SOURCE: Symons, Arthur. “John Day.” In Studies in the Elizabethan Drama, pp. 195-210. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1919.

In the following essay, written in 1888 and included in his 1919 collection, Symons asserts that Day's modest gift was for light, fanciful verse rather than drama in the mode of Shakespeare or Ben Jonson. Nonetheless, he finds Day's comedies lively and entertaining, if not always consistent or substantial.

John Day, “sometime Student of Caius College, Cambridge,” a “base fellow” and a “rogue” according to Ben Jonson, a good man and a charming writer if the evidence of his own plays may be credited, seems to have come down to posterity in the person of his best work, and of little beside his best. When he began to write for the stage is not known,—before 1593, some have supposed—but we learn from Henslowe's Diary that in the six years from 1598 to...