Becoming a Character in The Unfortunate Traveller

This essay examines a horror topos deployed by Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, and other Elizabethan writers in which bodies become suddenly and violently legible. It argues that such transformations, which Spenser uses to theorize allegory in The Faerie Queene , provide a mechanism for writers to interrogate the nature of literary character more broadly. The essay revisits Thomas Nashe's proto-novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), to examine how its character-system constitutes its subject in different ways—as printed texts, liquid bodies, costumes, conjurations, heraldic devices—before invoking this topos to dramatize characterization as the outcome of violent silencing and forcible signification.