<p>Nashe’s literary career was affected by a pandemic and a lockdown. In 1592 an outbreak of bubonic plague closed London’s theatres, the primary venue for commercial literature, and writers had to work out how to respond. Plague became an unfolding news story, and shaped Nashe’s improvisatory style. With guests Kirsty Rolfe and Andrew Hadfield. Transcript: <a href='https://tinyurl.com/mwjr4uj7'>https://tinyurl.com/mwjr4uj7</a></p>

Nashe’s literary career was affected by a pandemic and a lockdown. In 1592 an outbreak of bubonic plague closed London’s theatres, the primary venue for commercial literature, and writers had to work out how to respond. Plague became an unfolding news story, and shaped Nashe’s improvisatory style. With guests Kirsty Rolfe and Andrew Hadfield. Transcript: https://tinyurl.com/mwjr4uj7

<p>Nashe’s literary career was affected by a pandemic and a lockdown. In 1592 an outbreak of bubonic plague closed London’s theatres, the primary venue for commercial literature, and writers had to work out how to respond. Plague became an unfolding news story, and shaped Nashe’s improvisatory style. With guests Kirsty Rolfe and Andrew Hadfield. Transcript: <a href="https://tinyurl.com/mwjr4uj7" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://tinyurl.com/mwjr4uj7</a></p>

Episode 5: Plague

There’s a fairy-tale version of the Elizabethan era: a golden age of long-awaited prosperity, of palaces and pageants, of sea-faring exploration - all of it presided over by a spectacular queen governing alongside wise counsellors. There’s a lot this story misses out. Elizabethan England was also an anxious, paranoid place; its last full decade, the 1590s, saw increasing food prices, plague, and profiteering by the wealthy. One writer in particular explored what it felt like to be living on the edge. Thomas Nashe isn’t a household name today, but he wrote and published throughout the turbulent 1590s. In these podcasts, we explore the writings of Nashe and his contemporaries to open up the precarious world in which they lived.

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Episode 5: Plague

Episode 5: Plague