Life
He was born at Cawston, Norfolk, and educated at Ely. He became a sizar of Caius College, Cambridge, in 1592, but was expelled in the next year for stealing a book. He became one of Philip Henslowe's playwrights, collaborating with Henry Chettle, William Haughton, Thomas Dekker, Richard Hathwaye and Wentworth Smith. There are 22 plays to which he is linked.
However his almost incessant activity does not seem to have paid, to judge by the small loans, of five shillings and even two shillings, that he obtained from Henslowe. Little is known of his life beyond these small details, and disparaging references by Ben Jonson in 1618/19, describing him, (with Dekker and Edward Sharpham) as a “rogue” and (with Thomas Middleton and Gervase Markham) as a “base fellow”. It may be indicative of his abilities that of all the writers who did a substantial amount of work for Henslowe’s companies Day is one of only two not mentioned and praised by Francis Meres in his lists of the “the best” writers in 1598. In Peregrinatio Scholastica, or Learning's Pilgrimage, a collection of 22 morall Tractes written towards the end of his life, but not published until 1881, he laments that “notwithstanding . . . Industry . . . he was forct to take a napp at Beggars Bushe”, and elsewhere he refers to “being becalmde in a fogg of necessity” having been passed over by “Credit” and “Opinion”. It seems likely that he was the “John Daye, yeoman” who killed fellow dramatist Henry Porter in Southwark 1599. If so it does not seem have to interrupted his career; he continued to collaborate with writers such as Henry Chettle, who had written with Porter.
Read more about this topic: John Day (dramatist)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The more the development of late capitalism renders obsolete or at least suspect the real possibilities of self, self- fulfillment and actualization, the more they are emphasized as if they could spring to life through an act of will alone.”
—Richard Dean Rosen (b. 1949)