The Unfortunate Traveller is perhaps the most brilliant of the Elizabethan novellas. Thomas Nashe tells the complex and disturbing story of Jack Wilton, an amoral young recruit in Henry VIII’s army in France. Wilton has a series of dangerous adventures, starting when he worms his way into the good offices of the army’s Lord of Misrule, a cider seller. He convinces the man that the king regards him as an enemy spy, and receives a great deal of free drink. Eventually the king is confronted and the plot is exposed, resulting in a whipping for Wilton (although we are aware that in the real world a harsher punishment would have befallen him). Wilton then travels throughout Europe, witnessing the destruction of the Anabaptist Utopia established in Münster, before reaching Italy where he witnesses even more spectacular vice and cruelty—specifically the executions of two criminals, Zadoch and Cutwolfe. Wilton returns to England, horrified at what he has seen, and vows to remain at home in the future. The Unfortunate Traveller is disturbing and funny by turns, with every description undercut by a powerful irony, so we remain unsure whether travel is an enlightening or a pointless process. Nashe’s descriptions, especially those of violence, are a brilliant and unsettling combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary—notably when the dying Zadoch has his fingernails “half raised up, and then underpropped . . . with sharp pricks, like a tailor’s shop window half-open on a holiday.” AH