eastlondonhistory.com

In the late 1500s, the Isle of Dogs was a marshy wasteland, rather given to flooding and more commonly known as ‘Stepney Marsh’. But in 1597 the name gained infamy, as the title of an early play by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe. So scandalous was the content that the play was immediately banned and Jonson and his actors imprisoned. But what could have been so terrible about words on a stage that the whole force of the state had to suppress them?

Jonson, born in London in 1572, was one of the great writers of the English Renaissance, and one of England’s greatest dramatists and poets. He was also a contemporary of William Shakespeare, being one of the coterie of writers who would gather, drink and talk in the Mermaid Tavern, among them Ford, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Chapman and Marston. Like most of them, including Shakespeare, he was an actor first (if not a very successful one). He had been apprenticed as a bricklayer in his Westminster youth, and became a soldier in the Netherlands, by his own account killing an opponent in single combat. Jonson had far more life experience than many of the young playwrights, he was also ferociously well read though not universally liked - colleagues and opponents found him arrogant and prickly, and he was notoriously quick to take offence. Indeed his plays, political satires and comedies, were peopled with two-timers, financial tricksters, and had Byzantine plots in which Jonson’s private scores were settled.

His plays were often set in London (though like Shakespeare he would occasionally stray abroad) and he wasn’t frightened about putting the boot into the foibles of his fellows. And his targets were often all too recognisable. In ‘Isle of Dogs’ he may have struck too close to home. The first theatre in London had only been established 20 years before, and a nervous Government saw Shoreditch playhouses The Theatre and The Curtain, and Bankside’s Globe as dangerous places of mockery and dissent … they were watching the activities of Shakespeare, Jonson and the rest very carefully.

So, in 1597, ‘Isle of Dogs’ came to the attention of RIchard Topcliffe. Topcliffe was an extraordinarily unpleasant character during this bloody and turbulent period of English history. Trained as a lawyer at Gray’s Inn he led a peaceful life into his early forties, managing his estates in Yorkshire. But promoted to the Privy Council in the 1570s, he launched enthusiatically into his role of pursuing ‘Recusants’. These were those who refused to accept the primacy of the state religion, the Church of England. That meant Catholics largely, who lived under constant suspicion (not entirely unfounded) that they were plotting to overthrow England’s Protestant Crown and Government. Topcliffe nursed a fanatical loathing of Catholics and their Church. So fond was Topcliffe of torturing his suspects that he had a private torture chamber built in his home in London. He also personally supervised the hanging, drawing and quartering of victims, and was known to have raped one of his prisoners, Anne Bellamy.

Little wonder that Jonson and Nashe were horrified to find themselves on the wrong side of the psychopathic and perverted Topcliffe. Nashe already had plenty of previous with the authorities. He was a friend of Kit Marlowe, wrote pornographic poems and his works freely poured petrol on the religio-political rows of the day. The duo’s new work, a satirical comedy, was first performed by Pembroke’s Men at the Swan Theatre in Bankside in July or August of 1597. It was immediately reported to the authorities as ‘a lewd play full of slanderous matter’, and the location of the Isle of Dogs, opposite the Greenwich palace where the Privy Council sat (the Cabinet of its day), may have been a deliberate provocation. Contemporaries suggest that the Queen and her court was being satirised. Among the many legends surrounding the name of the peninsula is that the Isle of Dogs had been King Edward III’s kennels - perhaps the pair were drawing a parallel between the sycophantic courtiers and a pack of kept dogs. Certainly Nashed had already used the metaphor for his ‘Summer’s Last Will’: “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.”

Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury, chief spy for the Queen, and member of the Privy Council, acted swiftly. Jonson was sent to Marshalsea gaol in Southwark, along with actors Gabriel Spencer and Robert Shaa. Nashe fled home to Yarmouth, writing later that he had given birth to a monster and ‘It was no sooner borne but I was glad to runne from it.’ The nervous playwright tried to distance himself from the piece, claiming he had written mere fragments.

Job done, the authorities let the matter drop, and Jonson was out of jail in weeks. He would go on to write his great satirical comedies in the early years of the 17th century, with ‘Volpone’, ‘The Alchemist’, ‘Bartholomew Fair’ and a clutch more, as well as some of the finest poetry in the English language. Nowhere near as prolific as Shakespeare he was, during the 1600s, arguably more influential on English drama. If Jonson’s career was only beginning with ‘Isle of Dogs’, the young Nashe’s was already drawing to a close. Though he had written numerous poems and 11 plays in the decade leading up to ‘Isle of Dogs’, he would produce only one piece of work after it. The year and circumstances of his death are a mystery - though he was certainly dead by 1601. He was just 34 and his most famous work is lost forever.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under London writers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.