Thomas Nash (1567 – 1601) English Elizabethan pamphleteer, playwright, poet and satirist, was the son of the minister William Nashe and his wife Margaret.
His most famous work is The Unfortunate Traveller: or, the Life of Jack Wilton (1594), a picaresque novel set during the reign of Henry VIII of England
Jack Wilton, protagonist and narrator, describes his adventures as a page (= paggio) during the wars against the French, and his f travels in Italy
During his travels, Jack sees numerous atrocities, wars, plague (= peste), and violences. He risks to be hanged (= impiccato) and also to be cut into pieces for an anatomy demonstration. The most terrible among his experiences is when Jack’s witness (= è testimone di) a brutal revenge: an Italian forces another one him to pray to the devil and then shoots (= gli spara) him in the throat. This adventure makes Jack decide to escape from Italy and return to England
There is a reference to Jack Wilton in the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where Sir Jack Wilton stands in for the real figure of the Elizabethan spymaster (= spia) Sir Francis Walsingham and embodies M of the late 16th century. M is the leader of a group of special operatives called Prospero’s Men after the reign of Elizabeth I.