As is well known, war is a strong presence in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, with its court page protagonist and gory depiction of the massacre of the Anabaptists in 1536. However, warfare and soldiery are recurring metaphors in Nashe’s other writings and the purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between the conditions of warfare and the conditions of authorship. “Many Souldiours are most impatient vaine-glorious . . . Many puny Poets & old ill Poets are mighty vaine-glorious” (Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem): in Nashe’s restlessly associative prose, the martial desire for honour and reputation becomes a figure for the desire for poetic fame, and Nashe’s defence of the theatre in Pierce Penniless is rooted in the idea that idle “Captaines and Souldiers” need dramatic entertainment: “There is a certaine waste of the people for whome there is no vse, but warre: and these men must haue some employment still to cut them off”. Thus, war as a figure in Nashe’s writings is frequently associated with literary pursuit: the violent struggle for survival and honour is analoguous, and both soldier and poet exist on the same precarious borderline between glory and “waste”. The latter is a common figure for literature in Nashe’s writings, and characteristically, it is the outsider position of both soldier and poet that is explored; both are vagrant (as “those who come from the warres” who “cosen, begge, and starve”, both strive for glory and both are relegated to the social margin. As symbolic presences in Nashe’s writing, then, warfare and soldiers seem to serve the function of commenting on the conditions of the writer.