Negotiating patronage: Nashe and his ‘toys for private gentlemen’

This chapter situates Nashe’s relationships with specific patrons, including the Carey family; Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange; and John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, within public networks of exchange and negotiation in the book trade. It argues that Nashe’s texts and paratexts function as transactional sites where private exchanges with patrons are repositioned as public and commercially marketable ones. In doing so, this chapter offers new ways of conceptualizing and ‘measuring’ patronage: as subject, as network, and as public text. While the influence of contemporary patrons on Nashe’s writing should not be overlooked, this chapter proposes a model of patronage that moves beyond a two-way system of exchange to take account of multiple agents and sites of interaction that shape the interpretation of Nashe’s texts and the life of a ‘professional’ writer in Elizabethan England.