Pierce Penniless

Thomas Nashe
A woodcut showing Nashe with chains on his ankles. From Richard Lichfield's The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, Gentleman (1597)
Born	Baptised November 1567 Lowestoft, Suffolk
Died	c. 1601 (aged 33–34)
Occupation	Playwright, poet, satirist
Nationality	English
Alma mater	St John's College, Cambridge
Period	circa 1589–1599
Notable works	Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592)
Relatives	William Nashe, father Margaret Nashe (née Witchingham), mother

Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Divell is a tall tale, or a prose satire, written by Thomas Nashe and published in London in 1592. It was among the most popular of the Elizabethan pamphlets. It was reprinted in 1593 and 1595, and in 1594 was translated into French.

It is written from the point of view of Pierce, a man who has not met with good fortune, who now bitterly complains of the world’s wickedness, and addresses his complaints to the devil. At times the identity of Pierce seems to conflate with Nashe's own. But Nashe also portrays Pierce as something of an arrogant and prodigal fool. The story is told in a style that is complex, witty, fulminating, extemporaneous, digressive, anecdotal, filled with wicked descriptions, and peppered with newly minted words and Latin phrases. The satire can be mocking and bitingly sharp, and at times Nashe’s style seems to relish its own obscurity.

Pierce Penniless was printed and published as one of the many pamphlets or short quarto books that provided lively material to the reading public. Printed pamphlets had been a popular and longstanding tradition, but in London in the late 16th century, with the urban population booming, and literacy becoming widespread, they flourished. The content of these pamphlets often tended to be scandalous or scurrilous, but they contained a variety of material: Satires, war-of-words, anonymous attacks, topical issues, poetry, fiction, etc.Shakespeare, in the dedication to his poem The Rape of Lucrece refers to its quarto publication as a pamphlet.

Pamphlets also offered playwrights an opportunity to write and be published in those times when the plague had closed the theatres. Such was the case with Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Nashe's Pierce Penniless, which were both written and published when the theatres were closed from 1592–1593. As Nashe says in his introductory "Private Epistle of the Author to the Printer", the first edition of Pierce Penniless was published in London, while Nashe was out of town, because "the fear of infection detained me with my Lord [his patron Lord Strange] in the country." The plague is an underlying motive for the story itself—the seven deadly sins that Nashe's tale describes were said at the time to be the cause of the disease. Indeed, the last words that Pierce addresses to the Devil in his supplication express the wish that certain souls will be accepted into Hell, and thus will "not let our air be contaminated with their sixpenny damnation any longer".

The text of Pierce Penniless contains an attack on both Richard Harvey, the astrologer and the Marinists, who, as part of the Marprelate Controversy, had been waging a pamphlet war attacking the episcopacy of the Anglican Church. Near the midpoint of the story, Nashe's salvo begins: