The title of Neville's tract also recalls the lost play of Thomas Nash—"The Isle of Dogs"—for which he was imprisoned on its appearance in 1597, and suffered, as he asserted, for the indiscretion of others. "As Actaeon was worried by his own hounds," wrote Francis Meres in his "Palladis Tamia," "so is Tom Nash of his Isle of Dogs." And three years later, in 1600, Nash referred in his "Summers Last Will" to the excitement raised by his suppressed play. "Here's a coil about dogs without wit! If I had thought the ship of fools would have stay'd to take in fresh water at the Isle of Dogs, I would have furnish'd it with a whole kennel of collections to the purpose." The incident was long remembered. Nine years after Nash's experience John Day published his "Isle of Gulls," drawn from Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia."{2}
1 Dictionary of National Biography, xxiv. 76.
2 I take these facts from Sir Sidney Lee's sketch of Nash in
the Dictionary of National Biography, XL. 107.
DEFOE AND THE "ISLE OF PINES"
I would apologize for taking so much time on a nine-page hoax did it not offer something positive in the history of English literature. It has long been recognized as one of the more than possible sources of Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe." It is truly said that the elements of a masterpiece exist for years before they become embodied, that they are floating in the air, as it were, awaiting the master workman who can make that use which gives to them permanent interest Life on an island, entirely separated from the rest of mankind, had formed an incident in many tales, but Neville's is believed to have been the first employment by an English author of island life for the whole story. And while Defoe excludes the most important feature of Neville's tract—woman—from his "Robinson Crusoe," issued in April, 1719, he too, four months after, published the "Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe," in which woman has a share. It would be wearisome to undertake a comparison of incident; suffice it to say that the "Isle of Pines" has been accepted as a pre-Defoe romance, to which the far greater Englishman may have been indebted.
