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.

His reasons for leaving are unclear; his father may have died the previous year, but Richard Lichfield maliciously reported that Nashe had fled possible expulsion for his role in Terminus et non-terminus, one of the raucous student theatricals popular at the time.

The remaining decade of his life was dominated by two concerns: finding employment and participating in controversies, most famously with Richard and Gabriel Harvey.

He is featured in Thomas Dekker's News from Hell (1606), and is referred to in the anonymous Parnassus plays (1598−1602), which provide this eulogy: Let all his faultes sleepe with his mournfull chest And there for ever with his ashes rest.

[6] The anti-Martinist An Almond for a Parrot (1590), ostensibly credited to one "Cutbert Curry-knave", is now universally recognised as Nashe's work, although its author humorously claims, in its dedication to the comedian William Kempe, to have met Harlequin in Bergamo while returning from a trip to Venice in the summer of 1589.

While staying in the household of Archbishop John Whitgift at Croydon Palace in October 1592 he wrote an entertainment called Summer's Last Will and Testament, a "show" with some resemblance to a masque.

In brief, the plot describes the death of Summer, who, feeling himself to be dying, reviews the performance of his former servants and eventually passes the crown on to Autumn.

Nashe is widely remembered for three short poems, all drawn from this play and frequently reprinted in anthologies of Elizabethan verse: “Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss,” “Fair summer droops” and “Autumn hath all the summer’s fruitful treasure.” Nashe may also have contributed to Henry VI, Part 1, the play later published under Shakespeare's name as the first part of the Henry VI trilogy.

Despite the work's apparently devotional nature it contained satirical material which gave offence to the London civic authorities and Nashe was briefly imprisoned in Newgate Prison.

He remained in London, apart from periodic visits to the countryside to avoid the plague—a fear reflected in the play Summer's Last Will and Testament, written in the autumn of 1592.

It includes the famous lyric: Adieu, farewell earths blisse, This world uncertaine is, Fond are lifes lustful joyes, Death proves them all but toyes, None from his darts can flye; I am sick, I must dye: Lord, have mercy on us.

[11][12] It is written from the point of view of Pierce, a man who has not met with good fortune, who bitterly complains of the world’s wickedness, and addresses his complaints to the devil.

It has been suggested that The Choise of Valentines was written possibly for the private circle of Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby (then known as Lord Strange).

It describes the Valentine's Day visit of a young man named 'Tomalin' to the brothel where his lover, "Mistris Francis", has recently become employed.

My little dildo shall suplye their kind, A knave that moves as light as leaves by winde; That bendeth not, nor fouldeth anie deale, But stands as stiff as he were made of steele, And plays at peacock twixt my leggs right blythe.

When he was accused of "prostituting" his pen, he answered, in 1596, by writing: It may and it may not bee so ... [but] when ... the bottom of my purse is turnd downeward, & my conduit of incke will no longer flowe for want of reparations, I am faine to let my Plow stand still in the midst of a furrow, and follow some of these new-fangled Galiardos and Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous Villanellas and Quipassas I prostitute my pen in hope of gaine.

He says, "A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy which the day hath left undigested, or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imagination".

[25] He is also credited with the erotic poem The Choise of Valentines and his name appears on the title page of Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, though there is uncertainty as to what Nashe's contribution was.