No More Learning

The same lines run on:

Or thou O Elephant or Ape wilt doe.

This has been passed by commentators as a quite general reference; but
the Ape and Elephant seem to have been animals actually performing,
or exhibited, in London about 1594. Thus in _Every Man out of his
Humour_, acted in 1599, Carlo Buffone says (IV. 6): ''S heart he keeps
more ado with this monster' (i. e. Sogliardo's dog) 'than ever Banks
did with his horse, or the fellow with the elephant. ' Further, all
three are mentioned in the _Epigrams_ of Sir John Davies, e. g. :

In Dacum.

Amongst the poets Dacus numbered is
Yet could he never make an English rime;
But some prose speeches I have heard of his,
Which have been spoken many an hundred time:
The man that keepes the Elephant hath one,
Wherein he tells the wonders of the beast:
Another Bankes pronounced long agon,
When he his curtailes qualities exprest:
Hee first taught him that keepes the monuments
At Westminster his formall tale to say:
And also him which Puppets represents,
And also him that w^{th} the Ape doth play:
Though all his poetry be like to this,
Amongst the poets Dacus numbred is.

And again:

In Titum

Titus the brave and valorous young gallant
Three years together in the town hath beene,
Yet my Lo. Chancellors tombe he hath not seene,
Nor the new water-worke, nor the Elephant.
I cannot tell the cause without a smile:
Hee hath been in the Counter all the while.

Colonel Cunningham has pointed out another reference in Basse's
_Metamorphosis of the Walnut Tree_ (1645), where he tells how 'in our
youth we saw the Elephant'. Grosart's suggestion that the Elephant was
an Inn is absurd.
Davies' _Epigrams_ were first published along with Marlowe's version
of Ovid's _Elegies_, but no date is affixed to any of the three
editions which followed one another. But a MS. in the Bodleian
which contains forty-five of the Epigrams describes them as _English
Epigrammes much like Buckminsters Almanacke servinge for all England
but especially for the meridian of the honourable cittye of London
calculated by John Davies of Grayes Inne gentleman An^o 1594 in
November_. [2] This seems much too exact to be a pure invention, and
if it be correct it is very unlikely that the allusions would be to
ancient history. Banks' Horse, the performing Ape, and the Elephant
were all among the sights of the day, like the recently erected tomb
of Lord Chancellor Hatton, who died in 1591. The atmosphere of the
first _Satyre_, as of Davies' _Epigrams_, is that of 1593-5.
The phrase 'the Infanta of London, Heire to an India', in which
commentators have found needless difficulty, contains possibly,
besides its obvious meaning, an allusion to the fact that since 1587
the Infanta of Spain had become in official Catholic circles heir to
the English throne. In 1594 Parsons' tract, _A Conference about the
next Succession to the Crown of England. By R. Doleman_, defended her
claim, and made the Infanta's name a byword in England.

If _H51_ is thus approximately right in its dating of the first Satire
it may be the better trusted as regards the other two, and there is at
least nothing in them to make this date impossible. The references to
poetry in the second acquire a more vivid interest when their date or
approximate date is remembered. In 1593 died Marlowe, the greatest of
the brilliant group that reformed the stage, giving

ideot actors means
(Starving 'themselves') to live by 'their' labour'd sceanes;

and Shakespeare was one of the 'ideot actors'. Shakespeare, too, was
one of the many sonneteers who 'would move Love by rithmes', and in
1593 and 1594 he appeared among those 'who write to Lords, rewards to
get'.

It would be interesting if we could identify the lawyer-poet, Coscus,
referred to in this Satire. Malone, in a MS.