XII, are discussed with references
to Marlowe's and Shakespeare's evil Machiavellian characters and Act
III, sc. 3 of Hamlet. Queries are asked about the Elizabethan concept of
tragedy in connexion with the contemporaneous Christianity devoid of charitable
love. The conclusion is that T. Nashe's "mocking imagination" and consequent
style make his highly individual picaresque novel so ambiguous that it
Is impossible to give decisive assessment of his artistic intents. Without
Its "tragic matter" It served as a model for Defoe and Smollett in the
eighteenth century.
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