The Dog in the Manger

[7] Though the next reference in English is in John Lydgate's The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (1426),[8] where it is applied to a personification of miserliness, the work was written almost a century before in French by Guillaume de Deguileville (1335).

[11] Most of these authors follow Steinhöwel in interpreting the fable as an example of envy, but Christoph Murer's emblem of 1622 is titled meanness (Kargheit) and the accompanying verse explains that such behaviour is miserly, not using what one has for oneself nor for the relief of others in need.

[12] Later on the dog's behaviour is reinterpreted as malicious, a reading made clear in Roger L'Estrange's pithy version: "A churlish envious Cur was gotten into a manger, and there lay growling and snarling to keep the Provender.

(Timon the Misanthrope) In the 1687 Francis Barlow edition of the fables, Aphra Behn similarly sums up the sexual politics of the idiom: "Thus aged lovers with young beautys live, Keepe off the joys they want the power to give."

[16] A Spanish story involving sexual jealousy and selfishness appears in Lope de Vega's play El Perro del Hortelano (English: The Gardener's Dog; 1618).

In this case, De Vega's title alludes to the parallel European idiom involving a variant story in which a gardener sets his dog to guard his cabbages (or lettuces).

Where Lope de Vega had adapted the theme to a problem play in the 17th century, the Belgian composer Albert Grisar used it as the basis for his one-act comic opera of 1855, Le chien du jardinier.

Among these may be mentioned Wenceslaus Hollar's print for the 1666 Ogilby edition of Aesop's fables, in which a dog occupies the manger and barks at a single ox being driven into a wooden barn.

[22] Hollar's design of the ox turning its head to look round at the dog with the barn's brick entrance behind was clearly an influence on later illustrators, including those for the various editions of Samuel Croxall's fable collection[23] and for Thomas Bewick's of 1818.

[26] The fable also figured on the popular alphabet plates from Brownhills Pottery later in the 19th century, although in this case only the ox's head is featured as it gazes at the dog reared up and barking.

In much the same anecdotal tradition, the print-maker Thomas Lord Busby (1782–1838) used the title to show a dyspeptic man eyeing askance a huge dinner, while hungry beggars and an importunate dog look on, in a work from 1826.

Later on Charles H. Bennett revisited the scene in his The Fables of Aesop and Others Translated into Human Nature (1857), where a dog dressed as a footman and carrying food to his master bares his teeth at the poor ox begging at the door.

[31] It was followed by the cover cartoon of Harper's Weekly picturing William Jennings Bryan as the dog, obstructing the choice of the Democratic presidential candidacy and preventing others getting at the White House oats.