‘As Actaeon was wooried of his owne hounds: so is Tom Nash of his Isle of Dogs. Dogges were the death of Euripedes, but bee not disconsolate gallant young Iuuenall, Linus, the sonne of Apollo died the same death. Yet God forbid that so braue a witte should so basely perish, thine are but paper dogges, neither is thy banishment like Ouids, eternally to conuerse with the barbarous Getes. Therefore comfort thy selfe sweete Tom, with Ciceros glorious return to Rome, & with the counsel Aeneas giues to his seabeaten soldiors.’
We learn something more from Nashes Lenten Stuffe (S. R. 11 Jan. 1599), where he tells us that he is sequestered from the wonted means of his maintenance and exposed to attacks on his fame, through ‘the straunge turning of the Ile of Dogs from a commedie to a tragedie two summers past, with the troublesome stir which hapned aboute it’, and goes on to explain the ‘infortunate imperfit Embrion of my idle houres, the Ile of Dogs before mentioned ... was no sooner borne but I was glad to run from it’; which is what brought him to Yarmouth. In a marginal note he adds ‘An imperfit Embrion I may well call it, for I hauing begun but the induction and first act of it, the other foure acts without my consent, or the least guesse of my drift or scope, by the players were supplied, which bred both their trouble and mine to’ (McKerrow, iii. 153). Of this there is perhaps some confirmation in the list of writings on the cover of the Northumberland MS. which records the item, not now extant in the MS., ‘Ile of doges frmnt by Thomas Nashe inferior plaiers’. This MS. contains work by Bacon (q.v.), and if the entry is not itself based on Lenten Stuffe, it may indicate that Bacon was professionally concerned in the proceedings to which the play gave rise. McKerrow, v. 31, points out that the evidence is against the suggestion in the Trimming of Thomas Nashe (S. R. 11 Oct. 1597) that Nashe suffered imprisonment for the play. The Privy Council letter of 15 Aug. 1597 (cf. App. D, No. cxi) was no doubt intended to direct his apprehension, but, as I pointed out in M. L. R. iv. 410, 511, the actor and maker of plays referred to therein as actually in prison must have been Ben Jonson, who was released by the Council on 3 Oct. 1597 (cf. App. D, No. cxii). The connexion of Jonson (q.v.) with the Isle of Dogs is noted in Satiromastix. With him the Council released Gabriel Spencer and Robert Shaw, and the inference is that the peccant company was Pembroke’s (q.v.) at the Swan on Bankside. The belief that it was the Admiral’s at the Rose only rests on certain forged interpolations by Collier in Henslowe’s diary. These are set out by Greg (Henslowe, i. xl). The only genuine mention of the affair in the diary is the provision noted in the memorandum of Borne’s agreement of 10 Aug. 1597 that his service is to begin ‘imediatly after this restraynt is recaled by the lordes of the counsell which restraynt is by the meanes of playinge the Ieylle of Dooges’ (Henslowe, i. 203). The restraint was ordered by the Privy Council on 28 July 1597 (App. D, No. cx), presumably soon after the offence, the nature of which is only vaguely described as the handling of ‘lewd matters’. Perhaps it is possible, at any rate in conjecture, to be more specific. By dogs we may take it that Nashe meant men. The idea was not new to him. In Summer’s Last Will and Testament he makes Orion draw an elaborate parallel between dogs and men, at the end of which Will Summer says that he had not thought ‘the ship of fooles would haue stayde to take in fresh water at the Ile of dogges’ (l. 779). But there is nothing offensive to authority here. Nashe returns to the question of his indiscretion in more than one passage of Lenten Stuffe, and in particular has a diatribe (McKerrow, iii. 213) against lawyers who try to fish ‘a deepe politique state meaning’ out of what contains no such thing. ‘Talke I of a beare, O, it is such a man that emblazons him in his armes, or of a woolfe, a fox, or a camelion, any lording whom they do not affect it is meant by.’ Apparently Nashe was accused of satirizing some nobleman. But this was not the only point of attack. ‘Out steps me an infant squib of the Innes of Court ... and he, to approue hymselfe an extrauagant statesman, catcheth hold of a rush, and absolutely concludeth, it is meant of the Emperor of Ruscia, and that it will vtterly marre the traffike into that country if all the Pamphlets bee not called in and suppressed, wherein that libelling word is mentioned.’ I do not suppose that Nashe had literally called the Emperor of Russia a rush in The Isle of Dogs, but it is quite possible that he, or Ben Jonson, had called the King of Poland a pole. On 23 July 1597, just five days before the trouble, a Polish ambassador had made representations in an audience with Elizabeth, apparently about the question, vexed in the sixteenth as in the twentieth century, of contraband in neutral vessels, and she, scouring up her rusty old Latin for the purpose, had answered him in very round terms. The matter, to which there are several allusions in the Cecilian correspondence (Wright, Eliz. ii. 478, 481, 485), gave some trouble, and any mention of it on the public stage might well have been resented. A letter of Robert Beale in 1592 (McKerrow, v. 142) shows that the criticisms of Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse had similarly been due to his attack upon the Danes, with which country the diplomatic issues were much the same as with Poland. In Hatfield MSS. vii. 343 is a letter of 10 Aug. 1597 to Robert Cecil from Richard (misdescribed in the Calendar as Robert) Topcliffe, recommending an unnamed bearer as ‘the first man that discovered to me that seditious play called The Isle of Dogs’.
Doubtful Play
Nashe has been suggested as a contributor to A Knack to Know a Knave (cf. ch. xxiv).
THOMAS NELSON.
The pageant-writer is probably identical with the stationer of the same name, who is traceable in London during 1580–92 (McKerrow, 198).
Allot Pageant. 29 Oct. 1590
1590. The Deuice of the Pageant: Set forth by the Worshipfull Companie of the Fishmongers, for the right honourable Iohn Allot: established Lord Maior of London, and Maior of the Staple for this present Yeere of our Lord 1590. By T. Nelson. No imprint.
Speeches by the riders on the Merman and the Unicorn, and by Fame, the Peace of England, Wisdom, Policy, God’s Truth, Plenty, Loyalty and Concord, Ambition, Commonwealth, Science and Labour, Richard the Second, Jack Straw, and Commonwealth again, representing Sir William Walworth, who was evidently the chief subject of the pageant.
Edition by W. C. Hazlitt (1886, Antiquary, xiii. 54).—Dissertation: R. Withington, The Lord Mayor’s Show for 1590 (1918, M.L.N. xxxiii. 8).