Summary: Jack Wilton is a page serving in the army of King Henry VIII of England when

his adventures begin. While the English troops are encamped near Turwin in France, Jack
pretends that he has overheard the king and his council planning to do away with a certain
sutler, or civilian provisioner, and he convinces the sutler that he ought to give away all of
his supplies to the soldiers and then throw himself on the king’s mercy. Completely fooled,
the sutler does just that. The king, enjoying the prank, gives the sutler a pension and
forgives Jack.
Shortly after this escapade, Jack befriends a captain who forces Jack to help him
get rich by throwing dice. Jack tires of his subservience to the captain and persuades the
officer that the best means of getting ahead in the army is to turn spy and seek out
information valuable to the king. The gullible captain enters the French lines and is
discovered by the French and almost killed before he is hustled back to the English camp.
The campaign over, Jack finds himself back in England once more. When the
peacetime duties of a page begin to pall, he leaves the king’s household and turns soldier of
fortune. After crossing the English Channel to find a means of making a livelihood, he
reaches the French king too late to enter that monarch’s service against the Swiss. He
travels on to Münster, Germany, where he finds John Leiden leading the Baptists against
the duke of Saxony. He observes a notorious massacre in which the Baptists are annihilated
because they refuse to carry the weapons of war into battle.
After the battle, Jack meets the earl of Surrey, who is on the Continent at the
time. Surrey was acquainted with Jack at King Henry’s court and is glad to see him again. He
confides to Jack his love for Geraldine, a lovely Florentine woman. Surrey proposes that
Jack travel with him to Italy to find her. Since Jack has no other immediate plans, he
readily consents to accompany the earl.
Jack and Surrey proceed southward into Italy. As they travel, Surrey proposes to
Jack that they exchange identities for a time, so that the nobleman can behave in a less
seemly fashion. Pleased at the prospect of being an earl, even temporarily, Jack agrees.
Upon their arrival in Venice, the two are taken up by a courtesan named Tabitha,
who tries to kill the man she thinks is the earl of Surrey, using the true earl as her
accomplice.
Surrey and Jack turn the tables on her, however, and cause her and her pander to
be executed for attempting to conspire against a life. In the process, however, Jack
unknowingly comes into possession of some counterfeit coins. When they use the money,
Jack and the earl are seized as counterfeiters and are sentenced to death.
While in prison awaiting execution, Jack meets Diamante, the wife of a goldsmith;
her husband has imprisoned her because he suspects her of infidelity. Jack has sex with
Diamante after assuring her that by doing so she is avenging herself on a husband who does
not believe in her chastity.
After a few weeks in prison, Jack and the earl are released; an English gentleman
who had heard of their plight had secured the efforts of the poet Aretine to prove to the
court that Tabitha and her procurer were the counterfeiters. Aretine also sees to it that
Diamante is released from prison. She continues to be Jack’s mistress, and within a few
weeks, after her husband dies of the plague, Jack marries her.
Jack decides to travel, and he and Diamante leave the earl of Surrey in Venice. Jack
takes such pleasure from bearing the nobleman’s title, however, that he continues to do so.
After some time, Surrey hears that there is another earl by the same name and goes to
investigate. Learning that the double is Jack, Surrey forgives him, and they once again
resume their interrupted trip to Florence. Upon arriving there, the earl issues a challenge
to all the knights and gentlemen of the city; he hopes thereby to prove his love for
Geraldine. The tournament is a great success, and Surrey carries off all the honors of the
day. After that, Surrey and Jack part company, and Jack, still accompanied by Diamante,
goes on to Rome.
In Rome, Jack and Diamante live with Johannes and Heraclide de Imola. During the
summer, Signor de Imola dies of the plague. Shortly after his death, and before his corpse
can be removed from the house, bandits break in and rape Heraclide de Imola and
Diamante. Jack is overpowered by the bandits and unable to help the women. Heraclide kills
herself after the attack. When police arrive at the house, they blame Jack for what has
happened. He is unable to clear himself because the only other witness is Diamante, whom
the bandits have kidnapped.
A banished English earl appears in time to save Jack from the hangman’s noose by
producing witnesses to a deathbed confession made by one of the bandits. Jack is released
and goes in search of Diamante. While searching for her, he falls through an unbarred
cellar door into the house of a Jew, where he finds Diamante making love to an apprentice.
The Jew, roused by the noise of the fall and Jack’s angry shouting at Diamante, comes into
the cellar and accuses them both of breaking into his house and corrupting his apprentice.
Under the law, they become the Jew’s bond servants. Jack is turned over to another Jew,
the pope’s physician, to be used in a vivisection.
He is saved from this horrid death when one of the pope’s mistresses falls in love
with him and uses her influence to secure him for herself. Diamante also falls into the
woman’s hands. Jack and Diamante keep their previous relations a secret and wait for a
chance to escape from the woman’s house. One day, while the woman is away at a religious
festival, they run off, taking with them as much loot as they can carry.
Traveling northward, Jack goes to Bologna. There he witnesses the execution of a
famous criminal, Cutwolfe, who had confessed to murdering the bandit who led the assault
on Heraclide de Imola and Diamante months before. Moving on into France, Jack finds the
English armies once again in the field, and he returns to King Henry’s service.
Critical Notes: Following the example of Robert Greene, one of his predecessors at St.
John’s College, Cambridge, Thomas Nashe overcame whatever religious scruples might have
been bred into him as a preacher’s son and set out with profane determination to become
one of the first professional writers in England and one of the most controversial. As a
member of the University Wits, he distinguished himself with the diversity of his authorial
talents, unashamedly plying the writer’s trade as polemical pamphleteer, poet, dramatist,
and reporter. He said of himself, “I have written in all sorts of humours more than any
young man of my age in England.”
When he died, still a young man in his thirties, Nashe left behind a veritable grab
bag of miscellaneous literary pieces. Later critics have often concluded that Nashe’s
explosive productivity was more comparable with the effect of a scattergun than with that
of the big cannons wielded by such contemporaries as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson,
and Philip Marlowe. Nashe has been accused of superficiality, of both thought and style,
and he richly merits the accusation. Nevertheless, all would agree that at least two of his
works deserve the continued attention of all those interested in the development of English
literary style: The Unfortunate Traveller: Or, The Life of Jack Wilton and Pierce Penilesse,
His Supplication to the Divell (1592), which received three editions in the first year of
publication alone.
Pierce Penilesse, Nashe’s most popular and wide-ranging satirical pamphlet, is a
harsh, graphic indictment of the follies and vices of contemporary England, seen from the
perspective of one of the first indisputable forerunners of yellow journalism. Nashe’s ready
talent for immediately distilling the fruits of his observation and experience into gripping
first hand reports served him well in the complicated narrative of Jack Wilton.
The Unfortunate Traveller was written almost one hundred and fifty years too early
to be classified as a novel. It is, however, an important forerunner of the English novel as it
was to develop in the eighteenth century. The Unfortunate Traveller, along with Sir Philip
Sidney’s Arcadia (1590), was one of the high points of the literature of the last years of
the sixteenth century. The level of realism is high in this work, yet Nashe also catered to
the Elizabethan taste for the romantic and farfetched, especially in dealing with Italy and
the Italians. Seldom has a work, even in later centuries, described in such detail the
horrors of public torture and execution and incidents of rape and looting.
Rambling narrative, travelogue, earthy memoir, diary, tavern yarn, picaresque
adventure, and political, nationalistic, and religious diatribe, The Unfortunate Traveller,
although impossible to classify generically, is nevertheless clearly one of the seminal
starting points in the development of the English novel. The critics are in general
agreement with H. G. Wells, who declared that the work “has no organic principle; it is not a
unified work of art,” yet it definitely has an organic wholeness. That wholeness is as much
external as internal, provided more by the author’s pen than by the ephemeral events in the
life of the main character.
The lack of unity in the work accurately reflects the mind of its author, who had a
mind as chaotically diverse as the narrative it produced. The structure of the book, a
recounting of Jack’s travels through Great Britain, the Low Countries, Germany, France,
and Italy, seems entirely arbitrary. It is a structure ideally suited to Nashe’s always
changeable purpose and varying interests. The reader will look in vain for a balance between
one part of Jack’s travels and another; there is none, since Nashe sees contemporary life
as completely unbalanced. Like Jack, the author stays where he likes as long as he likes and
especially as long as he senses the reader can still be interested. Nashe’s sense of his
audience is one of his most charming assets, and it is highly appropriate that this tale is set
up in the guise of a barroom brag on the part of Jack, lately returned from Bologna.
Nashe’s structural nonchalance almost certainly influenced Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy (1759-1767).
Sterne also must have been intrigued by the ambiguity of viewpoint found in The
Unfortunate Traveller. At times in the book it appears almost certain that the author has
forgotten about Jack entirely, setting off on his own to denounce, castigate, ridicule, or
expound on one thing or another. At other times, Nashe can be most subtle in his handling
of the complicated relationship between narrator and fictive reader, as when Jack quotes a
Latin phrase to justify his actions, mistranslating it for his ignorant victims and leading
readers to wonder whether the mistranslation is also intended to poke fun at them (“Tendit
ad sydera virtus,” for example, which Jack renders as “There’s great virtue belongs, I can
tell you, to a cup of cider”). If Sterne in Tristram Shandy overlooked the neat narrative
distinctions that Dante and Geoffrey Chaucer had drawn between the naïve pilgrim and the
narrator-pilgrim, he was able to do so with the comfortable knowledge that Nashe had done
it first and had succeeded brilliantly.
Nashe’s style reaches its finest and most characteristic expression in this book:
with the vivacity of an undiminishing sprezzatura, brilliantly uneven, uncontrolled, and
disorganized. The Unfortunate Traveller walks a precarious line between the realistic and
romantic perspectives and frequently, as Nashe did in his own mind and life, gains its appeal
from its inability to prevent one aspect from overflowing into the other. The journalistic
nature of Nashe’s prose is marked both positively and negatively: positively for its
unprecedented precision of detail, proving the author’s considerable powers of observation
(equaled only by his lack of discipline), and negatively for his inability to separate objective
narration from personal viewpoint—indeed, his unwillingness to see the value of such a
separation. The result is a work as prodigious for its literary faults as it is for its virtues.
The reason this work continues to be read lies to some extent in the character of
Jack Wilton himself, the semifictional counterpart of Nashe’s own personality. Jack is an
earthy Everyman with whom every new reader can identify—in his ambivalence between
ambition and cowardice, between the desire for adventure and the need for security,
between aggressiveness and passivity; in his switch from awestruck observer to
cantankerous prankster, from innocent victim to devious culprit; in his love of acting and
enjoyment of performance; in his passionate enthusiasms and vicious hatreds. He is as
typical of the Renaissance English spirit as he is universal. In him, Nashe depicts brilliantly
what is so rarely successful, a mixture of opposites. The Unfortunate Traveller is a mixture
of the devout and the debauched, the sacred and the profane, the scholarly and the vulgar,
the delicate and the brutal, the aristocratic and the common, the explorer and the patriot
that made Elizabethan and Tudor England quite different from any other English era
before or since. The singularity of an age, after all, can be found only in its tensions, in the
peculiar coupling of opposing forces. The Unfortunate Traveller, in the unforgettable
crudity and refinement of its humor, and in its instantaneous leaps from highly serious
didacticism to profoundly trivial farce, is a kind of template both shaped by and
reproducing the shape of its times.
Character of Jack: Jack Wilton exhibits a range of moods and goes through many
colourful experiences in this story, but it cannot be said that he changes or develops
significantly as a character. He does claim at the end to have been suitably chastened by
the often horrific sights he has seen and the perils he has passed through, particularly the
stomach-churning episode involving Cutwolfe and Esdras: “To such straight life did it
thenceforward incite me that ere I went out of Bologna, I married my courtesan,
performed many alms-deeds, and hasted so fast out of the Sodom of Italy that within
forty days I arrived at the King of England’s camp twixt Ardres and Guines in France”.
Jack, then, finishes by declaring that he has been sobered into leading a better life,
leaving the scene of the most lurid of his adventures, Italy, which often appears as a grim,
bloodthirsty land in Elizabethan literature (note how Jack refers to it as 'Sodom', the
ancient city legendary for its wickedness). However, this change holds little, if any
psychological interest. His main function is to narrate his numerous adventures and
entertain the reader in this way.
The lack of real development in Jack's character is significant as it helps illustrate
what kind of work this is. As a fictional work of prose it is sometimes cited as a proto-
novel, but unlike most novels it is more concerned with providing a series of sensational
adventures than with character development. It might be called a picaresque narrative, like
the Spanish work Don Quixote, as it features the various, and often improbable, escapades
of its main character. However, although Jack is a lively narrator, he does not appear as a
fully-rounded character in his own right.