The Isle of Dogs, a satirical comedy by Jonson and Thomas Nashe with possible contributions from other members of Pembroke’s company (a guess as to the likely distribution of work is made below), was performed at ‘one of the playhouses on the Bankside’ (Life Records, 10) – almost certainly Francis Langley’s theatre, the Swan – in July 1597. Its performance aroused the immediate ire of the government, landed Jonson and two other members of the company in prison, inflicted lasting damage on Pembroke’s Men, and threatened for a time the future of all theatrical activity in London.

The play’s performance was quickly followed by a series of events whose precise cause and interrelationship are not always clear, though some guesses about their possible significance can be made. The first move occurred on 28 July 1597, when the Lord Mayor and aldermen of the City of London, sitting as the Court of Common Council at Guildhall, wrote formally to the Privy Council at Greenwich to complain of ‘the great inconvenience which we find to grow by the common exercise of stage plays’. This letter from the City fathers makes no reference, either directly or indirectly, to The Isle of Dogs, but instead rehearses, in an entirely generalized way, the supposedly pernicious effects of play-going (which corrupts the young, brings ‘idle and dangerous persons’ together, diverts honest citizens from their places of work and worship, and promotes the spread of the plague). The letter goes on to request ‘the present stay, and final suppressing, of the said stage plays, as well at the Theatre, Curtain, and Bankside as in all other places in and about the City’ (Chambers, 1923, 4.321–2). It has often been assumed that the City was spurred into writing this letter because of recent activities at the Swan. Yet as William Ingram has pointed out, such petitions from the City to the Privy Council requesting an end to all theatrical activity in London were regular and formulaic, and there is no clear evidence linking this complaint specifically to the performance of Nashe’s and Jonson’s play (Ingram, 1978).

On the very same day, 28 July 1597, the Privy Council instructed the magistrates of Middlesex and Surrey in a sweeping edict that ‘no plays shall be used within London or about the City, or in any public place during this time of summer’. More drastically, the Council went on to command that ‘those playhouses that are erected and built only for such purposes shall be plucked down – namely the Curtain and the Theatre near to Shoreditch, or any other within that County’. The proprietors of these playhouses were ordered to demolish entirely ‘the stages, galleries, and rooms that are made for people to stand in, and so to deface the same as they may not be employed again to such use’. These measures, the Council asserted, were justified by the ‘very great disorders’ provoked ‘by lewd matters that are handled on the stages, and by resort and confluence of bad people’ (Wickham, Berry, Ingram, 2000, 100).

Two obvious questions arise. Was the edict issued in response to the City’s letter, sent to the Privy Council that very day? If so, it would present a rare instance of the Court of Common Council and the Privy Council working harmoniously and simultaneously together. And secondly, was the edict triggered by government anxiety about The Isle of Dogs? Was it really Jonson’s and Nashe’s play that brought all the London theatres to a standstill?

The answer to the first question is almost certainly ‘no’. That the letter from the City and the edict by the Privy Council were issued on the same day must surely be, as Ingram (1978) has convincingly argued, a mere coincidence. Earlier commentators (such as Wickham, 1969, 21), attempting to establish a causal link between the two documents, had assumed that the Court of Common Council would have met in the morning of 28 July and the Privy Council in the afternoon, and that the latter body had issued its edict on immediate receipt of the letter from the former. But the meeting times of these bodies are entirely unknown, and the order in which the two documents were written is impossible to determine, as both commentators now agree (Wickham, Berry, and Ingram, 2000, 99). Even if a letter had been dispatched from the London Guildhall to Greenwich in the morning, moreover, it would hardly have arrived in time to be incorporated into the Privy Council’s busy agenda for that day, and to have prompted such a considered edict.

But the second question remains: was the Privy Council’s action taken in response to recent performances at the Swan playhouse of The Isle of Dogs, or was its timing again a mere coincidence? The Privy Council’s letter to the magistrates of Middlesex and Surrey makes no reference at all to The Isle of Dogs, and the ‘lewd matters’ complained of seem (once again) generic. An entry, however, by Henslowe in his diary for 10 August 1597 (Henslowe, 2002, 239–40) explicitly notes that the cause of the present restraint on acting was ‘by the means of playing The Isle of Dogs’. Henslowe records this comment along with a payment he has made to the actor William Borne (or Bird) whom he has signed up to work for the Lord Admiral’s Men at the Rose Theatre ‘immediately after this restraint is recalled by the lords of the Council’. Four days earlier Henslowe had signed on another actor, Richard Jones, to work for the same company at the Rose (Henslowe, 2002, 239–40). That a man as prudent as Henslowe should have been recruiting new actors for the Admiral’s Men just a few days after the issuing of the Privy Council’s order suggests he was confident that the Council’s more drastic provisions would not be carried out. Presumably he felt that, despite the wide-ranging language of the order, it was Pembroke’s Men at the Swan that were principally at risk, not all of the London companies.

In his first analysis of this episode, William Ingram doubted there was any connection between the restraint on acting and performances of The Isle of Dogs. Henslowe, he believed, was simply ‘under a misapprehension’ in seeing this play as the cause of the trouble (Ingram, 1978, 183). More recently, however, Ingram appears to have accepted that Henslowe’s statement was correct (Wickham, Berry, and Ingram, 2000, 101). The events immediately following the issuing of the restraining order seem to confirm this supposition.

In late July or early August the Privy Council instructed a team led by Elizabeth’s chief interrogator, Richard Topcliffe, to discover the names and present whereabouts of all who had been involved in the play’s composition and performance, and search out any remaining copies of the play, noting carefully the identity of their owners. Topcliffe himself, acting on advice from an informer, had almost certainly alerted the Privy Council to the play in the first instance. In a letter dated 10 August 1597 to Robert Cecil, Topcliffe commended the unnamed bearer as ‘the first man that discovered to me that seditious play called The Isle of Dogs’ (Chambers, 1923, 3.455). Forewarned of trouble, Nashe had fled from London to the safety of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. His London lodgings were raided and papers seized, but the manuscript of the offending play, like its author, was nowhere to be found. Having missed their main target, Topcliffe’s men settled for victims nearer to hand. In early August, Jonson and two fellow players from Pembroke’s company, Robert Shaa (or Shaw) and Gabriel Spencer, were arrested and committed to Marshalsea Prison in Southwark.

On 15 August 1597, the three men were examined by the Privy Council court at Greenwich. The case was heard by the Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley; the Lord Chamberlain, George, second Lord Hunsdon; the Controller of the Household, Sir William Knollys; the Secretary, Sir Robert Cecil; the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay; and Lord North. (For a transcription of the court record from which quotations are taken here, see Life Records, 10, 11.) The men were accused of indulging in ‘lewd and mutinous behaviour’ by having presented a play ‘containing very seditious and slanderous matter’. One of the three is described as ‘not only an actor, but a maker of part of the said play’. This is undoubtedly Jonson, who is likely to have borne the brunt of the examination that followed the official hearing. Topcliffe, now in his mid-sixties, was a notoriously successful interrogator, skilled in the use of torture, which he routinely applied when questioning recusants and political prisoners. His fellow-inquisitor, Giles Fletcher, Remembrancer of the City of London, had been similarly employed by the Privy Council to interrogate recusants in the early 1590s, and would have been equally familiar with these techniques. Other members of the investigative squad were Roger Wilbraham, who was later commissioned to interview the Earl of Essex’s followers after their unsuccessful uprising of 1601, and two Middlesex magistrates, Thomas Fowler and Richard Skevington. In 1596 Skevington had been authorized to apply instruments of torture when examining eighty ‘Egyptians and wanderers’ (Haynes, 2004, 60–1). Given the collective talents of this team, the questioning of the three players is unlikely to have been gentle.

Yet whatever treatment the men received during their time in Marshalsea evidently failed to break their spirits or elicit the information the government was after. Jonson was proud of his own defiance. ‘In the time of his close imprisonment under Queen Elizabeth,’ he told William Drummond many years later, ‘his judges could get nothing of him to all their demands but “ay” and “no”. They placed two damned villains to catch advantage of him, with him, but he was advertised by his keeper. Of the spies he hath an epigram’ (Informations, 194–6; see also Chambers, 1923, 3.353; Eccles, 1937, 385–8). The epigram to which Drummond refers is Epigrams 59, ‘On Spies’. The ‘two damned villains’ may have been two well-known former agents of Elizabeth’s (now deceased) spymaster-general, Sir Francis Walsingham: Robert Poley (or Pooley) and Henry Parrot, whose names Jonson passingly invokes in another poem, ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’ (Epigr. 101.36), where he assures his intended guest that these two will not be present at the supper party to which he is invited.

A warrant for the release of Jonson, Shaa, and Spencer was signed at a further hearing of the court at Richmond on 2 October 1597, and six days later the players were permitted to depart. Once they had walked free, it must have been clear that the larger case against the London companies and their playhouses – however seriously it had been intended – had collapsed, and that performances could be resumed with impunity. On 11 October, Henslowe’s men began to act again at the Rose, in defiance of the closure order which was still officially in place. The order itself, for all its apparent severity, did not lead in the end to the dismantling of any of the London playhouses. Within a few months of its promulgation, all of the London companies were playing once more. Its main victim was eventually Francis Langley, whose playhouse, the Swan, remained intact, but whose company was seriously depleted by the defection of his actors to the rival troupe, the Lord Admiral’s Men.

The episode raises a number of puzzling questions. Why was the order for the destruction of the London playhouses ever issued in the first place, and why, once issued, was it never carried out? In Glynne Wickham’s view, the Privy Council never intended that the playhouses be pulled down, but was seeking time to rationalize theatrical activity in London, reducing the number of companies to two principal groups which would be brought eventually under royal control, the Lord Admiral’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Wickham believes that Pembroke’s Men, who had mounted this troublesome play, were a particular target of attack (Wickham, 1969). But why was The Isle of Dogs seen as so troublesome? What ‘very seditious and slanderous matter’ did it contain that stirred the Privy Council to such drastic action?

The play’s title may offer a possible clue as to its general theme. The Isle of Dogs is a narrow strip of land on the north bank of the Thames downriver from the City, which nowadays forms part of the London Docklands area in the Borough of Tower Hamlets. It was a seedy district in Jonson’s day, being a common refuge for debtors and small-time criminals. Its name was once thought to derive from the (now-disputed) fact that Henry VIII had kennelled his hounds on this marshy peninsula, which lies just across the river from the royal palace at Greenwich. This ancient palace had been Henry’s birthplace, and became in time his chief residence, which he renamed Placentia (a name that Jonson would later ironically bestow on a young female character in The Magnetic Lady, who, like the palace, was a reliable source of pleasure). The palace had been Elizabeth’s birthplace, too, and continued to serve as a pleasant spot during the 1590s for court gatherings and theatrical entertainments. The close juxtaposition of the Isle of Dogs and Placentia Palace presented rich opportunities for ironical reflection. Perhaps, like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera a century or so later, The Isle of Dogs may humorously have equated the modes of the court with those of the criminal world, or have invoked the familiar Elizabethan comparison of courtiers with dogs – creatures which, as the character Orion in Nashe’s earlier play Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592) had remarked, were ‘Right courtiers to flatter and to fawn’ (Works, ed. McKerrow, 1966, 3.255).

In Jonson’s later comedy, Eastward Ho! (1605), co-authored with George Chapman and John Marston, the most daring satirical scene is also set, in what looks like a deliberately provocative allusion to the earlier play, along this same stretch of the river. Clambering ashore on ‘the coast of Dogs’ after suffering shipwreck in the Thames, the bedraggled knight, Sir Petronel Flash, believes he must have landed on the coast of France. It is here, on this same stretch of land facing the royal palace, that the play’s most controversial exchanges about James and his Scottish favourites take place. In 1606, the year following the performance of Eastward Ho!, the dramatist John Day antagonized the authorities with a play that worked the same vein of anti-court satire, being cheekily entitled, in further deliberate recall of Nashe’s and Jonson’s original piece, The Isle of Gulls. Through a process of what might be called satirical topography, the Isle of Dogs by this date had acquired a suggestive power of its own, the very hint of its name alerting an expectant audience to anticipate what was to come.

Yet to judge from the play’s reception in 1597, The Isle of Dogs must have contained something altogether sharper and more offensive than generalized anti-court satire, and must have wounded identifiable members of the court. Charles Nicholl (1984), 248 has suggested that the play may have upset the Queen herself. Later in his career, Jonson would always strenuously (if at times disingenuously) insist that his satire was general in nature, and not particular; that he attacked the vice, and not the person. But this work of his earliest years may not have been defendable in quite this way. Eight years after The Isle of Dogs affair, in a letter written to Robert Cecil from another prison where he had been confined for his part in writing Eastward Ho!, another play that had given grave offence to those in authority, Jonson seems to confess that The Isle of Dogs had indeed satirized the behaviour of recognizable individuals. Cecil had been one of the Privy Councillors who had investigated The Isle of Dogs incident, and would have known the nature of the original charges. In appealing to him for help in this second crisis, Jonson does his best to assure Cecil that the present play is not like its predecessor.

I protest to Your Honour, and call God to testimony – since my first error, which yet is punished in me more with my shame than it was with my bondage – I have so attempered my style that I have given no cause to any good man of grief; and if to any ill, by touching at any general vice, it hath always been with a regard, and sparing of particular persons. I may be otherwise reported, but if all that be accused should be presently guilty, there are few men would stand in the state of innocence. (Letter 3, 2.646)

Which ‘particular persons’ did The Isle of Dogs offend? Could the play, as Chambers suspected (1923, 3.455), have contained some indiscreet reference to the King of Poland, whose ambassador had called on Elizabeth on 23 July 1597, just a few days before the troubles over the play erupted? Or did it glance in some way, as Alice-Lyle Scoufos and others have wondered, at the late Lord Chamberlain, Henry Brooke, eighth Lord Cobham, who had died in March 1597, a few months before the staging of The Isle of Dogs, and who was soon to attract further satirical attention – so a series of elaborate puns on brooks and cobs in these works appears to suggest – in Nashe’s Lenten Stuff, Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour, and Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor (Scoufos, 1979; Nicholl, 1984; Taylor, 1985; Taylor, 1987; Dutton, 1991)? In the absence of further evidence, almost anything is possible, but if these were its only provocations it is hard to see quite why the play should have caused such acute turmoil in government circles.

Neither England’s relations with Poland nor the lingering sensitivities of the Cobham family were in themselves matters of the highest political concern during the summer of 1597. Of far greater moment were the growing danger of a new assault on England from a revived Spanish armada, and the potential instability at home caused by the mounting rivalry between Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, and the Cecils, father and son: William Burghley, the ageing Lord Treasurer, whose role as Elizabeth’s chief counsellor Essex fiercely coveted, and Sir Robert Cecil, whom Burghley just as ardently hoped would inherit this position himself. These two anxieties, foreign and domestic, were intimately linked. Impatient for military exploit, Essex tried to impress upon Elizabeth the need for immediate action against Spain. The Cecils counselled caution, believing the dangers of a Spanish attack to be less pressing than troubles in Ireland. Essex was appointed to the post of Master of Ordnance on 19 March 1597, and by May of was busy preparing for an assault upon Spain for which in early June he received his commission from Elizabeth. He planned to make a pre-emptive strike on the armada gathered at Ferrol, to seize Spanish treasure ships, and establish a permanent garrison in the Azores at the island of Terceira. His ambitions created considerable anxiety at court. Elizabeth herself had second thoughts about the expedition, asking Essex sharply how, if he gained Terceira, he would manage to prevent its immediate recapture by the Spanish (Wernham, 1994, 160–1; Hammer, 1999; MacCaffrey, 1992)?

In July 1597, the month in which The Isle of Dogs was presented at the Swan theatre, Essex had set off regardless with a fleet of twenty ships on what would prove to be an ultimately disastrous expedition to the Azores and the beginning of his own steep fall from power. His fleet had run into unseasonable storms and been forced back into harbour at Falmouth, where it was waiting until it could resume its journey. This was the highly volatile moment at which Nashe’s and Jonson’s play was performed at the Swan. It is impossible to establish with any certainty that these were the events to which the play, with misplaced facetiousness, managed somehow to refer, but a careless allusion to the Islands voyage, or to the imagined threat from Spain, or to current manoeuvrings for power by Essex and the Cecils, might easily have ignited the fuse.

One incidental fact may be worth mentioning. From earliest times, both the Canaries and the Azores had been widely known as the home of fierce native dogs. Pliny the Elder in the first century AD noted the ‘multitude of dogs of a huge size’ on Gran Canaria (6.37). The very name of this island – ultimately (via French and Spanish derivatives) from Latin canaria insula, ‘the isle of dogs’ – testifies to this reputation. This Isle of Dogs was one of the so-called Fortunate Isles, which by the time of Arnobius in c. AD 300 were collectively known as the Canaries (Arnobius, 1949, 2.456). By the sixteenth century, when both the Canaries and the Azores were important staging posts for Spanish fleets on their way to the Indies, these ferocious mastiffs were trained to guard this otherwise vulnerable territory and the treasure ships that took harbour there (Hancock, 2001, 69–74). The island of Terceira in the Azores which Essex hoped to capture was home to a particular breed of ‘gripping dog’ known as the cão de fila da Terceira. Could Terceira have possibly been the isle of dogs to which Jonson’s and Nashe’s play referred? Did the title invoke a location in the Azores as well as in the Thames? Might the play have somehow pictured Essex as contending with (literal) dogs abroad and (metaphorical) dogs at home?

Such intriguing possibilities – they rate no more highly than that – would strengthen, rather than replace, the more usual assumption that the play contained some slighting reference to the Cobham family. Essex had a particular dislike for Sir Henry Brooke, eighth Lord Cobham, who was brother-in-law to Essex’s chief rival at court, Robert Cecil. Essex had done his best to ensure – unsuccessfully, in the event – that Cobham would not be appointed to the vacant office of Warden of the Cinque Ports, preferring his own candidate, Robert Sidney. Caustic remarks about Cobham might well have formed one ingredient in the play’s satirical mix. In the absence of a text we simply cannot tell. The one surviving textual trace of the play, however, does hint at its possible relevance to Essex and his supporters. A manuscript in the possession of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle contains a number of minor works by Francis Bacon, and seems once to have been associated with Bacon himself, who served as Essex’s secretary in the 1590s. A surviving outer sheet lists a number of writings which the manuscript once contained, and includes the entry: ‘Isle of doges frmn^t / by Thomas Nashe inferior plaiers’ (Burgoyne, 1904; McKerrow, 1966, 5.29, n. 4; Beal, 1980, 1.1.18). While the ‘fragment’ itself has long since disappeared, the inscription appears to suggest that the piece had once been of interest to Essex and his circle.

Authorship

Even with the help of computer testing, it is often difficult to determine with any accuracy how authorial responsibility may have been distributed in surviving collaboratively-written plays from the early modern period. When the text does not survive, the task is more difficult still. When the work in question has run into trouble with the authorities, those difficulties are multiplied further, for it is in each party’s interest to deny responsibility for whatever it was that caused offence.

One or two deductions about the composition of The Isle of Dogs may nevertheless be made. That Jonson was chief among those ‘inferior plaiers’ who worked on its text seems highly likely. Spencer is not known to have written any other plays, while Shaa’s slight experience as a writer developed several years later (Eccles, 1993, 172, 168). In Satiromastix (1601) Thomas Dekker was to tease Jonson (represented in the character of ‘Horace’) for his involvement in The Isle of Dogs: when ‘thou turn’dst ban-dog, villainous Guy, and ever since bitest’ (4.1.165–70). (A ‘ban-dog’ was a mastiff, and ‘Guy’ may have been a well-known dog used in bear-baiting contests at the Paris Garden. Jonson the snarling satirist is being compared with the dogs about which he once wrote.)

The main inspiration for The Isle of Dogs is likely to have come from Thomas Nashe, the more seasoned and senior partner. Jonson was on good terms with Nashe (1567–c. 1601), to judge from the affectionate elegy which he wrote at his death just a few years later, praising his ‘spirit quick as powder, sharp as steel’ (‘Mortals, that yet respire’, 1.547, line 14). Following the play’s troubles, Nashe himself was at pains, however, to minimize his role in its composition. Writing in 1599 of ‘The strange turning of The Isle of Dogs from a comedy to a tragedy two summers past, with the troublesome stir which happened about it’, he nonchalantly dismissed the work as ‘the infortunate imperfect embrion of my idle hours’. ‘An imperfect embrion I may well call it’, he went on, ‘for I having begun but the induction and first act of it, the other four acts, without my consent, or the least guess of my drift or scope, by the players were supplied, which bred both their trouble and mine to it’ (Nashe’s Lenten Stuff, 1599; ed. McKerrow, 1966, 3.153–4).

‘Endure, and keep yourselves for days of happiness.’ Aeneas is comforting his companions after their fleet has been dispersed by storms, and they have made a precarious landfall: Aeneid, 1. 198–207. Yet Nashe’s days of happiness were slow to arrive. Throughout 1599 he was still in trouble with the authorities. In June of that year all of his writings were formally burnt in the famous ‘bishops’ bonfire’ in London, when the bishops further decreed ‘that no satires or epigrams be printed hereafter’ (Arber, 1876, 3.677). As late as 1601, the year of Nashe’s death, the authors of the Cambridge play The Second Part of the Return From Parnassus made fun of his anxious rustication in the character of Ingenioso: ‘to be brief, Academico, writs are out for me, to apprehend me for my plays, and now I am bound for the Isle of Dogs’ (The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601), ed. J.B. Leishman, 1949, 5.3.2062–8).

Nashe’s role in the composition of The Isle of Dogs may well have been (in short) more central than his own disclaimers in Nashe’s Lenten Stuff suggest, and his association with the collaborator he nowhere names – Ben Jonson – closer than he cared to admit.

(See also JONSON’S LOST PLAYS)