Thomas Nashe (November 1567–1600?) was an English Elizabethan pamphleteer, poet and satirist. He was the son of the minister William Nashe and his wife Margaret (née Witchingham).

He was baptized in Lowestoft, Suffolk. The family moved to West Harling, near Thetford in 1573. Around 1581 Thomas went up to St John's College, Cambridge gaining his bachelor's degree in 1586. Then he moved to London and started his literary career.

It does not appear that Nashe ever proceeded Master of Arts at Cambridge, and most of his biographers agree that he left his college about summer 1588, as his name appears on a list of students due to attend philosophy lectures in that year. It is evident, however, that he got into some kind of trouble, and probably was no longer in good repute; for William Covell, in "Polimanteia," 1595, speaking of Harvey and Nashe, and the pending quarrel between them, uses these terms: "Cambridge make thy two children friends: thou hast been unkind to the one to wean him before his time, and too fond upon the other to keep him so long without preferment: the one is ancient and of much reading; the other is young, but full of wit." The cause of his disgrace is reported to have been the share he took in a show called "Terminus et non Terminus," not now extant; and it is asserted that his partner in this offence was expelled, though the source reporting this, Richard Lichfield, does not claim Nashe met the same fate. As Nashe himself boasts he might have remained at college ("it is well knowen I might have been a Fellow if I had would"), it seems he did not suffer the disgrace of formal expulsion.

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