John Day (dramatist) - Works

Works

The first play in which Day appears as part-author is The Conquest of Brute, with the finding of the Bath (1598), which, with most of his early work, is lost. Day's earliest extant work, written in collaboration with Chettle, is The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (acted 1600, printed 1659), a drama dealing with the early years of the reign of Henry VI. It bore the sub-title of The Merry Humor of Tom Strowd, the Norfolk Yeoman, and was so popular that second and third parts, by Day and Haughton, were produced in the next year. The Isle of Gulls (printed 1606), a prose comedy founded upon Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, contains in its light dialogue much satire to which the key is now lost, but Algernon Charles Swinburne notes in Manasses's burlesque of a Puritan sermon is a curious anticipation of the eloquence of Mr. Chadband in Bleak House. In 1607 Day produced, in conjunction with William Rowley and George Wilkins, The Travels of the Three English Brothers, which detailed the adventures of Sir Thomas, Sir Anthony and Robert Shirley. This play is a dramatic romance of a type that hearkened back to the early decades of the public stage in London. In 1608 Day published two comedies, Law Tricks, or Who Would have Thought it? and Humour out of Breath.

The Parliament of Bees is the work on which Day's reputation chiefly rests. The piece contains much for which parallel passages are found in Thomas Dekker's Wonder of a Kingdom (1636) and The Noble Spanish Soldier (printed 1634). The passages which echo The Noble Spanish Soldier include references to speaking Spanish which are only meaningful in the context of Dekker's play; this suggests that the Dekker play is the original, a possibility reinforced by the consideration that there is no earlier known edition of The Parliament of Bees than 1641.

The six dramas by Day which we possess show a delicate fancy and dainty inventiveness all his own. He preserved, in a great measure, the dramatic tradition of John Lyly, and affected a kind of subdued euphuism. Without ever wholly abandoning these characteristics, Day's comedy also reveals some influence of early Jacobean satirists such as John Marston, who like Day wrote for the children's companies. The Maid's Metamorphosis (1600), once supposed to be a posthumous work of Lyly's, may be an early work of Day's. It possesses, at all events, many of his marked characteristics. His prose Peregrinatio Scholastica or Learninges Pilgrimage, dating from his later years, was printed by A. H. Bullen from a manuscript of Day's. Considerations partly based on this work have suggested that he had a share in the anonymous The Pilgrimage to Parnassus and the Return from Parnassus. The beauty and ingenuity of The Parliament of Bees were noted and warmly extolled by Charles Lamb; and Day's work has since found many admirers. The date of his death is unknown, but an elegy on him by John Tatham, the city poet, was published in 1640.