He was always a stranger to the best literary society, but found congenial companions in Chamberlain, Jordan, Marmion, and Tatham, and was known to many "gentlemen of the Inns of Court" (cf.
About January 1632–1633 his first comedy, Covent Garden, was acted by the queen's servants, and was published in 1638 with a modest dedication addressed to Sir John Suckling.
In the prologue he defends himself from stealing the title of the piece—in allusion doubtless to Richard Brome's Covent Garden Weeded, acted in 1632—and describes his "muse" as "solitary".
A third piece, Hannibal and Scipio, an hystorical Tragedy, in five acts of blank verse, was produced in 1635 by the queen's servants at their private house in Drury Lane.
The author of Theophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, to the Time of Dean Swift (1753) declares that in strict justice "he cannot rise above a fifth."
Nabbes displays a satisfactory command of the niceties of dramatic blank verse, in which all his plays, excluding the two earliest comedies, were mainly written.
A Morall Maske, presented with generall liking, at the Private House in Salisbury Court, and heere set down according to the intention of the Authour, Thomas Nabbes, (1637).
A reference to the approaching publication of the work was made in Don Zara del Fogo, a mock romance, which was written before 1637, though not published until 1656.
Nabbes contributed commendatory verses to Shackerley Marmion's "Legend of Cupid and Psyche" (1637); Robert Chamberlain's "Nocturnal Lucubrations", 1638; Thomas Jordan's "Poeticall Varieties", 1640; John Tatham's "Fancies Theater", 1640; Humphrey Mills's "A Night's Search", 1640; Thomas Beedome's "Poems Divine and Humane", 1641; and the "Phœnix of these Late Times; or, the Life of Mr. Henry Welby, Esq."
The Masque of Microcosmus is really a morality play, in which Physander after much error is reunited to his wife Bellanima, who personifies the soul.
In a 1628 poem he expressed hope that one day he would be worthy of entombment at Worcester Cathedral in his native Worcestershire, while an 18th-century theatre historian insisted he was interred at London's Temple Church.