"Pamphleteer, poet, story-teller, satirist, scholar, moralist and jester . . ." Thomas Nashe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, was writing in the 1590s, the zenith of the English Renaissance. Rebellious in spirit, conservative in philosophy, Nashe's brilliant and comic invective earned him a reputation as the "English Juvenal" who "carried the deadly stockado in his pen." In its mingling of the devout and bawdy, scholarship and slang,...