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The Isle of Dogs is a play by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson which was performed in 1597. It was immediately suppressed, and no copy of it is known to exist. [1]
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(March 2018) |
The Isle of Dogs is a play by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson which was performed in 1597. It was immediately suppressed, and no copy of it is known to exist. [1]
The play was performed, probably by Pembroke's Men, at the Swan Theatre in Bankside in the last week of July 1597. A satirical comedy, it was reported to the authorities as a "lewd plaie" full of seditious and "slanderous matter". While extant records do not indicate what gave offence, a reference in The Returne from Parnassus (II) suggests that Queen Elizabeth I herself was satirised. Other evidence suggests that Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham may have been the target.
The Isle of Dogs is a location in London on the opposite bank of the Thames to Greenwich, home of a royal palace, Placentia, where indeed the Privy Council met. It was also believed to be where the queen kennelled her dogs, hence the name. David Riggs suggests that the satire might have been related to portrayal of the queen's councillors as lapdogs. [2] However, the title alone does not indicate the play's content, since this area was also known as an unhealthy swamp where river sewage would accumulate. The Isle is also mentioned in Eastward Hoe (1605), another play for which Jonson was arrested. Nashe also referred to the location in Summer's Last Will and Testament : "Here's a coyle about dogges without wit. If I had thought the ship of fooles would have stayed to take in fresh water at the Ile of dogges I would have furnished it with a whole kennel of collections to the purpose."
Whatever the cause, Richard Topcliffe informed Robert Cecil, who raised the issue to the Privy Council on July 28. Three of the players (Gabriel Spenser, Robert Shaa, and Ben Jonson) were arrested and sent to Marshalsea Prison. Nashe's home was raided (he was then at Great Yarmouth) and his papers seized, but he escaped imprisonment. He later wrote that he had given birth to a monster – "it was no sooner borne but I was glad to runne from it." Nashe was later to call it "an imperfit Embrion of my idle houres" and claimed to have written only the introduction and first act. For his part, Jonson recalled that he said nothing but "yes and no". Authorities placed two informers (Robert Poley and someone surnamed Parrot) with him; those two are referred to in his Epigram 59, Of Spies.
After this burst of repression, royal authorities appear to have let the matter drop without further incident. The report of the initial arrest says that "the rest of the players or actors in that matter shall be apprehended", but no one else ever was. [3] Shaa and Spenser were released quickly, and even Jonson was out of jail by early in October. Pembroke's Men were in action again, as were the other companies, before winter of that year. The only party permanently hurt was the Swan's impresario Francis Langley, who alone among the play's producers was not able to obtain relicensing. Langley had apparently run afoul of the Privy Council on an unrelated matter involving a large Portuguese diamond that Langley had fenced, or planned to fence.
The suppression of Isle of Dogs has long been understood as a significant episode in the complex relations of city, court, and theatre-worlds; its precise significance, however, is difficult to determine. Chambers, while noting Langley's diamond involvement, viewed the play as related to the Privy Council's 28 July order prohibiting acting and ordering that the theatres be "plucked down"; in this view, the leniency shown to the companies later in the year reflects the transient nature of the offence. Others, among them William Ingram, have questioned this chronology. The 28 July order does not mention the play; it was written in response to one of the city authorities' periodic pleas for an end to the theatres. The Council issued specific orders against the play in the next month. In this light, Pembroke's men may have made their offence worse by performing the play (wittingly or not) after the date of prohibition. Moreover, Cecil's anger over the stolen diamond may suggest that Langley was the sole target of the July injunction. Andrew Gurr adds to this picture by noting the tendency of the Court to license two chief companies throughout the later Elizabethan and early Stuart periods.
The image of The Isle of Dogs conjured up a society ruined by envy, and Nashe also refers to Sirius the dog star in Summer's Last Will and Testament in relation to the dog days of July. Richard Lichfield was to taunt Nashe with this in his The Trimming of Thomas Nash gentleman.
1597 (MDXCVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar, the 1597th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 597th year of the 2nd millennium, the 97th year of the 16th century, and the 8th year of the 1590s decade. As of the start of 1597, the Gregorian calendar was 10 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Benjamin Jonson was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence on English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Fox, The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. He is regarded as "the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I."
The Isle of Dogs is a large peninsula. It is bounded on three sides by a large meander in the River Thames in East London, England, which includes the Cubitt Town, Millwall and Canary Wharf districts. The area was historically part of the Manor, Hamlet, Parish and, for a time, the wider borough of Poplar. The name had no official status until the 1987 creation of the Isle of Dogs Neighbourhood by Tower Hamlets London Borough Council. It has been known locally as simply "the Island" since the 19th century.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1597.
Thomas Nashe was an Elizabethan playwright, poet, satirist and a significant pamphleteer. He is known for his novel The Unfortunate Traveller, his pamphlets including Pierce Penniless, and his numerous defences of the Church of England.
The Parnassus plays are three satiric comedies, or full-length academic dramas, each divided into five acts. They date from between 1598 and 1602. They were performed in London by students for an audience of students as part of the Christmas festivities of St John's College at Cambridge University. It is not known who wrote them.
The Swan was a theatre in Southwark, London, England, built in 1595 on top of a previously standing structure, during the first half of William Shakespeare's career. It was the fifth in the series of large public playhouses of London, after James Burbage's The Theatre (1576) and Curtain (1577), the Newington Butts Theatre and Philip Henslowe's Rose (1587–88).
The Lord Chamberlain's Men was a company of actors, or a "playing company", for which William Shakespeare wrote during most of his career. Richard Burbage played most of the lead roles, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Formed at the end of a period of flux in the theatrical world of London, it had become, by 1603, one of the two leading companies of the city and was subsequently patronized by James I.
Richard Topcliffe was a priest hunter and practitioner of torture during the reign of Elizabeth I of England. A landowner and Member of Parliament, he became notorious as the government's chief enforcer of the penal laws against the practice of Catholicism.
Eastward Hoe or Eastward Ho! is an early Jacobean-era stage play written by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston. The play was first performed at the Blackfriars Theatre by a company of boy actors known as the Children of the Queen's Revels in early August 1605, and it was printed in September the same year.
Sejanus His Fall, a 1603 play by Ben Jonson, is a tragedy about Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the favourite of the Roman emperor Tiberius.
Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature. In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels. Major writers include William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Hooker, Ben Jonson, Philip Sidney and Thomas Kyd.
The Admiral's Men was a playing company or troupe of actors in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras. It is generally considered the second most important acting troupe of English Renaissance theatre.
The Earl of Pembroke's Men was an Elizabethan era playing company, or troupe of actors, in English Renaissance theatre. They functioned under the patronage of Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke. Early and equivocal mentions of a Pembroke's company reach as far back as 1575; but the company is known for certain to have been in existence in 1592. In that year, a share in the company was valued at £80.
The Alchemist is a comedy by English playwright Ben Jonson. First performed in 1610 by the King's Men, it is generally considered Jonson's best and most characteristic comedy; Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed that it had one of the three most perfect plots in literature. The play's clever fulfilment of the classical unities and vivid depiction of human folly have made it one of the few Renaissance plays with a continuing life on stage, apart from a period of neglect during the Victorian era.
Francis Langley (1548–1602) was a theatre builder and theatrical producer in Elizabethan era London. After James Burbage and Philip Henslowe, Langley was the third significant entrepreneurial figure active at the height of the development of English Renaissance theatre.
Walter Burre was a London bookseller and publisher of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, best remembered for publishing several key texts in English Renaissance drama.
In the historical era of English Renaissance drama, an Inn-yard theatre or Inn-theatre was a common inn with an inner courtyard with balconies that provided a venue for the presentation of stage plays.
Events from the 1590s in England.
Gabriel Spenser, also spelt Spencer, was an Elizabethan actor. He is best known for episodes of violence culminating in his death in a duel at the hands of the playwright Ben Jonson.
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