Saturday, January 13, 2024

The Isle Of Dogs affair of Jonson and Nashe

 The Isle Of Dogs by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe is the most successfully anathematised Elizabethan play: no copies remained and the writers and actors swore off it, theatres were all closed down temporarily and almost destroyed.

 To supplement the Wikipedia entry on this lost play is the entry in the Cambridge Edition Of The Works Of Ben Jonson Online. It adds much detail, although not significantly more revealing.

Philip Rowe's podcast The History Of European Theatre seems to have additional details on his 1 May 2023 episode. The temptation would be to interpolate - I suspect I would.

I'd hoped Shakespeare And Lost Plays by David McInnis would have more to say about The Isle Of Dogs than he did.

A tantalisingly intriguing episode in history.


https://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/k/works/dogs/facing/#