The Works of John Day

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Excerpt from The Works of John Day: Now First Collected, With an Introduction and Notes In this age of reprinting, when so much pious care is being spent in preserving fresh and sweet the memories of our good old English writers, it is somewhat curious that the author of the Parliament of Bees should have been left unnoticed. But, perhaps, the causes of this neglect are not far to seek. Day's merits are unobtrusive: his brightest work is of the thinnest texture. It is only in moments of most abandoned idleness that we can sit down to enjoy to the full the dainty repartees of his Court-ladies or the pretty pertness of the pages. At such times we think of Day, as of one of his own Bees, flitting in careless gaiety from flower to flower, now sipping the honeyed sweetness of Shakespeare's early comedies, then lighting on the fragrant exotics of Lyly, and, again, revelling in the "blossomed bravery" of the Arcadia. He seems as one born to live a life of idleness, a lounger in the Castle of Indolence, released from all "the heavy trouble, the bewildering care" that beset our work-a-day existence. In his best plays there is a striking absence of the robustness which characterizes the work of his fellow-dramatists. And yet an inspection of Henslowe's Diary shows that few among the knot of busy workers laboured more incessantly than Day. Between the years 1599 1692 he was engaged in the part-authorship of a score of plays, - of which only one (The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green), sixty years afterwards, found its way into print. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.