276. THE ISLE OF DOGS, once an island, is now a peninsula at one of the larger meanders in the Thames River, just north and west of Greenwich Reach, a straight section of the Thames. The royal dogs of King Henry VIII, and later Queen Elizabeth I, were said to be kenneled here, although there is no record of the name being used prior to 1588, when it first appeared on a map. It is, in any case, just across the river from the erstwhile grounds of the Palace of Placentia, the royal residence where Elizabeth was born in 1533 and where her Privy Council later met. In 1597, Thomas Nashe, with contributions from actor Ben Jonson, wrote a satirical play called The Isle of Dogs, which allegedly offended the queen and crossed lines of propriety to the point that Jonson and two of his fellow actors were arrested and all copies of the play were destroyed. The matter was referred to the Privy Council, which found the actors guilty of “leude and mutynous behavior” and recommended a three month prison term and a ban on all public plays for the rest of the summer. Queen Elizabeth was generally a supportive patron of London’s theater scene, but she carried out the Council’s recommendations, effectively imposing a ban usually reserved for the lenten season.
For commentary within a year of this event, see Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598):
"As Actæon was worried 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 doggies, neither is thy banishment like Ouids, eternally to conuerse with the barbarous Getæ. Therefore comfort thyselfe sweete Tom, with Cicero's glorious return to Rome, and with the counsel Æneas gives to his seabeaten soldiers.”
Palladis Tamia, subtitled Wit’s Treasury, was used in the 1600's as a schoolbook covering English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Pallas, or Athena, was the goddess of wisdom, or wit (see Pallas Bathing, note 298), and Tamia means household attendant or, in this case, treasurer. The cited Pallas Tarnia passage refers to Actaeon’s death by his own dogs (see note 197), Euripides’s death by dogs (see note 198) and the death of Apollo’s son Linus by sheepdogs (see Pausanius, Description of Greece (ca. 180 ACE)). It also refers to the exiles of Juvenal, a second century Roman satirist; of Ovid, who was banished to Getae for “a poem and a mistake” (See Ovid, Tristia, ca. 8 ACE); and of Cicero, who returned to a cheering senate after a yearlong political exile in 58 BCE. Finally it refers to Aeneas’s morale-boosting speech to his troops at Virgil*, Aeneid 1:198-207.
DOGS appear only one other time in The Waste Land, when the poet bids his friend to keep the dog from digging up a corpse (line 74), but there are other seemingly related references within the poem’s principal allusions: besides the attacks by dogs of Actaeon and Euripides, noted above, barking watchdogs appear in Ariel’s song (see Shakespeare, The Tempest, at note 26), and Lilith is sent to the desert where the wild dogs dwell (see Jesus ben Sira, Alphabeta, at note 145) . See also Penteus’s gruesome demise by the Maenads in Euripides, The Bacchae (note 248). Finally, see Sophocles, Antigone 5: 79-83 (note 248), in which Tiresias speaks of:
“...mangled warriors who have found a grave
I' the maw of wolf or hound.”
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* see note 0.1
