The Unfortunate Traveller: or, the Life of Jack Wilton (originally published as The Unfortunate Traueller: or, The Life of Jacke Wilton) is a picaresque novel by Thomas Nashe first published in 1594 but set during the reign of Henry VIII of England.
Synopsis
In this rollicking and stylistically daring work of prose fiction, Nashe's protagonist Jack Wilton adventures through the European continent and finds himself swept up in the currents of sixteenth-century history. Episodic in nature, the narrative jumps from place to place and danger to danger. Jack begins his tale among fellow Englishmen at a military encampment, where he swindles his superiors out of alcohol and money, framing others as traitors. Commenting by the way on the grotesque sweating sickness, Jack arrives in Münster, Germany, to observe the massacre of John Leyden's Anabaptist faction by the Emperor and the Duke of Saxony; this brutal episode enables Nashe to reflect on religious hypocrisy, a theme to which he frequently returns.
Following the massacre of the Anabaptists at Munster, Jack Wilton has a number of personal encounters with historical figures of the sixteenth century, many of them important for their literary contributions. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey functions as a sustained travel partner for Jack, and the two journey to Italy to fulfill the Earl's pledge to defend the honor of his beloved Geraldine in a tournament. Surrey's grandiloquent praise for Geraldine evinces clearly the author's ability to play with literary history, for although the poet was in truth married to Frances Howard, Nashe fashions her into the beloved object of the poet's courtly affections. Surrey and Jack pass through Rotterdam, where they meet both Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, who are at work on their important prose works The Praise of Folly and Utopia. Following this episode, the pair reaches the university city of Wittenberg, which enables Nashe to mock the customs of Renaissance academia, especially its convoluted orations and bizarre gestures and body language. Following the orations, the magician Cornelius Agrippa reveals in an enchanted mirror the image of Surrey's beloved, "weeping on her bed, and resolved all into devout religion for the absence of her love." The image causes Surrey to burst into poetry and spurs him forward with his new page Jack.
Passing into Italy, the land where the remainder of the narrative unfolds, Jack and Surrey exchange identities as a security measure and because the earl means "to take more liberty of behaviour." The two engage in acts of deceit and trickery with pimps, prostitutes, and counterfeiters. Forced to dig themselves out of a succession of plots, the disguised Jack and Surrey assume much of the duplicitous behaviour that Italians were stereotypically known for in Renaissance England. Commenting on the pander Petro de Campo Frego, Jack states that "he planted in us the first Italianate wit that we had." While imprisoned for fraud, Surrey and Jack meet Diamante, who had been falsely accused of adultery and cast out by her husband; Jack takes her up as his romantic companion and financier. All three characters are freed soon enough thanks to an English connection to the famous satirist Pietro Aretino. Nashe, who professed elsewhere his own desires to emulate Aretino's literary style, offers praise for the satirist as "one of the wittiest knaves that ever God made."
Departing from Venice, Surrey and Jack arrive in Florence, the city where Geraldine was born. Surrey is overcome with poetry and speaks a sonnet in honor of her fair room, a moment in which Nashe can slyly mock the overbearing, lovesick verse of contemporary imitators of Petrarch. The copia of Surrey's verse then gives way to a tournament in which the Earl competes for his beloved's fair name, and Nashe offers gratuitous descriptions of the competitors' armor and horses in a manner that recalls printed accounts of early modern masques and other festive spectacles. The most worthy competitor, Surrey emerges from the tournament victorious, but is suddenly called back into England for business matters.