"The Civil Quill:" Print, Civility, and Conversation in the Harvey-Nashe Quarrel

Abstract

This essay investigates the pamphlet feud between the scholar Gabriel Harvey and the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe in the 1590s in light of contemporary notions of civil discourse. A survey of Harvey’s marginalia shows a sustained interest in the use of jesting and laughter to project a genially urbane public persona capable of carrying out a civil form of conversation. In turn, his pamphlets are a complex combination of ironic libel and a claim to bear the “civil quill.” Nashe’s contributions to the quarrel ridicule and dismantle Harvey’s stance of civility and in the process create a subversive world of printed orality and physicality. Placed in the context of the Martin Marprelate controversy of the late 1580s and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599, the insults and invective of the Harvey- Nashe quarrel take on a sense of urgency in their engagement with the concept of civility and its relation to the commonwealth.