I wonder if what they say is true
That you can fly inside a canoe
Across the world of joy and smog
And dock yourself at the Isle of Dogs
The Canary Islands in Spanish are the Isles of Dogs. The Isle of Dogs in London is where you find Canary Wharf. My lawyer advises me not to talk about this one. When I inquired why on earth for, he advised “fuck around and find out”.
Is this a dangerous thing to talk about? How exciting! You see, in 1597, playwrights Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe wrote and performed “The Isle of Dogs” in London. They went to jail for a year as a result of this. No copies of the play are known to exist. Jonson is otherwise known for his Comedies of Humors, and plays in which characters, usually unsavory Italian types, act like animals and are named after them.
Ooh, cool. Elizabeth the First (and the Second, too) has kicked the bucket, so surely no one will put me in the nick for writing my own version of this lost masterpiece.
Act The First
Gastronomo, the Male Prostitute, yanks back the curtain and crab walks onstage.
GASTRONOMO:
Oh hail mightiest Queen Elizabeth
They sing to you paeans of Venus
I wonder if what they say could be true
The Virgin Queen perchance she hath a penis
Shee is known to fuck a hole in the wall
That keepeth Britain chain’d and fenc’d away
And now across the great wide world we swarm
SInce Spanish fuckery is out the way
Forsooth therefore to explain to me why I am curs’d
Shat on by martinets and sycophants
This world of douchebags and bright red ants
Is like a nightmare perspective revers’d
Prithee do not cut out my right eye
In case my tongue so much offendeth thee
Alas you threw me in a canister
Beneath your fucking sacred canopy
Not much is coming to me beyond the opening soliloquy
Perhaps the play abruptly ended and Gastronomo was forced to make hush money payments to Queen Elizabeth.
Or, instead, Queen Elizabeth made payments to Gastronomo for “filling the royal coffers” which is a euphemism for sexual intercourse. This led to skipping the rising action and proceeding directly to the climax.
All I can tell you is that it’s very hard to build a stage inside a canoe, let alone hang lekos and fresnels and spotlights. Maybe that’s why a canoe is a place relatively free of drama.