Gabriel Harvey - Feud With Nashe

Feud With Nashe

After Greene's death Harvey published Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets (1592), in which he revealed the miserable details of Greene's later years. Nashe settled his personal score with the Harveys, in Strange Newes (1593). Harvey rebutted the personal charges made by Nashe in Pierce's supererogation, or a New Prayse of the Old Asse (1593). In a religious work, Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593) Nashe made a full apology to Harvey, who however resumed the controversy in a New Letter of Notable Contents (1593). Harvey probably had not seen Nashe's apology in print when he wrote the New Letter of Notable Contents, but he knew something along those lines was rumoured. He refused take reports of Nashe's change of heart at face value until he had the proof in black and white:

"Till a public injury be publicly confessed, and print confuted in print, I am one of St. Thomas' disciples, not over prest to believe..." This certainly sounds as if, at the time of writing New Letter, Harvey had simply not seen a copy of Christs Teares.

Nashe dramatically withdrew his apology in a new edition (1595) of Christes Teares. Harvey, he claimed, had hinted at wanting a reconciliation so that Nashe would make a public apology, and as soon as he did so he was made to look a fool for his pains:

"Impious Gabriel Harvey, the vowed enemy to all vows and protestations, plucking on with a private slavish submission a general public reconciliation, hath with a cunning ambuscado of confiscated idle oaths, welnear betrayed me to infamy eternal (his own proper chair of torment in hell). I can say no more but the devil and he be no men of their words."

It was nearly two years before Nashe replied to New Letter, when hearing that Harvey had boasted of victory he produced the most biting satire of the series in Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596). Harvey never responded. Later Richard Lichfield of Cambridge attacked Nashe in The Trimming of Thomas Nashe Gentleman (1597). He signed his work "by the high-titled patron Don Richardo de Medico campo", a play on his name (i.e. "leech-field"). This work was formerly attributed to Harvey.