the receipt of a single sum of 3s. 9d., to which no addition was ever made. Did these entries stand alone, one would infer, on the analogy of other transactions of Henslowe's and from the signatures of two Admiral's men as witnesses to the loan, that Jonson had purchased a share in the Admiral's company for £4, that he borrowed the means to do this from Henslowe, and that Henslowe was to recoup himself by periodical deductions from the takings of the company as they passed through his hands. But there is no other evidence that Jonson ever had an interest in the Admiral's, and there are facts which, if one could believe that Henslowe would regard the takings of any company but the Admiral's as security for a loan, would lead to the conclusion that Jonson's 'share' was with Pembroke's men at the Swan. The day of Henslowe's entries, 28 July 1597, is the very day on which the theatres were suppressed as a result of the performance of The Isle of Dogs (cf. App. D, No. cx), and it is hardly possible to doubt that Jonson was one of the actors who had a hand with Nashe (q.v.) in that play. The Privy Council registers record his release, with Shaw and Spencer of Pembroke's men, from the Marshalsea on 3 Oct. 1597 (Dasent, xxviii. 33; cf. App. D, No. cxii); while Dekker in Satiromastix (l. 1513) makes Horace admit that he had played Zulziman in Paris Garden, and Tucca upbraid him because 'when the Stagerites banisht thee into the Ile of Dogs, thou turn'dst Bandog (villanous Guy) & ever since bitest'. The same passage confirms Aubrey's indication that Jonson was actor, and a bad actor, as well as poet. 'Thou putst vp a supplication', says Tucca, 'to be a poor iorneyman player, and hadst beene still so, but that thou couldst not set a good face vpon 't: thou hast forgot how thou amblest (in leather pilch) by a play-wagon, in the high way, and took'st mad Ieronimoes part, to get seruice among the mimickes.' Elsewhere (l. 633) Tucca taunts him that 'when thou ranst mad for the death of Horatio, thou borrowedst a gowne of Roscius the stager, (that honest Nicodemus) and sentst it home lowsie'. This imprisonment for the Isle of Dogs is no doubt the 'bondage' for his 'first error' to which Jonson refers in writing to Salisbury about Eastward Ho! in 1605, and the 'close imprisonment, under Queen Elizabeth', during which he told Drummond he was beset by spies (Laing, 19). Released, Jonson borrowed 5s. more from Henslowe (i. 200) on 5 Jan. 1598, and entered into a relationship with him and the Admiral's as a dramatist, which lasted intermittently until 1602. It was broken, not only by plays for the King's men, whose employment of him, which may have been at the Curtain, was due, according to Rowe, to the critical instinct of Shakespeare (H.-P. ii. 74), and for the Chapel children when these were established at Blackfriars in 1600, but also by a quarrel with Gabriel Spencer, whose death at his hands during a duel with swords in Hoxton Fields on 22 Sept. 1598 was 'harde & heavey' news to Henslowe (Henslowe Papers, 48) and brought Jonson to trial for murder, from which he only escaped by reading his neck-verse (Jeaffreson, Middlesex County Records, i. xxxviii; iv. 350; cf. Laing, 19). Jonson's pen was critical, and to the years 1600-2 belongs the series of conflicts with other poets and
